The Devil Wears Plaid Read Free Page B

I’d come to kill her.”
    Emma read his intent a heartbeat before anyone else in the abbey. It was there in the squaring of hisunshaven jaw, the tension that rippled through his muscular thighs, the way his powerful fists wrapped around the beaten leather of the reins.
    Yet all she could do was stand rooted to the flagstones, paralyzed by the raw determination in his narrowed gaze.
    Everything seemed to happen at once. Sinclair dug his heels into the horse’s flanks. The beast lurched forward, eyes rolling wildly, nostrils flaring. It came charging down the aisle of the abbey, heading straight for Emma. Her mother let out a bloodcurdling scream, then slumped into a dead faint. The minister dove behind the altar, his black robes flapping behind him like the wings of a crow. Emma flung her arms up over her face, bracing herself to be trampled beneath those flashing hooves.
    At the last possible second, the horse veered to the left while Sinclair leaned right. He wrapped one powerful arm around Emma’s waist and swept her into the air, tossing her belly-down across his lap as if she weighed no more than a sack of wormy potatoes and knocking the air clear out of her. She was still struggling to catch her breath when he wheeled the horse in a tight circle, forcing the beast up on its hind legs for a dizzying pirouette. As those deadly hooves pawed at the air, Emma sucked in a breath that was sure to be her last as she waited for the horse to topple over backward and crush them both.
    But her captor had other ideas. He sawed at the reins with brute strength, using sheer mastery to force the creature to succumb to his will. The beast let out an earsplitting whinny. Its front hooves came crashing down, its iron shoes striking sparks off the flagstones.
    Sinclair’s strong voice carried, even over the shrill shrieks and frantic shouts of alarm echoing off the vaulted ceiling. But his words were meant for the earl alone. “If you want her back unharmed, Hepburn, you’ll have to pay and pay dearly! For your own sins and the sins o’ your fathers. I’ll not return her to you until you return to me what’s rightfully mine.”
    Then he snapped the reins on the horse’s back, sending the beast charging back down the aisle of the abbey. They thundered through the doorway and past the crooked gravestones of the churchyard, each of the horse’s long, powerful strides carrying Emma farther away from any hope of rescue.

Chapter Three

    E MMA COULD NOT HAVE said how far or how long they traveled. Each bone-jarring jolt of the horse’s hooves against the frozen turf scattered more of the amber-tipped pins her maid had so painstakingly secured in Emma’s unruly curls as she had sat before the mirror that morning. Before long, the tumbled strands were hanging in a blinding curtain around her face.
    She had only the vaguest impression of other horses surrounding them, other hooves pounding the ground in a rhythm as relentless as their own. Sinclair’s men must have leapt upon their own horses outside the abbey and joined their reckless flight.
    They were moving far too fast for her to put up any sort of struggle. If she tried to fling herself off the horse while it was in mid-gallop, the fall would snap every bone in her body.
    Her undignified position would have been even more precarious were it not for the large, warm,masculine hand firmly anchored at the small of her back, shockingly near to the gentle swell of her rump. Its steady pressure was all that was keeping her from flopping around on her captor’s lap like one of Edwina’s beloved rag dolls.
    Even with that dubious protection, there was still no guarantee the horse’s next leap wouldn’t splinter a fragile rib or bash her skull wide open on one of the tree trunks leaping in and out of her frantic vision. As the landscape raced by with dizzying speed, blurring before her eyes, she could feel the muscles shifting in her captor’s powerful thighs. He drove the horse