Page 4 of Anything But a Duke
The smaller man stepped closer. The glow of moonlight revealed his youthfulness. Gaunt face, huge, nervous eyes, and not a hair on his chin. “Turn ’em out.”
“Your pockets,” the bulky pistol wielder clarified in a smoke-roughened voice.
Aidan sensed the young man’s nervousness. If he took down the large one without getting a hole through the chest, he suspected the boy would scarper.
“Afraid you didn’t hear me, gents. I’ve no money.”
His response took the behemoth by surprise, and Aidan seized the moment, lifting his arm and coming down hard on the beast’s forearm, forcing the pistol away.
The man grunted, recovered quickly, and wound his own massive arm back to strike.
Aidan moved quicker. With a balled fist, he caught the edge of the brawny man’s jaw. The brute faltered, stumbling back, before his pistol clattered to the pavement. Rather than retrieve the weapon, the man bent at the waist and leaned forward as if he meant to use his body as a battering ram.
A foolish move.
Aidan swiped the man’s smokestack hat away, gripped his bald head, and jerked a knee up to smash his nose. A guttural yawp told him he’d found his mark, and the large man dropped onto the slick cobblestones with a thud.
Unfortunately, the younger man didn’t retreat as expected.
An object came at Aidan, a flash of movement in the dark. Shooting pain lanced through his temple and he faltered, dropping to one knee. Shadows swelled in his periphery.
The youth gripped a handful of hair and wrenched Aidan’s head back.
“Fool. Why’d you have to go and fight?” The lad’s accent was sharper than that of his bulky compatriot, almost polished.
“I’m not fond of thieves.” Aidan struggled to see and speak clearly.
“What kind of toff doesn’t have a farthing to pinch? You’ll forget you ever seen us if you know what’s good for you.”
Aidan sensed the man’s movement and saw the object he’d been struck with raised up high for another blow.
“Stop!” A shout echoed off the row of town houses.
Dizziness made his vision swim, but moon glow revealed a woman. An angry woman, rushing toward his attacker, wielding a closed umbrella raised like a sword.
Hands braced on wet cobblestones, Aidan tried to force his body up. How could one blow turn his legs to jelly?
He had to stand. He had to fight. There’d been more brawls in his life than breakfasts. Now there was a woman to protect. To hell with being caught off guard by some young scalawag.
He had to protect her.
Chapter Two
Diana spotted the men the moment she entered the mews.
Rather than join the gentlemen queuing in the rain to enter Professor Woodson’s house, she’d slipped around to the back garden. Because she was a frequent visitor of the professor and his family, the servants knew her well. She could be warm and settled before the gentlemen filed inside.
But the three men standing in the rain struck her as decidedly odd.
She considered turning back and wading through the sea of lecture goers in front. Any sensible young woman wouldn’t be traipsing around alone in the dark.
Then the attack had begun, and she refused to watch a man being bludgeoned and do nothing.
“Stop!” she shouted as she marched toward the thin man.
He held an object aloft as if he intended to batter a gentleman who’d fallen to his knees in the rain-soaked alleyway.
The attacker turned to face her, and she caught a glint of white as he sneered. “What sorta tart are you then?”
