Page 5 of Her Wicked Highwayman
“Lady Lennox?”
“Y-yes.” She could barely speak. Her throat closed as a sudden inescapable weight pressed down on her chest, threatening to choke her. She knew what this was. She knew.
“I regret to inform you that your husband has died.”
A ringing started in her ears as she saw two figures step out from behind the man speaking to her. Rafe and Ashton. Their faces were ash-white, and Rafe’s clothes were covered in mud. When had her sons left the house?
“My lady?” the man asked. “Did you hear what I said? I said, your sons witnessed the accident.”
“Accident?” Regina had never fainted before, but right then the world spun dizzily around her. Her legs gave out.
Rafe dove to catch her, but Ashton shoved him out of the way and held their mother tenderly to him. “Mother!”
“How... how did it happen?” Her voice was breathless, but the man still heard her.
“He was run over by a carriage, my lady,” he said as he knelt close to Regina. “I was the constable on duty. I will need to ask you some questions about your husband’s movements this evening and?—”
Regina stopped listening to the man. She stared into her sons’ faces and read the pain in their eyes, the pain and... in Rafe’s face,guilt. Her beautiful little boy’s face was twisted with grief. Ashton shot Rafe a look of pure rage that Regina couldn’t understand. Her sons loved each other, they never fought... they never...
Something had happened tonight to change that.
She clutched Ashton’s arms, her heart shattering and her voice breaking as she stared at her youngest son.
“Rafe, what have you done?”
CHAPTER 1
Excerpt from theQuizzing Glass Gazette, October 13, 1822, the Lady Society column:
Lady Society has becomeaware of reports of a dangerous highwayman who hunts for jewels and coins on the road in the country throughout Hampshire. While Lady Society usually focuses on scandalous gossip of the goings-on of the ton, this tale was simply too delicious to ignore.
By all accounts, this highwayman is dangerous only to those who dare cross him. He holds the men at bay with a pistol in hand, while kissing the rings off the ladies with the other. He is without question a scoundrel of the highest order, but one can’t help but embrace the romantic imagery he evokes. Lady Society wonders what lies beneath the domino and the black cape. Who is this man who cries, “Stand and deliver!” as he collects his prizes? Perhaps he will move his hunting territory to the streets of London so that the ladies of the ton might feast their eyes on this handsome devil.
Diana Fox pulledher shawl tighter about her shoulders as she stared bleakly out of the coach window. She would be home in a few hours, but as much as she was glad to be returning, she had no good news to bring with her to those servants who had loyally stayed with her after her father died.
Foxglove Hall, her beloved family home, would soon belong to creditors if she could not find a steady source of income for the estate. They had the farming tenants, of course, but she could not take what little money they were able to earn. She’d spent the last three weeks in London, meeting with her father’s solicitor and doing her best to sort out the mess his passing had left her to deal with. At least now she had a complete list of the debts she must pay and the amounts. The solicitor had persuaded the banks to give her a month’s time to come up with at least half of what she owed. The problem was, she was without a means to earn it.
Wind whistled against the windows of the coach. Its chilliness permeated the cracks in the frame, freezing the interior of the coach, along with its passengers. Three others traveled with her on this stagecoach, two men and a woman. They were huddled together for warmth on one side of the coach, while she kept her distance on the opposite side. She had learned during their brief discussions that the other occupants were a family, with a father, a mother, and their son, Claude, who was around Diana’s age of twenty-three.
She had politely put off the young man’s attempts at small talk when it became clear he was interested in her. She had neither the time nor the inclination for romance, let alone the patience to entertain a restless young pup like this young man. He was nice enough, even pleasant looking, but his attentions only stirred a frustration deep inside her. She’d given up on love and marriage years ago, when she’d begun caring for her ailing father.
I barely have time to care for myself. How could I possibly stretch myself thin for yet another man?
It was a question she wearily voiced in her mind whenever a pang of loneliness struck her more deeply than usual. As always, she’d pushed the loneliness down, buried it so deep it could not easily claw its way back to the surface.
Other women might have married for security, but she couldn’t stomach the thought. A marriage as an agreement or contract would put Diana at a disadvantage—and ultimately at the will of the man she married. Should their relations sour, she would be the one who stood to lose everything.
Therefore, it made no sense to marry someone unless it was for love, a lasting love and friendship that would not devolve into a war of wills she would ultimately lose because she was a woman and therefore her husband’s property. If she married, it would be for love. It would be because her heart simply could not beat another second without the man she loved in her life. But that kind of man was nothing but a girlish daydream. Her home and the well-being of the servants who lived there were all that mattered to her now.
The coach dipped a little as the wheels fell into a rut on the road. Diana braced herself against the side of the coach, wincing at the jarring distraction.
Only a few miles down the road, the coach would stop in front of a pair of carved stone foxes on pillars that abutted the entrance to Foxglove Hall, her family’s home.
A bitter ache stirred in her chest as she reminded herself that she no longer had any family.
I’m all that’s left of the noble house of Fox.
Her mother had died when Diana was fifteen, and her older sister had run away from home to get married not long after. And then her father had passed from a stroke less than a year ago.
