Page 257 of The Ladies Least Likely
“I can’t turn down the challenge, my love. It’s not groundless, you know.”
She thrilled atmy love. Just an endearment, but still. “You can flee. Leave for the Continent tonight. You can get papers to Calais, and?—”
“I cannot leave my mother and sister. They depend on me.”
They did fine the years you were abroad, Harriette wanted to cry. Instead she turned her face into his neck and spoke what was on her heart. “He could kill you, and it would be my fault.”
“I chose pistols, since I am not very handy with a sword. We have set the place. It will happen tomorrow morning, and it will be over soon. I intend to delope into the air, and I’ll take whatever he deals out and hope I survive it.”
She moaned and nestled closer. His skin was warm, his muscles firm and his skin so soft. She’d explored every inch of his beautiful body in the past days. She couldn’t bear for a hair of it to be hurt.
“Who is your second? You haven’t been back long enough to know anyone in town yet.” She was groping now for anything that could delay the inevitable.
“The man who supplies the fabric for my suits, believe it or not. His name is Jeremiah Falstead. He’s grandson to a marquess, so a gentleman, for all that he’s a draper.”
A stranger. Someone she didn’t know would be watching over Ren, ensuring the pistols were functional, the correct number of paces counted off, the efforts at apology or reparations had been made and spurned. Harriette dug her fingers into his arms. “Is there no way to stop this?”
“I cannot claim you are untouched and I never sullied your virtue.” He cleared his throat. “I don’t think I could lie about iteven if honor didn’t demand I be honest. These past d-days have been the best—the best of my life, Rhette.”
His slight stammer pierced her heart. She couldn’t breathe with the pain in her chest. To let him go now, when she knew what she had?—
“Renwick!” His mother’s piercing shriek carried up the stairs. “That very unpleasant Prussian man is here and demanding to see you! Dunstan?—”
Her ladyship’s efforts to command the butler were drowned out by some very rude comments in German. Harriette shuddered.
“He can’t find me here. He might shoot you on the spot. Ren?—”
She turned up her face and he gave her a brief, hard kiss. Their last kiss. Harriette anchored her hands on either side of his face and devoured him as if she meant to draw him inside of her, where he would be safe. Lord love her, she didn’t have the strength to step away.
But he did. He took her hands and pushed them gently towards her. “You can take the servants’ stair,” he whispered. “Go, darling. I shall call on you tomorrow when it’s over.”
A heavy tread mounted the stair, with more shouting in German. Franz Karl was furious. “Harriette, you wretched harlot! You unfathomably lecherouswhore! You went straight to your lover, didn’t you? I ought to run you through as I intend to run him?—”
Harriette leapt for the window and squeezed herself and her skirts through it before Ren could reach the inside door to his dressing room. She wriggled across the balcony to the alder tree she’d climbed mere weeks ago. It was an easier job climbing down it than it had been climbing up, though she had to pause with every step and tear her skirts free of the clinging branches.
Fortunately, she didn’t think she had left any rents that could not be repaired. If tomorrow morning didn’t go as planned, she would have double reason to wear mourning, either for her beloved or her betrothed. What else could she do? The situation was intolerable. Franz Karl was intolerable. If only there were a way she could simply make him go away.
She dropped to the ground and brushed her gloves to free them of leaves and debris. Amalie and Jock’s voices drifted from the back of the garden in quiet conversation, and as she turned toward them, an enormous, unknown man stepped out from the garden wall toward her. She opened her mouth to shriek, but he held up a hand to beg silence. He wore a livery she didn’t recognize, with bright copper buttons, and he was at least twice her size.
“Your Serene Highness?” he whispered. “Harriette, Duchess of Löwenburg?”
He spoke in German as well. Franz Karl had a henchman! “Who are?—?”
She got no further as he clamped a hand over her mouth. She bit into the leather glove, but he didn’t let go. The arm that came around her back was as large as the trunk of the tree she’d just climbed down, and as strong.
“Es tut mir sehr leid, Highness. I’m very sorry,” he whispered, pressing the fingers of his other hand against her windpipe.
Harriette fought like the devil—like her life depended on it, and Ren’s—but it was no use. She couldn’t draw breath to scream, and in moments she couldn’t draw breath at all. Her lungs burned like fire for want of air, and the world went black.
CHAPTER TWENTY
“Highness?” A strange voice whispered to Harriette in German. “Highness, it is time to wake up now.”
Harriette groaned and thrashed as an awful smell assaulted her nostrils. Her eyelids felt glued shut, but she wrenched them open and looked about her. The canopy of a bed, the drapes stained and covered with dust; a small room with wooden walls with no decoration, just bare planks; a chair before the fire, a small table next to it, but no fire in the grate. She was cold. She lay in her black gown in a strange bed, and she sat up so quickly her head whirled. A hoarse cry rasped from her throat when she recognized the man standing next to the mattress.
“You! I intend to have you thrown in gaol for kidnapping.”
Her voice didn’t work right. Her throat hurt terribly, the consequence no doubt of his choking her until she fell unconscious. Harriette scrambled out of the bed, grateful to note that her arms and legs responded to her will, that she didn’t appear to be injured or otherwise manhandled. “What did you do to me while I was out?”
