Page 128 of What a Highlander’s Got to Do

“Why do you no’ want me to escape?” she asked.

The ugly, scraggly one chuckled. “Because you’re a prime piece.” He waggled his brows.

“And,” the other one said, “we’re takin’ you with us.”

It hit her then, cold and hard, the realization of the danger she was in. What these men could and probably would do to her in their den or wherever it was they called home.

As they came at her, one of them carrying a length of rope, it rose up in her, the fear, the horror, the regret. Why had she not just been happy with what she’d had? It had been amazing. It had been wonderful and perfect.

But she’d turned her back on it, and now this was her fate.

Bile tickled the back of her throat as the brigands seized her and roughly tied her hands together. It rose and rose, swelling to an unsustainable bitterness.

She opened her mouth and released it. Mr. Breedlebum’s apples and cheese, and anything else she’d eaten that day.

She released it.

All over the highwaymen.

Chapter Twenty-Five

Nick was exhausted.

He’d been riding for hours, straight through the night. Though he didn’t dare stop at any inns and ask if the mail coach had passed, he did see the occasional bundle of post still by the road in villages. He could only hope this was the road she was on, that he was following the right coach. There were so many.

He was between Leicester and Nottingham, amid the countryside, when he crested a hill and spotted a coach in a stand of woods, turned on its side. His heart froze. His breath stalled.

He was visited by the most horrible thoughts in that fraction of a second.

None of them were tolerable.

Everything in him urged him to fly forward, but something about the scene was not right. It was difficult to make out the details in the dim light, but he recognized the fall of trees before the coach for what it was. An ambush.

His pulse skittered and his mouth went dry. He tethered his horse to a tree by the road and, skirting the shadows, moved closer on foot.

Before long, he was near enough to hear male conversation and laughs, and the thud as one package after another hit the ground.

“Oy,” one man said. “We should have brought a bigger cart.”

“Aye,” another said. “But a lot of this is rubbish.”

“We should load it up anyway, and go through it later. No telling when another coach will come along.”

A harsh laugh echoed through the night air. “Mayhaps we’ll rob them, too.”

Both men laughed then.

Bloody hell. Just as he expected. The coach had been ambushed and robbed. What a damn shame that in his hurry to find her, he hadn’t thought to bring a weapon. He sorely regretted it now.

Nick edged closer and scanned the scene. There was no sign of Isobel.

Was she still in the coach? Had she been injured? Or worse, killed?

Hell, if they’d hurt her, he’d hang them both by their balls. He would—

“Please!”

His knees nearly collapsed as he heard her cry out. Her voice was unlike anything he had ever heard. It had a tremble in it that made his gut churn.