she listened to the men whisper in the dark, their words little more than the soft hisses and clicks of a language she didn’t understand. It must be Gaelic. She finally drifted to sleep, dreaming of Brodie and wondering whether or not he would come after her.
Brodie scanned the edge of the forest. It had been nearly fifteen minutes, and there was still no sign of Lydia.
“Rafe, I’m going after her,” he called out.
Rafe waved a hand at him to indicate he had heard. Brodie, his hand on the knife in his coat, started toward the woods. He moved slowly, studying the way the branches had broken as he followed the trail Lydia had left. He paused at a clearing near a small stream. Dozens of footprints were imprinted deep in the soaked grass, and one of Lydia’s blue hair ribbons lay on the ground, ravaged with mud. Beside it lay a folded bit of paper. A hasty note had been scrawled on the paper.
We have your woman. Meet us at noon tomorrow at the Boar’s Head Inn on the main road. Bring two hundred pounds or she dies.
Brodie crushed the note in his fist. A blood rage swept through him, so powerful that if the men who had taken her had stood before him at that moment, he would have swung a broadsword as his ancestors had in the past and taken their heads clean off. Instead, he drew a steadying breath and made his way back to the coach.
“Rafe!” he bellowed. Rafe was leaning against the coach, his arms folded.
Rafe pushed away from the coach, his lazy, sardonic manner vanishing. “What? Didn’t you find her?”
He pushed the crumpled note into Rafe’s hand. “She was taken.” Rafe smoothed out the note and read the message aloud.
“Bloody Christ,” he growled. “So, do we meet them?”
Brodie stared at the four horses for a moment. “No. Here’s what we’ll do. Free one of the horses. I will follow their trail. You will continue down the road to the Boar’s Head and wait for me. If they arrive and I dinna come, you pay whatever they ask and wait for me to join you.”
“I’ll go with you,” Rafe said.
“No, you can’t. I need to ken that you will protect Lydia and free her from those men if they reach the inn before I can catch up to them.”
“You don’t think there’s any chance they’ll be on the road ahead of us?” Rafe asked.
“Would you, if this was your plan?”
“No, I wouldn’t. I would stay off the main road and hide a safe distance away, somewhere I felt comfortable I wouldn’t be attacked, or where I felt I would have a decent chance of seeing anyone coming.”
“They willna see me coming,” Brodie said in a dark tone that matched his rage. If they harmed her, he would kill every one of them.
“Are you sure you don’t want me to come?” Rafe asked. “You know I like the kitten, and if they hurt her . . .”
“They’ll be dead,” Brodie vowed.
“So long as we agree on that.” Rafe’s voice was as cold as a loch in winter.
“Take a pistol.” Rafe reached into the coach and pulled out a pistol from underneath the coach cushions, which Brodie accepted with a frown. He would have preferred at least two pistols so he wouldn’t have to take the time to reload in the midst of a fight. “Mr. Withers, release one of the front horses. We have need of it.”
As soon as a horse was made ready, Brodie mounted it without a saddle and took off into the evening light. He could follow her trail even in darkness as long as the moon was out.
Once he found her, he would deal with those bastards who had taken her. He whipped the long reins over his body to strike the horse’s flanks and urged it onward, leaning forward as he rode into the growing gloom.
12
Lydia stirred just before dawn, her entire body aching, as though she had slept on a bed of rocks. She rubbed her cheek against her pillow, only to wince as something hard and cold dug into her face. She came awake with a start and stifled a moan as she found she had indeed slept on a bed of rocks.
The sky overhead was a murky gray that still bore hints of the passing night. The campfire was nearly dead, with bits of logs aglow with burning embers and the smell of the smoke teasing her