It was going to crash.
She was going to die.
And it would be his fault.
Panic consumed him and he moved to bang on the roof, unable to stop himself. Before he could make contact, however, the carriage slowed, as though the great, hulking mass of wood and metal understood his madness.
He had the door open and was on the ground before it stopped.
The coachman looked down at him, curiosity turning quickly to surprise, and King hated the wash of warmth that flooded his cheeks. He didn’t want the man witnessing his discomfort and panic. “Why are we stopped?” he snapped, eager to redirect any attention from his madness.
The driver did not flinch. “There’s someone in the road, m’lord.”
King turned in the direction of the coachman’s gaze to find a man, out of breath and waving his hands madly in the air. “My lord, please! We’ve been set upon by highwaymen!”
King hesitated at the words—knowing that this precise turn of events had fleeced any number of travelers on this road. Trick a man with a false sense of heroism into hieing off to save the day, and empty his carriage of his belongings. Not that there was anything in King’s carriage worth stealing. Sophie Talbot had made sure of that.
Either way, the man in front of him was either a tremendous actor, or legitimately concerned. “The mail coach is filled with women and children,” he panted. “They’ll be hurt. Worse.”
The mail coach.
Christ.
Even if he could have ignored the impending doom of a collection of women and children, he’d be willing to wager half his fortune that Sophie Talbot was on that exact mail coach. He met the heaving man’s eyes. “Is there a servant riding with you? Wearing livery?”
Surprise flared. “As a matter of fact—”
King was in motion before the driver could finish his sentence. She had annoyed the hell out of him, that much was true, but he couldn’t leave her to the nefarious doings of highwaymen on the Great North Road. Dammit, she was a lady of breeding. Of questionable breeding, certainly, but ladies of any kind of breeding did not take well to highwaymen, he imagined. She had probably begun shrieking like a lunatic the moment the coach had been stopped. That was if she hadn’t fainted dead away from the shock of the situation.
With any luck, she’d fainted.
That would keep her out of trouble.
Criminals were less likely to murder unconscious females than they were to murder difficult, meddling ones.
But if any woman was skilled at being difficult and meddling . . .
King began to run faster.
He’d get to her, he promised himself. He’d get to her, and he’d get her to safety. And once he got her out of there, she’d be begging him to return her to London. He supposed that was the silver lining in this damn inconvenient cloud.
When he rounded the bend in the road to find the mail coach stopped dead in its center, however, it was to find that there were no silver linings whatsoever. Indeed, the cloud became a hurricane.
Lady Sophie Talbot was neither unconscious inside the northbound mail coach, nor a source of shrieking from within. She wasn’t inside the mail coach at all.
Lady Sophie Talbot stood at the center of a criminal tableau, wearing Eversley livery and her ridiculous yellow slippers, hands on her hips as though it was a perfectly ordinary afternoon.
As though a man was not calmly lifting a pistol and pointing it at her head.
Goddammit.
King increased his speed, no thought in his head save one—he had to get to her.
“No!” he shouted, hoping for nothing other than to distract the villain long enough for Sophie to escape, but before the man with the weapon could turn to face him, a small creature launched itself from under the coach toward Sophie.
King thought he heard a child’s “No!” echoing his own, but he would never be certain, as it was difficult to hear much over the pounding of his heart and the rushing of blood in his ears.
It was also possible that he heard Sophie’s “No!” as she immediately turned, ignoring the fact that there was a pistol pointed at her head, and captured the living projectile, turning to put herself between the little thing and the weapon, as though she were impermeable to bullets.
King’s exclamation became an incoherent roar as he pushed himself closer. Faster. But he couldn’t get there in time. He knew as much the moment the barrel of the gun tracked her to the ground. Things slowed, and he would imagine later that he could see the hammer on the weapon cock, move in slow motion over what would seem like minutes or hours before the pistol’s report sounded, tearing through the English countryside and taking the air with it.
And still, he could not reach her.
Someone screamed. Perhaps more than one person. He’d never know, as he arrived at the scene of the crime a heartbeat too late, tackling the large man to the ground with a mighty roar, coming down on top of him with several quick blows to the face before rendering him unconscious.
Standing up, he turned on his victim’s compatriots, making quick work of one before the other turned tail. King considered going after him, wanting nothing more than to brutalize each of the three men for what they had done. Threatening women and children. Shooting at them.
Dear God.
Shooting them.
Had she been shot? King turned back to the scene playing out at the foot of the carriage, ignoring the half-dozen faces peering out the door now that the immediate danger had passed. He raced toward the collection of bodies there—a prone female who appeared to be regaining consciousness and two additional figures fully entangled.
Sophie crouched low at the base of the conveyance, clutching what King now recognized as a young boy who could not be more than seven or eight. “Are you hurt?” he heard her ask as he closed in on them, and Sophie’s words—the fact that Sophie could speak words—was enough to send relief threading through him with staggering power. Relief was quickly replaced by fury.
He paused, attempting to control the irrational anger that coursed through him as she ran her hands along the boy’s arms and legs. “Are you certain? He did not shoot you?”
The boy shook his head.
“You aren’t hurt?” she repeated, and King understood why. He was repeating a similar litany in his own mind. She was worried for the boy, which meant she hadn’t been shot, either.
Breathing restored, King made quick work of instructing his coachman and the driver of the mail coach to tie up the two men he’d rendered unconscious before turning back to Sophie as her charge squirmed in her arms, embarrassed by the attention. “Stop!” the boy cried, pulling away from her touch. “I’m unharmed!”
“Don’t you dare take a tone, Jonathan Morton,” the woman on the ground said smartly, sitting up. “She saved your life.”
The boy blinked up at Sophie. “She?”
Sophie smiled. “You saved my life, too. Now that we are friends, I suppose it is only fair that you know my secret.”
The boy’s brow furrowed. “You’re a girl.”
She nodded. “I am, indeed.”
Respect chased away confusion. “You stood up to Bear,” he said, looking to the still unconscious man on the ground by King. “To protect us.”
She followed the direction of his attention, until she found King’s boots and looked up to meet his gaze. The skin around her right eye was swelling, already turning black and blue, already forcing her eye closed. She’d been struck. Fury came again, this time directed at another. He wanted to knock the blighter unconscious again.