Panicking, Fletch needed to shoot someone.
“Knife, Fletch, please, hurry.” Kate’s normally pleasant voice stopped swearing to bark peremptory commands.
The lady had transformed into a general. He ought to be appalled, but instead, her calm orders froze Fletch’s inner monsters, allowing reason to emerge again. Finding no target, he cautiously set his rifle on a battered desk and removed his sharpest knife from his belt. Kate glanced up grimly and shifted aside.
Instead of murmuring sympathetic reassurances when he started on the ropes, or freeing the prisoner’s head from that dreadful contraption, Kate snatched up a splintery log. With a fury and strength no lady should possess, she whacked uselessly at the unopened exterior door, shouting, “I’ll kill him!”
Fletch understood her rage. The victim’s delicate skin was chafed by the harsh ropes, and she moaned, as if only regaining consciousness. She stank of vomit. Had they poisoned her? As the blackguards had probably poisoned Jasper.
He ground his teeth and kept his raging monster under control, trying to be the sensible one. “Stop it, Kate. You’ll only kill yourself. Where’s Morgan?”
The rope on the wrists frayed loose and he started on shapely ankles. He shouldn’t be looking at a lady’s ankles but he scarcely noticed what he did when all his attention was on Kate.
She raised her battering ram again—but before she could senselessly pound the door, the panel shifted off its rusted hinges, revealing Hugh Morgan on the other side.
“Wha’ the de’il ye bist doin’. . .” The lunatic didn’t have the chance to finish his whine.
Volcano finally erupting, Kate slammed the log into his face.
Nice work. Fletch sprang to his feet and yanked Kate back against his chest before she actually killed the bastard. If he had learned anything at all, it was that killing another human being scarred for life. And it was possible the monster Kate was seeing in her head wasn’t this pathetic bedlamite.
Holding a screaming, kicking bundle of fury, Fletch verified that Morgan was down for the count before comforting her. “Hush, it’s over.”
Her thick auburn hair brushed his chin as she struggled, and then abruptly, she went limp, weeping. Fletch turned her around and held her soft curves, rocking her while years of pent-up rage and sorrow poured down his shirt so hard she was shaking.
He knew a bit of her story and finally recognized that this dingy office must have been where she’d been violated. He’d chop up that couch later.
He'd like to tell her it would be all right, but he knew from experience that emotional pain lasted far longer than physical. It just muted over time. So he gave her something to do the way she had done for him. “I need to tie him up, take him to Hunt. Help me undo those ropes.”
He set her away before he started thinking thoughts he didn’t deserve to allow near his empty attic.
“Lavender!” Reminded of others, Kate lunged for the couch.
The atrocious bonnet finally falling aside, Miss Marlowe coughed and pushed up on one elbow, looking far more bedraggled than that fashionable lady had ever appeared.
Calming his racing heart with practicality, Fletch used the frayed ropes to tie up Morgan. Kate had broken and bloodied the lout’s nose and probably knocked his teeth loose but he was stirring. Apparently someone had padded the knife wound in his side with a large bandage. Fletch wondered if the scoundrel’s toes were bandaged beneath his shabby boots as well. The lunatic had an accomplice.
“Where are the other ladies?” Fletch inquired.
Lavender coughed on her response. “Sent them off.”
Thank all that was holy, he didn’t have to waste time searching for anyone else.
Kate had finally calmed down enough to remove her cloak and wrap it around the shivering, terrified modiste. Lavender had led a sheltered life, coddled by an entire household of doting relations.
Kate had grown a tough shield over years of tribulation. Fletch needed to start recognizing that a lady might also be a warrior.
Shouts from the front warned of new arrivals. He hoped it was Damien and not the actors. The fast-talking lawyer could take Lavender in hand. Fletch didn’t want to be around when she arrived at the manor. Hunt would call in armies and hellhounds.
Fletch handed Kate his rifle. “Shoot anyone you want, including the bastard on the floor if he so much as moves.”
Leaving her looking startled, Fletch strode outside and toward the shrubbery where he’d sent the guard, following the sound of voluble cursing. The old soldier held Wilma’s wrists behind her back and a knife to her throat. She wasn’t going anywhere soon.
“Give me a minute,” Fletch shouted at the soldier as the bellows in front escalated. “I have to shut up the neighbors.”
Taking the shortest path through the open kitchen door, Fletch stomped through the house as if it were his own. Low-ceilinged and dark, the ancient part of the Hall wasn’t particularly prepossessing. He flung open the front door to greet the men already circling the house, weapons in hand.
“Laggards,” Fletch called, relieved to see Rafe had brought Cantherius. He wouldn’t have to ride in the carriage with the women. His brainbox was already overwhelmed, without adding his rioting monsters to the mix. “We have Morgan trussed in the workshop office. He’ll need Dr. Walker. We need rope to tie up Mrs. Jameson. No idea what the old besom has done but she’s putting up a fight.”
