“Not quite yet.” Maggie forced a smile. “I have some matters to take care of first.”
Rhys didn’t know why he was riding to the Foley cottage in the starlit darkness. Some instinct had told him to come here, even though it was too late to call. He’d hoped that Maggie might seek him out after receiving the news of Pickering-Parks’s change of heart, but she hadn’t. Like some moonstruck calf, he hadn’t been able to stop thinking about her…so he’d saddled his stallion and come to find her.
This plan was asinine. He ought to turn around. Find her in the shop tomorrow morning.
As he was about to retreat, he spied movement ahead of him. A rider on an old nag emerged from a drive a few yards away, and Rhys instinctively halted his own horse by a clump of bushes. The rider pulled the hood of her cloak over her hair which, even in the moonlight, had a telling red gleam. With a furtive look at the cottage behind her, she urged her mount into a lumbering trot.
Where the devil is Maggie going this time of night?His gloved hands gripped the reins as the possibilities raced through his head, not one of them good. If she had a lover, why hadn’t she mentioned it? If she wasn’t meeting a lover, didn’t she know the danger she courted, a lone female riding in the dark?
With a sense of foreboding, he followed her.
He kept a safe distance, the cover of darkness and overgrown shrubbery making it easy to conceal himself. Whatever her mission was, she was so intent upon it that she didn’t look back. The growing roar of waves told him they were nearing the water, and she continued east for a quarter hour, ending up at an isolated stretch of coastline.
On the beach, she dismounted, leading her horse into a cove beyond his view. When she re-emerged, she was without her mount, and lamp in hand, continued on foot, heading north. He waited until she rounded a bend before heading to the cove she’d exited. There, he found her mare tethered to a washed-up log; securing his own horse, he raced after her. Not wanting to give himself away, he didn’t use his own lamp, instead relying on the shifting glow of the moon to light his way.
He stuck close to the jutting cliffs. Within them, mouths of darkness gaped; the stirring in those caverns hastened his pace. The beach narrowed to a thin strip, the water lapping at his boots. His tension grew with each step.
Bloody hell, what is she doing here?This was no place for a lover’s tryst; the other unthinkable explanation made his gut clench.
Up ahead, he saw a dancing orange flame—a bonfire. He stopped behind an outcropping of rock, watching as Maggie approached the brawny male figure standing by the fire.
“Well, oi’ll be. Maggie, my girl, looks like you be a Goode, after all.”
Rhys recognized her brother Jeremy’s triumphant tones.
“Made it just in time, you did. Jimmy and Jacob are ’bout to bring the shipment ashore, and we’ll need you to keep a lookout while we unload the goods.”
Devil and damn.Rhys balled his hands.Smuggling? That’s what the bounder wanted her to help him with?
“I’m not here to help.” Though hushed, Maggie’s tones were clear and crisp. “I’m here to talk you out of this idiotic plan. The excise men have increased their patrolling of the waters, and the three of you are like sitting ducks. If you leave now—”
“Don’t be daft.” Jeremy’s tone heated with ready anger. “We got blunt invested, and we ain’t leaving without our brandy.”
“No amount of blunt is worth rotting in gaol over,” she shot back.
“Oi ain’t got time to argue with you. Now you either ’elp—or get out o’ the way.”
Before she could reply, shouts came from the direction of the water. Rhys spied two men knee-deep in the waves, an anchored boat just beyond them. Each man was hauling a rope of floating casks.
As Jeremy ran over to help, Rhys caught a bobbing movement on the horizon. Was there something in the waves? He squinted, trying to get a better look. The moon suddenly broke through the clouds, splattering pale light over the ocean—and the object.
Men on a lighter. Moving with determined speed toward the beach.
Bloody. Fucking. Hell.
Rhys broke into a run toward Maggie, shouting, “Excise men, they’re coming!”
10
Maggie joltedat the sound of Rhys’s voice, the sight of him running toward her.
Then his words sank in.
Blooming hell…
“Run for it!” Jeremy’s yell blasted through the darkness.
Dazed, her gaze bounced to her brothers, who were cutting themselves loose from the cargo. They scrambled onto the beach and sprinted away from her. Paralyzed, she saw the boat nearing the shore, a lamp flaring as a shout went up.
