Colin swallowed hard. “No,” he said, knowing how dangerous it was to call the bluff of a man who was currently leveling a pistol at him. “You won’t.”
Arthur laughed, but didn’t depress the trigger. “And why won’t I?”
“Because you have clearly wanted my title for years,” Colin said. “And you haven’t done it yet. Something stops you.”
“Are you calling me a coward?” Arthur hissed, but his eyes filled with tears.
“No,” Colin responded, gentling his tone as much as he could considering the circumstances. “Just not a killer.”
Arthur bent his head. “I’ve tried, you know. I’ve tried. That riding accident when you were seventeen? The duel you refused? That illness two years ago?”
At that Jane slowly got to her feet. Colin stared at her, for her eyes snapped with anger. Anger on his behalf. Protectiveness he did not deserve.
“You?” she growled. Arthur pivoted, pointing the gun toward her again, and Colin’s heart nearly stopped.
“Sit down, Jane,” he ordered sharply. “Arthur, Arthur, please. Aim the gun at me. I’m the one who you have the quarrel with. Aim the gun at me.”
“Colin,” she whispered, but she took a shaky place at the edge of her seat.
As Arthur did as he’d been asked, swinging the gun back at him, Colin nodded toward her. “It’s all right, Jane. I promise you.”
“All right?” Arthur burst out. “All right? None of it is bloody all right! I was never able to finish.”
Colin moved toward his cousin a step, praying Arthur’s hand, which now did shake, wouldn’t cause the gun to fire and kill him where he stood.
“Ending a life is not to be taken lightly,” he said softly. “Perhaps you struggle because you don’t really want to do this.”
He took another step closer.
“Yes, I do. Stop walking toward me!” Arthur all but screamed. He began to depress the trigger as Colin lunged for him.
In that moment, Colin knew he was going to die.
Except that when the gun fired, it missed him. Because Jane let out a screeching cry and swept out a leg, kicking Arthur hard in the back of the knee and causing him to topple and misfire.
Colin jumped on him at once, wrestling the gun away and tossing it aside before he punched his cousin as hard as he could in the face and knocked Arthur unconscious.
Jane rushed toward him as he flipped his cousin over and placed a knee in his back to hold him steady. She wrapped her arms around him, pulling him into her chest, whispering his name as she smoothed her hands across his arms and back to make sure he wasn’t injured.
“I’m fine,” he reassured her. “Are you?”
She drew back at last. “Yes. Thanks to you.”
“Thanks toyou,” he corrected as he looked up into her face and saw her, really saw her, for perhaps the first time. No longer was he looking through the glass of Arthur’s manipulations and his own doubt.
He saw Jane and knew how badly he had failed her, even if he’d managed to save her life.
It was like she read his mind in that moment. She took a long step away and her gaze flicked away from his. “I-I should get a servant to call for the guard.”
“Yes,” he agreed, knowing this wasn’t the time or the place to address what he now knew. “Though Arthur may have sent them away, so you might have to go to the next house. Hand me the gun, will you? Just in case.”
She nodded, handing him the pistol before she gave him one last look and hurried from the room. He watched her go as he stood up and trained the gun on the still-unconscious form of his troubled cousin.
And he prayed that once this had been resolved, he could find some way to make everything up to her.
Chapter Eight
Jane sat in the hallway, staring at the door to the parlor where Arthur had tried to kill her, tried to kill Colin. He had been taken out nearly an hour before by the guard, struggling and screaming as they did so. He would be taken to the prison…or perhaps to Bedlam, judging from how incoherent he was.
