Any cries she made, any screams, were futile. They would be lost to the raucous shouts and laughter below.
Her chest heaved in fast, shallow spasms.
Panic tightened its grip.
To think she had spent the past weeks, all the way up to this very day, mourning her impending marriage to the Duke of Hartwell.
Her mother, aunt, sisters, cousins, and brother had wed for love, while Meghan would stand alone in a marriage built on convenience and connections. Meghan could not have imagined a greater travesty than a loveless union.
She had stolen a single night of fun for herself, and the duke had taken her to task like a child for it. From that aberrant night alone, she had built him into a monster in her mind.
All the way on her journey to the church, Meghan had contemplated running from the Duke of Hartwell.
At last, the universe delivered. She had gotten exactly what she asked for.
Only now, robbed of that fate—and of a future—she wanted to fall to her knees and take back all her greedy hopes and wishes.
For there would be no marriage—not a loving one, nor a convenient one. Meghan had not merely been relieved of her valuables; she had been abducted by a highwayman.
She swallowed back a wave of nausea.
A highwayman who had slapped her buttocks and handled her like she was a common tart, his cruel touch nothing like August’s sweet, masterful caress.
As if he had followed Meghan’s tormented musings and sought to pile upon her sorrow, the dastard touched two callused fingers to her face and glided them along her cheek with a gentleness that bespoke familiarity. Warmth.
Her pulse quickened under her bindings, the response as inexplicable as it was unwelcome.
Somehow, she scraped together one last vestige of fight.
“You bloody coward,” she spat. “No man worth his salt would drag an unwilling woman, bind and blindfold her, and spirit her away.”
“Ah, mais on vous a déjà bandé les yeux, oui?”
Meghan stilled. Her ears sharpened first on his thick, velvety French accent, and then his words.
“…Ah, but you’ve been blindfolded before, yes…?”
Meghan’s heart beat faster.
“N’avez-vous jamais joué au jeu d’enfant du colin-maillard?”
She furrowed her brow.
“…Have you not played the child’s game Blindman’s Buff…?”
There was something familiar about the slightly mocking but playful quality of his speech. Every syllable rolled from his lips in the practiced way of a rogue.
She lifted her chin in the direction his voice came. “You know me!”
Silence answered her.
Heat flushed through her body. “You bastard! I want to see you.”
He chuckled, and the low, sonorous timbre resonated so near that she recoiled.
“Je veux que tu me voies,” he purred, in the tones of the masked highwaymen she read about, not real ones.
Meghan frowned.
