The Highwayman (Victorian Rebels Book 1)

Northwalk Abbey glowed against the night sky as Dorian pounded up on the back of his Thoroughbred. Every window blazed with light, and frantic movements from within prickled the hairs on the back of his neck.

Something was amiss.

Clattering into the cobblestone courtyard, Dorian leaped from his horse and threw the reins to a stable boy, his focus on the men clustered in the yard studying a map in their hands.

“What’s going on here?” he demanded.

Peter Kenwick, an employee he’d installed to watch his wife, led the handful of men. His dark eyes widened as Dorian approached. “Blackwell!” he exclaimed, crumpling the map. “It’s Murdoch, he’s been shot.”

“Is he alive?”

“Yes, we sent for the doctor, and to get word to you. Tallow’s with him now.”

Dorian ripped off his riding gloves and mounted the stairs two at a time. “Where is my wife? Who did this? I assume he’s been dealt with.”

The men followed him up the steps, their silence screaming a warning. “Murdoch was found in Lady Blackwell’s bedroom,” one of the men was brave enough to answer. “She’s missing.”

Speared by an arrow of cold dread, Dorian spun at the top of the stairs and glared down at them. “What do you mean, missing?”

No one met his eyes.

“Answer me if you value your lives.”

Kenwick, more accustomed to Dorian’s visage, stepped ahead. “All we know is we can’t find her, or the gun. The house is being scoured, sir, and we were going to start a search of the grounds. She can’t have gone far.”

The prick of dread turned to a douse of icy fear. “How long since the gunshot?”

“Minutes,” Kenwick answered. “If that long.”

Whirling so fast his black cloak flared, Dorian plunged into Northwalk Abbey, bellowing Murdoch’s name. The bedrooms had to be on the second floor, so he dashed up the stairs, his boots barely touching the carpets. “Murdoch,” he roared. “Farah!”

Tallow ran around the bend of the hall to the right. “B-Blackwell! He’s here!”

Murdoch sat propped against the wall outside a splintered door barely clinging to the hinges. A maid held pressure to his side with a heavy cloth.

“Murdoch.” He dropped to one knee next to the injured man. “Who did this?”

“Bullet grazed me flesh.” Murdoch waved him off. “Go. He has her,” his steward bit out through drawn, white lips. “Warrington.”

The bastard isn’t dead.

“No!” Dorian exploded to his feet, his ice becoming that foreign fire, the one that stole his thoughts along with his breath. “Where did he take her? Which way?”

Murdock shook his head. “They never—left the room. I was by the door.” He winced and swore as the maid pressed harder on his side.

Dorian leaped into her bedroom, lit by a lone lantern. Walters and Gemma were already searching the balcony and beneath the bed. “She’s not ’ere.” Gemma moaned fretfully. “We looked everywhere. There’s no way anyone could have leaped off the balcony and lived, it’s too high.”

Every muscle in his body tightened. “Murdoch,” he gritted out. “Is there a chance you lost consciousness? No possibility that they might have gotten past you?”

“Not a one,” Murdoch rasped. “Passing out would be a mercy.”

Panic threatened to choke his rage, and Dorian refused to let it. “Warrington’s a dead man,” he announced to the men who’d only just crowded in through Farah’s bedroom door. “And so is the imbecile who allowed him in. Which one of you was it?”

“It’s impossible, Lord Blackwell,” Kenwick marveled. “We’ve attended our posts like you ordered. Not one of us has been late or remiss. We wouldn’t dare fail you.”

“My wife is in the hands of my enemy.” The truth of it burned through his blood, making him wish a man could die more than once. He’d murder Warrington exactly the number of times he’d put his hands on Farah. The man’s soul would expire before his body gave out. There were ways.

And this time, he’d stay dead.

“We’ll find her,” Kenwick promised.

“You’ll answer for losing her,” Dorian vowed.

The man went whiter than Murdoch. “Blackwe—”

A shot volleyed through the castle, freezing them all. Then another.

“Farah,” Dorian gasped. It had come from inside the castle, from inside the walls. Dorian walked to the east wall and pressed his hands against it, then his ear. She was behind there. He knew it. She wasn’t dead. That shot wasn’t for her. She was alive! She was alive because he was still alive. And if her heart ever stopped beating, his soul would follow her.

Feeling like an animal trapped in a cage, he hurled his body against the wardrobe, shattering the wood. He would tear this bloody castle apart brick by fucking brick. Starting with her bedroom.

*   *   *

“Good-bye, Lady Northwalk.”

Farah reacted before she thought, slapping at Warrington’s wrist as he pulled the trigger.

The gun went off right next to her ear. She could no longer hear, but she could kick. And so she did, her foot coming up as hard as she could drive it between Warrington’s legs.

Another bullet pinged off the stones, but Farah felt no pain, and so she lunged for the pistol, easily pulling it from Warrington’s hand as he crumpled to the earth, clutching himself.

Fumbling for a moment, she got the pistol pointed in the right direction, and slowly backed away from Warrington. “Don’t move,” she yelled, the sound still muffled. Every limb shook with a violence she’d never before experienced. Her left ear rang loudly, and another sound, like rushing water, competed for dominance, but she was alive.

She was alive.

The foul words that spilled from Warrington’s lips rivaled the filth of the pit. And Farah began to wonder just how she was going to climb the stairs—they were almost as steep as a ladder—while still training the gun on him. Should she run first and get help? Or make him climb at gunpoint? Should she just kill the bastard and be done with it?

The idea held appeal, and yet her stomach protested.

A loud explosion, like the shattering of wood and brick, startled her. Warrington took that moment to lunge toward her, his teeth bared as if he planned to bite.

Farah leaped back toward the corner, screamed, and pulled the trigger.

Warrington staggered, a hole opening just below his sternum, and fell. She felt rather than heard the vibrations of footsteps sprinting toward her.

The ringing had started to fade, and she might have heard a man scream her name, but she just stared and shook, wondering if she shouldn’t empty the gun into the fallen man, just in case he rose again.

Warrington’s eyes blinked rapidly. His mouth, ringed with blood, worked over words, though she couldn’t hear any of them. The world began to spin, the ground beneath her feet pitching like a ship rolling on an angry sea.

A dark shadow leaped from the stairs, his long coat flowing behind him like demon wings, landing in between her and Warrington.

Dorian.

He looked like the devil, come to take his minion. His hair black as obsidian. His scarred eye glittering with so many dark things, Farah couldn’t identify a single one through her shock.

“Give me the gun,” he growled. “His life is mine.”

His words seemed to snap Farah out of whatever threatened to pull her under. “No.” She scowled at him. “He attacked me.”

“Farah, you’re not a killer,” Dorian soothed, a desperate tenderness glimmering from his onyx eye. “Now give me the gun.”

“I’ve—reconsidered my position on that.” She looked at Warrington’s twitching leg, could hear the breath gurgle through his throat, and she felt woozy all over again.

In a flurry of swift and magical movements, Dorian took her gun, shoved her behind him, and shot Warrington squarely between the eyes like he was a dog that needed to be put down.

Farah took her hands from her ears and pushed at his broad back, fighting elation at his presence that rose through her fear, shock, and anger. “You needn’t have done that,” she charged. “He wouldn’t have survived my shot.”

Her husband turned on her, his eyes devouring every inch of her barely clad body as he tucked the gun in his belt. “He should have died slowly,” he said. “But he is still a stain on my soul, not yours.”

They stared at each other for a dark, tremulous moment.

“Dorian.” She breathed his name, and the sound of her voice seemed to unleash a torrent of raw, brutal emotion from within him.

She was at once trapped between the chilly stones and six feet of burning, aroused male. On a primitive groan, he took her lips in a fierce, possessive kiss. His gloved hands were everywhere, almost clinically, as though checking for injury, then he crushed her to him in an embrace that threatened to squeeze the breath from her.

“Fairy,” he groaned against her lips, and Farah thought she detected the brogue of their childhood. He seized her mouth. Possessed it. Drove his tongue into her with deep, drugging thrusts.

Farah wanted to leave this place. To escape the smell and the death and the fear. But she felt her husband’s ribs expanding with heaving, painful breaths against her chest, and detected bone-deep tremors running through his solid frame, and so she stood passively in his arms, submitting to his scorching kisses.

He said her name almost incoherently between rough drags of his hard lips and bristly chin. “Fairy. My Fairy.”

She tried to answer him, to soothe him, but each time she took a breath, he claimed her lips again. His own breaths began to slow to a less alarming rate, rattling out of his broad chest in deep, ragged pants.

Farah wasn’t aware that they weren’t alone until some rather loud throat clearing echoed off the castle walls. “Blackwell…” She recognized Kenwick, one of her handymen, who addressed her husband. “What do you think we should do with this?” He kicked at Warrington’s limp body with the toe of his boot.

Dorian lifted his head, his eyes clearing of their clouded frenzy. Inspecting her again, he seemed to only just notice the thin translucence of her nightgown.

“Get rid of it, Kenwick,” he said darkly, taking off his cape and settling it around Farah’s shoulders.

Farah lifted an eyebrow as the enveloping warmth instantly sank through her gown and into her skin. She shivered, not from the cold, but a deep, intense relief. “Kenwick? You know my handyman?”

He didn’t even have the decency to look sheepish, and Farah narrowed her eyes at him. “Just how many of my staff are in your employ?”

Dorian didn’t answer. Instead, a strong arm swept beneath her knees and lifted her until she was cradled to his thick chest.

“I’m perfectly capable of walking,” she informed him, wriggling in his grasp.

“Hold still,” he ordered, climbing the stairway.

She did as he said, only because she didn’t want to survive all this only to die from a fall down the stairs. Now wasn’t the time. She had a few choice things to say to her husband.