Or rather, that’s all she’d wanted to do until she’d discovered the mysterious men were English.
“What’s that you say?” The English voices grew closer and footsteps thudded on the muddy ground.
“You found someone?”
If she was going to get free, she had to do so quickly. She’d not lie there docilely while men from the same country that had killed Laurent attempted to capture her. She brought her knee up, trying to uproot the oaf’s bottom. The man only gripped her shoulders and pressed her harder against the damp earth. She twisted and turned, but his weight made it difficult to suck in air and his knee still pinned her knife hand.
“She was watching from the bushes,” her captor explained. “I wouldn’t have spotted her except she started moving as I was coming up from the stream with the water.”
Danielle pressed her eyes shut and stifled a groan. She should have considered someone might be at the stream, should have thought to scout the area before she’d even started into the bushes. Instead, she’d turned into a complete and total idiot at the sound of one simple phrase in English.
“What’s your name?” the intelligent voice asked in English.
She opened her eyes and stared at the tall form above her, with tousled dark brown hair, an arrogant, aristocratic nose, and eyes the color of fog over the ocean. Not quite gray but not quite blue, and just mysterious enough one might stare into them a bit too long, trying to understand—
“Her name matters not,” a deeper voice snapped. “How much did she overhear?” Another man appeared above her, leaner and taller than the first, with a face so thin and wan the bones seemed to jut from it. His hands appeared just as bony, as though he hadn’t had a good meal in the past half decade. But his emaciated body didn’t stop his shrewd green eyes from narrowing at her.
She licked her lips. What should she tell them? She hadn’t overheard much beyond that they were lost and debating when to travel. Could she pretend as though she didn’t know English and hadn’t understood a word? They had little reason to suspect a woman such as her would know their language.
And even if she wanted to answer their questions, she couldn’t manage to speak more than a word or two with an English ignoramus sitting atop her stomach and squishing the air from her body.
“I daresay she didn’t overhear anything,” the raspy voice spoke from the other side of the brambles. Then that horrid coughing filled the air again.
“A woman like her isn’t going to know English,” the dunce atop her proclaimed. At least he was useful for something besides squishing the breath from her body. “Lord Westerfield is right.”
Lord Westerfield? She nearly groaned, would have if she possessed the ability to breathe.
She moved her gaze between the two men standing above her, their patrician noses and arrogant bearings suddenly more than mere circumstance. As if finding regular Englishmen hiding in the woods wasn’t trouble enough. She’d somehow stumbled into a nest of aristocrats.
Just her luck.
“Try in French, Halston.” The thin blond man nudged the darker haired one—Halston, evidently.
Halston scowled at the other man. “You try in French. You’re the one who’s spent the past year and a half in this wretched country.”
“The only French I found use for were curses. The rest of the language I’d like to forget as quickly as possible.”
Danielle bit the side of her lip. This was probably supposed to be the moment she turned grateful for all those horrid English lessons her mother had forced upon her while growing up.
Except she still didn’t feel all that grateful—though it was rather helpful to know what they were saying instead of being left to guess their intent.
And now that she had a moment to consider, she’d best not speak in English. She might lay pinned beneath a wiry man who felt far heavier than he looked, but she still had two things to her advantage. First, her captors didn’t realize she understood their words, and second, they didn’t know about Serge.
If she managed nothing else from this debacle, she would at least keep them from learning of her brother.
“Stand her up, Farnsworth. Let’s have a look at her,” the blond commanded.
“She’s a person, Kessler, not some dog,” Halston growled.
The two men stared at each other, the air between them igniting like the sudden spark of a flintlock. Then Kessler turned away and the man atop her began to rise.
She tightened the grip on her knife, waiting for the perfect moment...
Gregory had never seen anything more astounding. One second the woman was lying docilely beneath Farnsworth’s hold, and the next she’d reversed their positions, flipping his valet to the ground and sitting atop him, a knife pressed to his throat.
“Come any closer, and your servant dies.” The woman spoke in a calm, controlled voice, and judging by the fierce look etched across her face, she wasn’t bluffing. The French words fell comfortably off her tongue, only confirming what they’d already suspected. She knew not a lick of English.
Something sick rolled through his stomach. Why had he brought Farnsworth on this wretched journey in the first place? As though endangering himself, his brother and Kessler wasn’t enough.
He took a step closer to the woman, but her grip on the knife only tightened and her lips pressed into a thin white line. How was he supposed to get her off Farnsworth if she wouldn’t even let him approach?
“Lord Gregory,” Farnsworth gasped, evidently not minding moving his throat to speak despite the wicked-looking blade pressed against it. “I could use a little help here, if you don’t mind. Perhaps you might find my service to you worth a guinea or two and be willing to—”
“Silence!” the woman snapped.
Though the pronunciation in French was quite different from English, Gregory had no trouble recognizing the word.
He reached into his pocket and fished out two napoleons, speaking to Kessler without taking his eyes off the woman. “We can let her go.” Once he convinced her to leave Farnsworth unharmed, that was. “She couldn’t have understood what we were saying.”
“No, but she likely understands we’re English.” Kessler tilted his nose down at the woman. “Where do you think she’ll head the moment we free her?”
Of course Kessler would have to argue with him. Though he did agree on one point: the woman was trouble, plain as day, with all that thick black hair ready to tumble from beneath her mobcap, those sharp blue eyes, quick reflexes...
And the blade.
She’d lain meekly under Farnsworth the entire time they talked about her, and somehow they’d all missed she had a blade. “Ah, shouldn’t we be more concerned about her freeing Farnsworth at the moment than us freeing her?”
Kessler waved his hand absently in the air. “She’s only a wench. Surely she can’t hold him for more than a minute or two, and then we’ll need to know what to do with her.”
True, they needed a plan for after she released Farnsworth, but first and foremost, they needed to get that knife away from her and his valet off the ground.
“Excusez moi.” He stepped closer to the woman, the rusted French bumbling over his tongue. He cringed a bit, and a trace of a smile curved the woman’s lips. But at least she