All I Want for Christmas... Is You by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oliver Heber Books
Published: 2022-12-19T18:30:00+00:00

CHAPTER 5

A mile away, Lucien de Montforte pulled his black stallion, Armageddon, to a halt where the robber had held up his coach.

Thick wet snow sifted down from above, quickly filling the depression in the mud where the highwayman’s horse had gone over backwards, lining the ruts of the carriage and hissing down all around him. His breath plumed the darkness as he scanned the area of the attack. The rogue was nowhere to be seen though his horse, a piebald beast with shaggy fetlocks and a back as broad as a warship, stood nearby, pawing at bits of grass stabbing up through the building crust of frozen sleet and snow.

Lucien hadn’t really intended to come back. He’d figured the highwayman would have mounted his horse and disappeared into the night from which he’d come. But the horse was still here, which meant that he couldn’t, in good conscience, leave the animal out here to the elements nor the robber, who had to be somewhere....

“Hell and damnation,” he muttered, and pulling his pistol free of its holster, swung neatly down from Armageddon’s back. His boots crunched through the frozen crust of snow and into the mud. Wind dislodged his tricorn and impatiently, he yanked it more firmly down. It was a wretched night to be out and about. He’d only just returned from a madcap trip across the Atlantic and back in pursuit of his errant sister, and hunting down a highwayman in a snowstorm was the last thing he felt like doing on Christmas Eve—or any other eve, for that matter. How he longed to be home, warm and dry and holding his duchess in his arms.

Where was that cursed rogue?

Leading Armageddon, he scanned the snowy darkness but there was no sign of the robber and Lucien wondered, impatiently, if he’d crawled off somewhere to die. Then he spotted the footsteps leading off the road and into the verge, where they were quickly fading beneath the building mantle of white. There were enough of them to note a pattern. Lucien’s black, omniscient gaze lifted and followed their direction. Far off into the darkness, the lights of his nearest neighbor glowed like a beacon.

He stood there for a long moment, frowning, as the raw, brittle wind whipped his greatcoat around him. Brookhampton was probably deep in his cups and passed out, and he suspected that the Farnsleys, like himself, had probably given the night off to most of his staff. They were alone out there. Unprotected against whatever malice the highwayman intended. Lucien swung up on Armageddon, caught the reins of the loose mare and struck off across the dark, snowy pastures toward where that single light stood like a lonely beacon against the wintry night.

A hell of a way to spend Christmas, he thought.

But it could be worse.

At least he wasn’t the highwayman.

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