Free Lady Sherry and the Highwayman by Maggie MacKeever Page B

lass had been such that he hoped he would not set eyes on her again, nor the ancient beldame who had kept her company. How pleasant it would be to open his eyes and discover that these past few days had been no more than a singularly nasty nightmare.
    Not even briefly could Micah cherish that hope. His throbbing leg told him all too clearly that no overheated imagination could be held to account for his recent travail. His delirium had subsided somewhat now, at least sufficiently for him to wonder where he was. Perhaps, in light of his recent ill luck, he might be easier in his mind if he did not know. Micah was no coward, whatever else he might have been. Cautiously, he opened his eyes.
    His first impression was of a large, dark room cluttered with bizarre furnishings and books. Then he glimpsed the female dozing in a chair drawn up close to the sofa where he lay. She was holding a pistol. His pistol, he realized. The pistol that, during his abrupt descent from the scaffold, had been pressed into his hand. Who had given the gun to him? Had his escape been planned, that riot could not have been better staged.
    There was little point in asking questions for which answers were not readily at hand. Micah looked again at the pistol and the sleeping woman. She looked familiar. Aha. He had not immediately recognized her now that she was neatly coiffed and gowned, but this was the woman whose horse he had commandeered, who had dressed him in that queer rig; who had torn strips from her petticoat to bind his wound, in the process revealing an ankle that was exceptionally neat. Though Micah should have been grateful, in his dazed mind this red-haired, blue-eyed female was associated with a great deal of inconvenience and pain. Now she held a pistol trained on him, and Micah had had quite enough of being held prisoner. Freedom seemed worth any risk. He took a deep breath and lunged.
    Lady Sherry wakened suddenly to find herself staring yet once more down the barrel of a pistol, with the additional perplexity of a highwayman sprawled across her lap. Sherry had been dreaming most pleasurably of kisses, and was as a result somewhat disoriented to find herself caught up in a very different kind of embrace. “Are you going to shoot me?” she inquired faintly. “I wish that you would not!”
    Certainly, Micah did not wish to shoot this female. He had not shot anyone in all his life. However, he did not lower the pistol, or remove himself from the lady’s lap. He could not. Prinny had leaped atop him, under the impression that the man’s queer antics signified a desire to play some new game. The pain was intense.
    The highwayman groaned. “Oh, you wretched beast!” cried Sherry, and swatted at the dog. Prinny removed himself from atop their guest and stalked across the room in high dudgeon, then flopped down by the door. Sherry helped her guest back onto the couch. He stared at her with perplexity. “You’re no serving wench.”
    A serving wench? Was that what he had thought her? Sherry remembered Lord Viccars’s compliments on her appearance and almost laughed. “No. I’m no serving wench,” she said wryly, then frowned again as he grimaced with pain. “However did you get out from under that hedge?”
    Micah did not care to recall the hedge, which had been very prickly, or his feelings when he had suddenly and painfully awakened, the horrid moment when he thought he’d been flung alive into his grave. “Was it you who put me there?” he asked as he took firmer hold of the gun that she had neglected to take from him.
    Sherry resented the man’s suspicious expression, his unappreciative tone of voice. “Good heavens, man! I didn’t shoot you!” she snapped. “Nor have I turned you over to the authorities as any sensible person would have done. Instead, I saved your ungrateful neck. Oh, do put that thing down before it goes off and we have the whole household gathered outside the door, wishful of knowing what is going