Free Kasey Michaels by Escapade Page A

make Callie love him, but only gave her a wonderfully stationary target. She launched Lester forward... so that her friend cannoned into the earl with all his weight just as if he had stumbled over a loose stone, which he had... and lost his balance which, thanks to the force of Callie’s shove, he did... succeeding in roughly knocking Noel Kinsey to the ground... and holding him there by the simple expedient of pretending to faint dead away on top of the badly crumpled peer—which was above everything beautiful!
    “Aunt Leslie, are you all right?” Callie called out, doing her best to appear alarmed even as she quickly tugged down the hem of Lester’s gown, which had risen to show just a smidgen too much of plump, hairy calf. Lester was being simply splendid—lying on his back, his arms and legs splayed out in an ungainly manner that effectively pinned Kinsey in place, his eyes shut as he feigned a very passable swoon.
    “Aunt Leslie, Aunt Leslie!” Callie pleaded, bending down to gently slap at Lester’s cheeks. “Speak to me, Aunt Leslie! Have you hit your head? Sir? Sir, I beg you—release my poor aunt!”
    Noel Kinsey, who was sprawled facedown on the flagway, a dead weight on his back, turned his head to one side and did his best to look up at Callie. “Re-re- lease her? Why, you insolent pup—the ungainly lump is crushing me!”
    “Oh, now that’s not nice,” Callie scolded as a small crowd gathered around them, two gentlemen already taking hold of Lester by either arm and gently raising him up. Lester was soon settled in a sitting position as he stirred, moaned, and bounced his rump a time or two on Noel Kinsey’s already-abused back before being completely hauled to his feet. “See? My aunt is looking much better, no thanks to you. Now, sir, may I assist you to rise? Perhaps help you to your carriage?”
    “It’s a phaeton, you twit, not a carriage, and I wouldn’t ask your bumbling, cowhanded help if I were on fire,” the earl grumbled meanly.
    Callie ignored him, positioning a hand on his elbow and lifting him up—even as she placed her other hand on the pistol in her pocket. With Lester keeping any onlookers occupied with his loud, hysterical shrieks and threats to swoon yet again, it would be a simple matter to press the barrel of the pistol against Filton’s side and, in a low whisper, convince him of the reasonableness of offering both Callie and her injured “aunt” a ride back to their lodgings.
    Once she had him in his stylish phaeton, and on the roadway, she would only have to get him to drive out of the city. Once free of onlookers, she could shoot him in the knee—his right knee, she had decided—and leave him near the Green Man in the care of his groom, about a half mile from where she and Lester had hidden their rented hacks.
    Callie’s fingers had already slipped around the pistol as she stood just to the left and slightly behind Kinsey. She was about to push the barrel—still hidden inside the large pocket of her coat—into his ribs.
    And that’s when it happened. Her right arm was suddenly halted in its movement, clamped in a vise-hard grip.
    “I don’t think so, brat, although I do admire your pluck, and your resourcefulness,” a familiar, and hated, voice drawled beside her ear. “Release him. Release him now, and let him be on his way. Understood?”
    Callie went stiff as a board as Noel Kinsey erupted in a flood of complaints. “I’ve never been so insulted!” the earl was saying as he tugged his arm free of Callie’s nerveless fingers. He bent to retrieve his ruined hat, using it to brush his person free of some of the dust it had collected while kissing the flagway. “There should be a law against bumpkins—and fat women! Fat, clumsy, stupid women—and their slack-jawed, bovine, Johnny Raw relatives!”
    Kinsey’s groom had been fully occupied in attempting to wipe what appeared to be an appreciative grin off his face ever since his employer had