Free The Counterfeit Gentleman by Charlotte Louise Dolan Page A

For a moment she was more terrified of him and his wrath than she was of the kidnappers.
    Then he smiled and touched her cheek lightly with his hand, and her fears—all of her fears—subsided, and she felt safe again.
    As if from an immense distance rather than just a few yards away, she heard Jacky-boy cry out enthusiastically, “There’s the body, right where I told you it’d be. Now’ll you admit I know my job?”
    The two men speeded up their steps until they were al most running, and as soon as they were past the waiting smugglers, Mr. Rendel gave a low whistle. With a sudden ness that astounded her, the small cove erupted with vio lence.
    Bethia could not bear to watch the pain that the men were inflicting on one another, and yet she could not tear her glance away. To her astonishment, some of the smugglers were grinning, as if they were enjoying the fray.
    Her ears were filled with the sound of men shouting, and the thud of fists striking flesh and bone, and Bethia winced with each blow, as if she herself were being battered.
    Then with the same abruptness with which it had begun, the fight was all over. From her hiding place behind a boulder, she saw that Big Davey was holding one of the villains with his arms twisted behind his back, and the large man named Jacky-boy was lying motionless on the sand.
    Using his foot, Harry turned the man over, then said, “He’s dead. ‘Twould appear he fell on his own knife.”
    Mr. Rendel nodded his head once, and then, as if it were commonplace for him to have dead bodies at his feet, he turned his attention to the other kidnapper.
    “We want a name,” Mr. Rendel said, and Bethia heard a world of power and arrogance in his voice. The captured man should have been intimidated, for surrounded as he was by five strong men, he had to realize how effortlessly he could be dispatched to join his companion, who was surely feeling the unremitting fires of hell by now.
    “‘Tis you who need to explain yourself,” the man said quite brazenly. “My companion and I were merely taking a walk and enjoying a bit of brisk sea air when you fell upon us like savages.”
    “We want the name of the man who hired you,” Mr. Rendel repeated, and Big Davey gave a jerk on the man’s arms for added emphasis.
    But even with his face contorted in pain, the man persisted in his denials. “I do not know ... what you are talking about,” he managed to say with visible effort. “I am innocent of whatever it is ... you think I have done, and I demand the right to put my case before a magistrate.”
    “You are lying,” Bethia cried out, springing to her feet and dashing out onto the sand. “You and your partner ad mitted quite openly that you were paid to kill me.”
    The man looked at her as if she were a ghost returned from the grave, and his face became bloodless.
    Confronting the man who would have murdered her without a qualm, Bethia was amazed to discover that he was much smaller than she remembered him. “You will tell me which of my cousins paid you to drown me, or these men will not hesitate to force the truth from you.”
    Goggle-eyed, whether from pain or from thinking him self confronted by an unearthly spirit, the man could only stare at her, his mouth agape.
    Bethia was about to repeat her demands when a shot rang out and Big Davey let out a yelp of pain. The captured man instantly wrenched himself free and was off down the beach with the smugglers in hot pursuit.
    Before Bethia fully comprehended what was happening, she was thrown down onto the sand and a heavy weight came down on top of her, squashing the breath out of her body.
    The voice cursing steadily in her ear she recognized as belonging to Mr. Rendel, and she was about to demand that he let her up, when he caught her under her arms, dragged her to her feet, and shoved her toward the cliff, which offered them protection from the assassin or assassins above them.
    Only half the curses, unfortunately, were directed