Margaret McPhee - His Mask of Retribution

The highwayman’s eyes were not cruel and pale and blue but a warm honeyed brown, and his gaze was steady and strong and compelling, holding hers so that she could not look away. She felt her heart miss a beat and a shiver shimmy all the way down her spine. She did not know whether it was from shock or relief or fear, or a combination of all three.

‘What the hell do you want?’ her father snarled at him.

The highwayman glanced away, releasing her gaze, and only then did she realise that he had a pistol in each hand and both were aimed at her father’s heart.

‘Stand and deliver.’ The man’s voice was quiet and harsh, as if half whispered.

‘You’ll rue the day you picked me to thieve from, you scoundrel.’

‘I think not.’ He cocked his pistols. ‘I will kill you if you do not give me what I have come for. And once you are dead I will be free to take that which you seek to protect…without reprisal.’

‘Papa, please, if you have any knowledge of what this villain wants, I beg you to deliver it to him. Do not risk your life.’

Both men looked at her. Her father’s face was strained and haunted; he seemed to have aged a hundred years in those few moments. And the highwayman’s eyes held the strangest expression.

‘Run, Marianne,’ her father said, agony in his voice. ‘Run and do not look back.’

And she understood in that moment what it was that the highwayman wanted even before he said the words.

‘For what does a father love best in all the world but his only daughter?’

AUTHOR NOTE

You first met Lady Marianne Winslow and her rather sinister family in UNMASKING THE DUKE’S MISTRESS. Marianne was always going to have her own story, and you, the reader, an explanation for her father and brother’s behaviour in that earlier book. But I needed a very special hero for her. I found him in the tall, dark and handsome highwayman Rafe Knight. If ever two people deserved love and a happy-ever-after…

So here is Marianne and Rafe’s story. I really do hope that you enjoy it.

With very best wishes

Margaret

www.margaretmcphee.co.uk

MARGARET MCPHEEloves to use her imagination—an essential requirement for a trained scientist. However, when she realised that her imagination was inspired more by the historical romances she loves to read rather than by her experiments, she decided to put the ideas down on paper. She has since left her scientific life behind, retaining only the romance—her husband, whom she met in a laboratory. In summer, Margaret enjoys cycling along the coastline overlooking the Firth of Clyde in Scotland, where she lives. In winter, tea, cakes and a good book suffice.

Previous novels by the same author:

THE CAPTAIN’S LADY

MISTAKEN MISTRESS THE

WICKED EARL

UNTOUCHED MISTRESS

A SMUGGLER’S TALE

(part of Regency Christmas Weddings )

THE CAPTAIN’S FOBIDDEN MISS

UNLACING THE INNOCENT MISS

(part of Regency Silk & Scandal mini-series)

*UNMASKING THE DUKE’S MISTRESS

*A DARK AND BROODING GENTLEMAN

* Gentlemen of Disrepute

Did you know that some of these novels

are also available as eBooks?

Visit www.millsandboon.co.uk

And in Mills & Boon Historical Undone! eBooks:

HOW TO TEMPT A VISCOUNT

www.millsandboon.co.uk

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For E

Hounslow Heath, London—1810

It was the perfect day for a wedding.

The October morning was crisp and filled with sunshine. The sky was a cloudless blue. Hounslow Heath was a rich green, and the surrounding oaks and beeches that peppered the heath had turned the prettiest shades of red and gold. But as the solitary dark liveried coach sped across the heath Lady Marianne Winslow noticed nothing of the beauty.

‘We had better pray that Pickering is still waiting in the church. I would not be surprised if he has suffered a change of heart and gone home. And who could blame him? He has his pride, after all. What on earth were you doing in your bedchamber for so long?’ George Winslow, the Earl of Misbourne, pulled his watch from his pocket and flicked open the gold casing.

Marianne wondered what her father would say if she told him the truth—that she had been staring into the peering glass for the last two hours, wondering how she might bring herself to marry a man she had met only twice, was almost as old as her father and scrutinised her as if she were a prize filly. But her father did not wait for an answer.

‘Forty-five minutes late and we have yet to reach Staines.’ He snapped the watch case shut and returned it to his waistcoat pocket. ‘Good lord, girl! We cannot risk losing Pickering after the fiasco with Arlesford.’

‘Papa…marrying Mr Pickering…I am not at all sure that I can…’

‘Marianne, as your mother has already told you, what you are feeling is nothing more than wedding-morning nerves, which are perfectly normal in any young lady. We have been through all of this before.’

‘Yes, but…’

‘But?’

‘I thought when Mr Pickering and I were first betrothed that I would grow used both to him and to the idea of marriage. But I need more time. It is barely a month since he gave me his ring.’ She glanced down at the heavy signet ring upon her finger.

‘A month is more than adequate for a betrothal, Marianne.’

‘But, Papa, I barely know him.’

‘You will come to know him soon enough and Pickering is not a demanding man. He will be kind to you.’

The gold of Pickering’s ring glinted in the sunlight.

‘I can understand that he may not be the most appealing of bridegrooms,’ said her father, ‘but he is steady and solid and reliable. Not only is Pickering’s fortune vast and he highly esteemed within the ton , but he is a man of influence and power. No one can question the sense of the match.’ He paused. ‘The wedding must go ahead. You will say no more of it and do as you are told, my girl.’

She stared down at the wedding posy clutched in the clamminess of her hand, at the pale pink roses delivered fresh from a hothouse in the country that morning and the tiny white babies’-breath flowers. She knew all of her father’s arguments and knew, too, that they were right. Yet it did not make the prospect of marrying Charles Pickering any more palatable.

The coach took a bend in the road too fast and Marianne reached up for the securing strap to stop herself from sliding across the seat, her posy tumbling to the floor in the process.

‘Papa, please, can we not at least travel a little more slowly?’