Falling for the Enemy

She began to back away as stealthily as she’d crept up. Except, with her hands shaking and her heartbeat thudding wildly in her ears, she wasn’t stealthy at all. Clumsy, more like. Her foot cracked a dried twig, and her cloak brushed against the brambles. She paused for a moment. Had they heard?

“We’re lost now.” A third voice, higher pitched than the first two and with a hint of intelligence behind his words, spoke.

She let out a silent breath. They’d noticed nothing. Now she need only move quietly—because she could be quiet if she didn’t let panic get the better of her—back through the brambles. Then she’d find Serge, and they’d pack up camp. Dinner could be some of the salt pork and bread they carried. No need for freshly roasted squirrel now, not when they had to find a gendarmerie post and report the Englishmen.

Because Englishmen traveling through France during the middle of a war could only be spies.

What secrets would these men impart to the British government if they reached the coast and no one stopped them? She was glad they were lost. They could walk around in circles for the next week.

Except by then, she’d have found that gendarmerie post and explained everything. A week hence, those British spies would be moldering in some nameless dungeon, likely being tortured and pouring forth whatever secrets they’d discovered about her country.

Which was exactly what they deserved.

But first she had to get away without anyone noticing.

“What do you want us to do? Stop and ask for directions?” The third, intelligent-sounding voice dripped with sarcasm. “Or perhaps a map? I’m sure there’s a very welcoming gendarmerie station along the road to Saint-Quentin. We need only present ourselves and say, ‘Good day, sirs. Could you tell me the quickest way from here to the channel? You see, I’ve two es—”

Something crashed in the woods behind her. Danielle whirled, the leather handle of her knife clamped tightly between her fingers. But too late. A male body slammed into her from the side and crashed her to the ground.

Shrubs scratched her arms and tore at her cloak as the man rolled himself over her. She fought as he struggled to sit up while holding her to the ground. He wasn’t overlarge or terribly strong, but he plunked himself down directly atop her while trapping the forearm that held her knife beneath his knee. If she could only find some way to upend him...

“Come quickly! I’ve found a spy.”

A spy? Her?

She wasn’t a spy. She was just...well, spying, but not for the reason they thought. They were the spies, and she’d only wanted to make certain she and Serge were safe from the men camped so close to their own site.

Or rather, that’s all she’d wanted to do until she’d discovered the mysterious men were English.

“What’s that you say?” The English voices grew closer and footsteps thudded on the muddy ground.

“You found someone?”

If she was going to get free, she had to do so quickly. She’d not lie there docilely while men from the same country that had killed Laurent attempted to capture her. She brought her knee up, trying to uproot the oaf’s bottom. The man only gripped her shoulders and pressed her harder against the damp earth. She twisted and turned, but his weight made it difficult to suck in air and his knee still pinned her knife hand.

“She was watching from the bushes,” her captor explained. “I wouldn’t have spotted her except she started moving as I was coming up from the stream with the water.”

Danielle pressed her eyes shut and stifled a groan. She should have considered someone might be at the stream, should have thought to scout the area before she’d even started into the bushes. Instead, she’d turned into a complete and total idiot at the sound of one simple phrase in English.

“What’s your name?” the intelligent voice asked in English.

She opened her eyes and stared at the tall form above her, with tousled dark brown hair, an arrogant, aristocratic nose, and eyes the color of fog over the ocean. Not quite gray but not quite blue, and just mysterious enough one might stare into them a bit too long, trying to understand—

“Her name matters not,” a deeper voice snapped. “How much did she overhear?” Another man appeared above her, leaner and taller than the first, with a face so thin and wan the bones seemed to jut from it. His hands appeared just as bony, as though he hadn’t had a good meal in the past half decade. But his emaciated body didn’t stop his shrewd green eyes from narrowing at her.

She licked her lips. What should she tell them? She hadn’t overheard much beyond that they were lost and debating when to travel. Could she pretend as though she didn’t know English and hadn’t understood a word? They had little reason to suspect a woman such as her would know their language.

And even if she wanted to answer their questions, she couldn’t manage to speak more than a word or two with an English ignoramus sitting atop her stomach and squishing the air from her body.

“I daresay she didn’t overhear anything,” the raspy voice spoke from the other side of the brambles. Then that horrid coughing filled the air again.

“A woman like her isn’t going to know English,” the dunce atop her proclaimed. At least he was useful for something besides squishing the breath from her body. “Lord Westerfield is right.”

Lord Westerfield? She nearly groaned, would have if she possessed the ability to breathe.

She moved her gaze between the two men standing above her, their patrician noses and arrogant bearings suddenly more than mere circumstance. As if finding regular Englishmen hiding in the woods wasn’t trouble enough. She’d somehow stumbled into a nest of aristocrats.

Just her luck.

“Try in French, Halston.” The thin blond man nudged the darker haired one—Halston, evidently.

Halston scowled at the other man. “You try in French. You’re the one who’s spent the past year and a half in this wretched country.”

“The only French I found use for were curses. The rest of the language I’d like to forget as quickly as possible.”

Danielle bit the side of her lip. This was probably supposed to be the moment she turned grateful for all those horrid English lessons her mother had forced upon her while growing up.

Except she still didn’t feel all that grateful—though it was rather helpful to know what they were saying instead of being left to guess their intent.

And now that she had a moment to consider, she’d best not speak in English. She might lay pinned beneath a wiry man who felt far heavier than he looked, but she still had two things to her advantage. First, her captors didn’t realize she understood their words, and second, they didn’t know about Serge.

If she managed nothing else from this debacle, she would at least keep them from learning of her brother.

“Stand her up, Farnsworth. Let’s have a look at her,” the blond commanded.

“She’s a person, Kessler, not some dog,” Halston growled.

The two men stared at each other, the air between them igniting like the sudden spark of a flintlock. Then Kessler turned away and the man atop her began to rise.

She tightened the grip on her knife, waiting for the perfect moment...

Chapter Two (#ulink_e35d2edb-8b75-5dd2-aa6d-8a478b3d374b)

Gregory had never seen anything more astounding. One second the woman was lying docilely beneath Farnsworth’s hold, and the next she’d reversed their positions, flipping his valet to the ground and sitting atop him, a knife pressed to his throat.

“Come any closer, and your servant dies.” The woman spoke in a calm, controlled voice, and judging by the fierce look etched across her face, she wasn’t bluffing. The French words fell comfortably off her tongue, only confirming what they’d already suspected. She knew not a lick of English.

Something sick rolled through his stomach. Why had he brought Farnsworth on this wretched journey in the first place? As though endangering himself, his brother and Kessler wasn’t enough.

He took a step closer to the woman, but her grip on the knife only tightened and her lips pressed into a thin white line. How was he supposed to get her off Farnsworth if she wouldn’t even let him approach?

“Lord Gregory,” Farnsworth gasped, evidently not minding moving his throat to speak despite the wicked-looking blade pressed against it. “I could use a little help here, if you don’t mind. Perhaps you might find my service to you worth a guinea or two and be willing to—”

“Silence!” the woman snapped.

Though the pronunciation in French was quite different from English, Gregory had no trouble recognizing the word.

He reached into his pocket and fished out two napoleons, speaking to Kessler without taking his eyes off the woman. “We can let her go.” Once he convinced her to leave Farnsworth unharmed, that was. “She couldn’t have understood what we were saying.”