“Your Grace.” Francesca continued her introductions as though they weren’t speaking over a man he’d only just beaten within an inch of his life. “These are my bridesmaids, Miss Cecelia Teague, of London, and Lady Alexandra Lane, daughter of the Earl of Bentham.”
“Pleased to meet Your Grace.” Miss Teague spread her lavender skirts and executed an elegant curtsy. Her spectacles hid maybe the most brilliant blue eyes he’d ever come across. The brilliance, he marked, had just as much to do with what shone from behind her gaze, as the hue of it.
A jab from Miss Teague’s elbow broke Alexandra from a rather worrisome stupor, and she did something with her knees so ridiculous, Piers couldn’t have found a curtsy in it if he’d a magnifying glass.
His absurd bubble of amusement had to be the aftermath of violence still singing through his blood.
“Remarkably swift thinking back there, Doctor Lane.” He looked down at her with his most imperious expression. “Or should I say, Lady Alexandra?”
Lady Francesca glanced between them. She crossed her arms over nonexistent bosoms wrapped in a pink so garish, it almost hurt to gaze upon. On any other woman, the color would have been hideous. On her, it was oddly fetching.
“It appears you two have already been introduced.” She narrowed her eyes at Alexandra, though Piers detected no true malice in the look.
“Well—I—no?” Lady Alexandra gasped.
“Is that a question?” Francesca smirked. “You could have mentioned it last night.” She pronounced the t’s with undue emphasis.
As Lady Alexandra’s alluring mouth opened and closed soundlessly for several seconds, Miss Teague crept toward their attacker, who’d given up writhing for limp twitches and guttural moans.
“I say, he seems to be in a great deal of pain. Shouldn’t we get him some help?”
Francesca turned to her. “Honestly, Cecelia, he attempted to murder one of us not moments ago. Do let him suffer for a bit longer. I should think he brought it upon himself.”
A bold and officious woman in every facet, that was his wife-to-be.
God, they were going to make each other miserable. Not that he disagreed with her on any particular point, it was simply that this was a trait they shared, and with both of them stomping about Castle Redmayne demanding their own way, who would keep the peace?
Assuming she wouldn’t notice his inability to keep his eyes off her closest friend.
“I’ll need to ascertain which of you the bullet was intended for.” Piers dragged his gaze from Lady Alexandra to glare down at the man on the ground between them. “Is he familiar to any of you?”
Both Lady Alexandra and Cecelia stared at the gunman, shook their heads in the negative, then turned to look at Francesca, who blanched.
“I’ve never seen him before in my life,” she announced, almost too innocently. “Though we should probably all take a gander at the man up the hill, just to be certain.”
“Good thinking, dear,” Cecelia agreed amicably. “Should we take the long way toward the tree line, and then follow it until we can ascertain that there is no one else? It’ll make us less of a target, won’t it?”
“Indeed.” Francesca picked up her skirts and stepped over the moaning man as nonchalantly as one would a pile of manure. “Excellent suggestion.”
Piers curled his hands into fists, the masculine equivalent of pinching himself. No, he wasn’t dreaming, so …
Just who were these ladies? Where were the tears and histrionics? Couldn’t they have at least afforded him a modicum of feminine display for his—he wasn’t too modest to say—rather heroic behavior?
Cecelia followed in his betrothed’s wake, performing a little dainty hop over the incapacitated man that did something to her enormous breasts he’d have to be completely blind not to notice. “Do you think we should contact the authorities before or after the ambu—”
“I wasn’t aware he was a duke!” Alexandra blurted.
They all paused, turning to look at her.
She stood frozen to the exact spot she had been in since they’d ventured out from behind the stone wall. Rapid blinks and darting eyes revealed a woman still too shocked to have caught up to the moment. “I—I would have mentioned, had I known. He’s the stablemaster I told you about with the runaway stallion. That one.” She pointed at Merc, docilely grazing nearby. “That one right there.”
Cecelia made an interested noise. “He’s the one we spied on last night? Of course! I should have known from the shoulders.”
Piers’s head snapped up. The one they what?
The thought of Alexandra watching as he’d wrenched off his shirt did little to soothe the battle heat in his blood.
Had she liked what parts of him she’d seen?
“Yes!” she affirmed.
Yes?
“Yes, he’s the one! He said—” Alexandra turned to him, a frenzied accusation in her gaze. “You said you kept the beasts at Castle Redmayne.”
“And so I do.” He nudged the man with his boot. “Wasn’t it Alexander the Great who wrote, ‘Every man has a wild beast within him’?”
“It was Frederick the Great,” Lady Alexandra corrected without seeming to notice that she’d done so. “And, as apropos as that quote may be, it still doesn’t—”
“Speak of the devil,” Francesca cut in. “Don’t look now, but ‘the beasts’ are returning, and are about to stumble upon a fresh kill.”
A crowd of inveterate revelers in wool jackets and jodhpurs, with shotguns draped over their arms, tromped through the grass on the ridge not one hundred yards from where Piers had shot the rifleman down.
“What the bloody hell are they doing this far east?” Piers muttered, ducking behind a wall. “They can’t see any of us together.”
“Oh dear,” Cecelia worried. “Perhaps we should head them off and redirect them to a different path toward the castle?”
Piers nodded, staring down at the mess he’d made of himself. His vest was stained with the man’s blood, and his bleeding knuckles were beginning to swell. “There’s a deer path that will lead you past a swan pond and the gardens. They’ll have to turn left immediately, and double back through the edge of the woods to find it.”
“Any other assassins would be daft to shoot into a hunting party,” Cecelia reasoned. “They’d never escape without leaking like a sieve.”
“Right. Too many witnesses with guns. Do let’s go.” Francesca lifted her skirts and all but sprinted up the hill with gazellelike agility.
Cecelia took an alarmed step toward her friend. “Don’t you want to join Francesca, Alex? I can easily stay here alone with the duke and help His Grace lift the brigand onto the horse.”
“You’ll do no such thing,” he growled. Lift the man onto the horse? What rubbish.
“Oh, it’s no bother. I might never be a dainty woman.” She held shapely arms and broad shoulders out for his review. “But I can carry my share of a body when called upon to do so.”
Lady Alexandra made a distressed sound.
“I’ll ruin the handsome side of my face before I allow a lady to assist in such odious work.” Piers looked from the countess’s determined stomp up the hill to the petrified doctor behind him and back to the Valkyrie offering to help with the heavy lifting. He’d met his share of peculiar women, but this trio simply beat them all.