Hiding Rose (Saved By Desire 5)

“Where?” Reg demanded. He glanced out of the window to the harbour the house overlooked and slid the shutters closed a little further. “How many are there?”

“About six, but there may be more. We have run into trouble several times over the last day or so. Chadwick has a lot of men in the area and they mean business,” Barnaby reported. Rather than take a seat he began to pace backward and forward beside the door eager to get going.

“We?” Ryan’s brows lifted.

“Chadwick murdered Jones and Bray the night before last. I have a witness stashed in the woods. I need to get back to her,” Barnaby reported briskly.

The men looked at each other. They knew that the situation must be dire to get a man like Barnaby in such a state of nervous anxiety. Barnaby was the most calmly unflappable man there was. To see him so agitated warned them all that the situation was about as bad as it could get.

“Let’s go then,” Ryan said as he threw his cloak over his shoulders. He checked his gun for shot as he stalked toward the door. “I’ll get the horses ready.”

“Where are you?” Reg asked.

“About a mile out of town,” Barnaby said to Ben. “Who else is here?”

Ryan snorted. “We had word that Mainton had been spotted around these parts, which is why Sir Hugo sent us reinforcements. There are all of us plus Eddie, Caleb, Luke and Simeon. They are all out looking for Mainton, but should be back soon.”

“We need safe passage out of Portsmouth,” Barnaby warned as he followed them out of the kitchen.

The men nodded but fell silent as they all went to fetch their horses from the stabling at the back of the property. Minutes later they all left town using different routes and converged upon the exact spot Barnaby had last seen Rose.

“Rose?” Barnaby called as he crept quietly into the woods. He murmured soothing noises to her horse, which stood nervously watching him several feet away from where he knew Rose had once stood. Studying the trees, he remembered what his good friend Archie had once told him about anybody searching for someone never thought to look up. Rose wasn’t hiding higher in the trees either.

With a blistering curse teasing his lips, Barnaby and his colleagues widened their search.

“There are scuff marks back here,” Reg reported a few moments later.

“Look,” Ben said. “Look at that group over there. They are in a hurry, aren’t they?”

Reg looked at Barnaby who was mounting his horse. “Is your woman wearing breeches?”

“Yes,” Barnaby bit out. He knew instinctively what had happened.

“They have her. Come on,” Ben snapped. He didn’t wait for his colleagues to catch up. He dug his heels into his horse, leaned low over the saddle, and allowed the animal to charge across the open field. Within seconds, Barnaby overtook him with the rest of his colleagues close behind.

They all knew that from the look of the gang they chased that retrieving Barnaby’s woman wasn’t going to be easy.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

“I should have kept her with me,” Barnaby growled as he remembered her reluctance to be left behind. He knew now that she had been right to protest. He should have listened to her. The thought of the fear she must have faced when they accosted her fanned the flames of the anger that burned through him and made him all the more determined to get her back as quickly as humanly possible.

“Jesus, they are going to kill her,” Reg swore as they watched the gang of thugs all jump over a low stone wall at the edge of a field.

They all watched the

rider carrying the lifeless body draped casually over the front of his saddle grapple with her weight to stop her sliding off. Although he managed to prevent her certain slide toward death, he didn’t have the time to brace himself for the second wall that appeared.

“He is going to lose her,” Barnaby warned darkly. He hated to think what a fall from height and at such speed would do to someone as delicate as Rose but he couldn’t stop what was about to happen.

“We will see about that,” Reg snarled.

“You can’t shoot,” Ben snapped. “You will hit her.”

Barnaby urged his horse to go faster but none of them were able to gain any ground.

“We have to do something,” Barnaby shouted when the group flew over the higher wall, and Rose slid unceremoniously off the saddle and disappeared from view.

Barnaby knew that hitting the ground would have been bone-jarring, if not bone-breaking. She would be covered with bruises if they carried on the way they were, assuming that she hadn’t landed on her neck and broken in it. Everything within him remained frozen as he raced toward her. He refused to consider that she might be dead. He just couldn’t comprehend what that would mean to him or to his life. It brought about such an agony of the soul that he knew he couldn’t withstand the emotions her death would bring him. He would go quietly out of his mind if he lost her. Not Rose. She was too feisty, too opinionated, too wayward, to have her life stolen in such a way.