They had been traveling north for about twenty minutes, through the wooded, suburban countryside surrounding Manhattan. Every now and then they had passed a farm or an orchard. Otherwise, homes were interspersed in the wooded countryside. She wasn't quite sure where they were, exactly, but she knew they were all about to be captured. "What are you doing?" she whispered, gripping his arm.
"Relax, Charles," Braxton said with a smile.
She stared at him. When they had left the barn, he bad made her put some dirt on her face and Louie's cap on her head, her long blond hair twisted up beneath it, but she did not think she was going to pass muster as a young man. And what about Braxton? A change of clothes was hardly a disguise! His description, which was hardly average, had to be everywhere and his very upper-crust British accent was a dead giveaway.
He halted the carriage as two policemen came forward on big bay horses. He was smiling at them. Annabel thought her own cheeks were red. She was afraid to breathe.
"I'm going to have to ask you to step out of the carriage, sir," one mounted officer with a big mustache said.
"Afternoon. What's this about, officers?" Braxton asked-in a clipped and nasal Yankee twang.
Annabel realized she was gaping and she shut her mouth.
"Please step down."
"Glad to obey, got all the time in the world," Braxton said, sounding as if he were a native Brahmin of Boston. He stepped lithely out of the carriage.
" Boston, eh?" the officer said, dismounting. His tone had changed, becoming less firm, softer.
"Born and raised, just like my father and his father before him." Braxton was cheerful.
The officer nodded, then glanced at Annabel and Louie. "Who are they?"
"Charlie is a distant cousin. He's an orphan-his grandmother just died. I'm concluding a bit of business in town, stocks, you know, and am bringing him home with me."
"An orphan, eh?" the officer said. He was chewing tobacco now and eyeing Annabel closely.
Annabel was afraid he could see through her absurd disguise, or that he was going to ask her a question directly, and she felt herself turning redder still, but then he looked at Louie. She almost swooned with relief.
Louie, meanwhile, appeared to have fallen asleep in the back seat. Annabel closed her eyes. "My groom," Braxton said.
Annabel jerked, thinking of Harold, certain the thief, damn him, was doing this to her on purpose.
The officer nodded and turned away, mounting. "Sorry to bother you folks. But we're looking for a very clever Englishman and a young woman he has abducted." He tipped his hat. "Seems he also made off with a small fortune in jewels."
Braxton stepped up into the carriage. "Criminals these days," he said with a shake of his head. Annabel felt like killing him. "The nerve! Thank God we have men like you serving citizens like us. Astute and perceptive officers of the law, capable of protecting the innocent and apprehending the guilty."
Annabel looked at him with murder in her eyes.
The policeman smiled. "Have a good day, sir," he said.
Braxton smiled back, lifted the reins, and drove the bay gelding past the barricade. Annabel sat staring stiffly ahead. Her heart continued to beat with frantic insistence. Clop clop clop. The gelding trotted along, taking them farther and farther away from the policemen and the road block. She wanted to look back over her shoulder to see if the two officers had realized their mistake and were now charging after them.
"Do not look back," he said in his usual, aristocratic British accent.
She looked at him. He was smiling. Unruffled, unperturbed-as if this kind of hair-raising narrow escape was an everyday occurrence. "You are not even sweating!" she accused.
" 'E don't sweat," Louie said from the back seat. He glanced at her briefly. "Aren't you supposed to say 'perspiring'?" "You are laughing!"
"You, my dear, are the one perspiring."
Annabel took a deep breath and collapsed against the seat. "I admit to being afraid."
"Why? You had nothing to lose-unlike Louie and myself."
Their gazes had locked. "I told you, I cannot go back. Not yet."
"Yes," he said softly, still holding her regard with his. "You most certainly did."
Annabel felt herself stiffening. She thought about being in his arms, about receiving his kiss. Then she shook herself free of the thought. What was wrong with her? Tonight she would explain everything, and there was not going to be either an embrace or a kiss or, dear God, anything else. But her reputation would be ruined and she could return home, a free woman at last.
She thought about her family and felt a twinge of guilt, for putting them through the ordeal of her disappearance. However, far more than guilt claimed her now. Soon she could return home with her ruined reputation, and she felt nothing but dismay at the thought.
She did not want to go home. Being on the run with Braxton was exciting. Her life had never been this exciting before. And she did her best to make it unusual and entertaining; Annabel knew she lived a far more imprudent existence than any woman of her acquaintance. She was always doing something thrilling. For a while she had actually exercised racehorses at dawn. She had spent a year enrolled in a very Bohemian art class on the Lower East Side. She had even modeled for some of the artists-without her clothing. She had taken employment as a shop girl for two weeks in Wanamaker's department store-which was but a block away from her father's emporium. All of these endeavors, of course, had been found out. Missy was a snoop.
And then there was her tennis game, her books, and travel. She adored all three pastimes, but especially traveling abroad. She had been visiting Europe one or two times a year since she was twenty-one. Her father had actually encouraged such adventure, but Annabel knew he had done so only because he hoped she would meet an appropriate man and fall in love and come home affianced.
But nothing to date had been as exciting as being with this man.
"You are staring at me," he said softly.
She swallowed. Not only was she staring, she had been envisioning herself once again in his embrace. Except this time he had been unclothed. He had been long and lean and all hard muscle. Such a thought should be shameful. Annabel found it intriguing.
He was intriguing.
Annabel looked away. They were entering the village of Mott Haven. It was nothing more than a collection of wood-shingled homes, four- and five-story brick stores, and farms. She did not really see the town. She was in trouble, fairly deeply; Annabel knew herself too well. If she continued to think this way, she was going to become even more deeply in trouble than she already was-perhaps irreparably so.
She wanted to ignore the little warning bells going off inside her head. Usually, she did. And then she would be off and running with a new pursuit. The end result was always the same. Being found out, set down, grounded for a time. And being talked about. Poor, poor, unfortunate Annabel Boo the! Whatever makes her so wild, so reckless, so headstrong? Annabel smiled. She considered her peers to be the unfortunate ones.
But to start thinking about her life being boring in comparison with his, why, that was very dangerous, indeed. That could lead her farther astray than she had ever intended to go. Maybe, as Melissa kept saying, there was something wrong with her. Drastically so.
"Is something wrong, Miss Boothe?" He interrupted her thoughts.
Annabel started. "No! No. Nothing is amiss." She smiled at him, but it was strained.
His blue gaze was brilliant and searching. "Having regrets?"
She straightened. "I never have regrets," she said._ His only response was a long, inscrutable, and very wide stare.
Annabel smiled sweetly at him. And realized that night was falling.
Chapter four
The cheerful and freshly painted white clapboard house was one of the last on Main Street. A white picket fence surrounded it and there was a red barn in the backyard. Braxton drove the carriage directly around the house and into the barn. Both wide, whitewashed doors had been left open.