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at his clothes, he winced. They would have to go, too.
    With a sigh, he set out to walk the short distance to the small tavern down the road at which he’d hired a room.
    High above, Heather stood peering out of the window. She saw Breckenridge stride away and let out a sigh of relief. She hadn’t been able to see him until he’d walked away from the wall; she’d been waiting, watching, worried he might have slipped and fallen.
    She might not like him—not at all—and she certainly didn’t appreciate his dictatorial ways, but she wouldn’t want him hurt, especially not when he’d come to rescue her. She might have decided against being rescued yet, but she wasn’t so foolish as to reject his help. His support. Even, if it came to it, his protection—in the perfectly acceptable sense.
    His abilities in that regard would be, she suspected, not to be sneezed at.
    Still, she found it odd that the instant she’d recognized him outside the window, confidence and certainty had infused her. In that moment, all her earlier trepidation had fled.
    Inwardly shrugging, she turned from the window. Assured, more resolute, infinitely more certain the path forward she’d chosen was the right one, she padded back to the bed, flicked the coverlet back over the sheets, slipped beneath, and laid her head on the pillow.
    Smiled at the memory of Breckenridge’s expression when he’d gestured at her to open the window; he hadn’t been his usual impassive self then. Amused, relieved, she closed her eyes and slept.

Chapter Three
    T he next
morning, relatively early, Heather found herself back in the coach and heading
north once more.
    Martha had woken an hour after dawn and consented
to hand Heather the round gown of plain green cambric they’d brought for her to
wear. Heather had retrieved her fringed silk shawl, but her amber silk evening
gown and her small evening reticule had been packed into Martha’s commodious
satchel. Martha’s planning hadn’t extended to footwear. With the woolen cloak
about her and her evening slippers on her feet, Heather had been escorted
downstairs to a private parlor.
    Over breakfast, taken with Fletcher, Cobbins, and
the hatchet-faced Martha, Heather had had no chance to even make eye contact
with the busy serving girls. If anyone did come asking after her, she doubted
that the overworked girls would even remember her.
    While she’d eaten, she’d thought back over her
behavior in the carriage the previous night. Although she’d asked questions, she
hadn’t given her captors any reason to believe she was the sort of young lady
who might seriously challenge them or disobey their orders. Admittedly she
hadn’t burst into tears, or wrung her hands and sobbed pitifully, but they’d
been warned she was clever, so they shouldn’t have expected that.
    Although it had gone very much against her grain,
by the time they’d risen and she’d been ushered, under close guard, into the
waiting coach, she’d decided to play to their apparent perceptions, to appear
malleable and relatively helpless despite her supposed intelligence. Her plan,
as she’d taken her seat on the forward-facing bench once more, was to lull the
trio into viewing her much as a schoolgirl they were escorting home.
    In the few minutes while she, Martha, and Cobbins
had waited in the coach for Fletcher to finish with the innkeeper and join them,
she’d looked out of the coach window and seen an ostler holding a prancing bay
gelding, saddled and waiting for its rider.
    The temptation to open the coach door, jump down,
race the few feet to the horse, grab the reins, mount, and thunder back down the
road toward London had flared—and just as quickly had died. Not only would the
maneuver have been fraught with risk—with no money or possessions, let alone
proper clothes, she might have potentially jumped from frying pan into fire—but,
successful or not, it would have ensured she got no chance to learn more about
what lay behind her