The Accidental Abduction Read Online Free PDF

box and trying to wrestle the ribbons away from his surprisingly strong and well-armed lady abductor. Abductress?
    Harry laughed again. He clambered carefully onto the seat, gripped the rail, and settled back to see where this madwoman would take them both.

Four

    I f Leannah had been able to spare a thought from driving, she might have used it to wonder how the night could possibly get worse. As it was, she needed every ounce of concentration, and all her strength, to keep Rumor and Gossip from overturning the carriage. The two mares were having the time of their high-strung lives. Their necks strained forward, and their ears pressed flat against their skulls. Gossip fought to get the bit between her teeth, and Rumor was picking up on the idea, making the reins twice as tricky to hold. They could feel her hands were tiring and her grip was weakening, and both were trying their best to try to outrun the annoying, rattling contraption they’d been harnessed to, again.
    And now there was a man in the barouche. How’d he even gotten there? Had he actually managed to jump aboard? Leannah found herself impressed, although very much against her will. Such a feat made him either a hero or a lunatic, but she had no leisure to work out which it could be. They were coming up on the crossroads and the signposts, and the straight, white ribbon of the Great North Road. Leannah pulled on the reins, but the team resisted. She cracked the whip over Rumor’s ear, catching the mare’s attention and turning her head. She saw the open way now, and the chance to really run. The team swerved sharply to the right. Leannah had just enough strength left to rein them in and prevent the barouche from tipping up on two wheels yet again. She should slow them. She was risking the team, the carriage, her own neck, not to mention the neck of whoever it was riding behind her. But if she slowed too far, she’d never catch up with Genevieve and then . . . then . . .
    The barouche jounced over a pothole, landing hard in a noise of straining axles and springs. Her last pin fell away and her hair tumbled in a great, heavy mass down her back. Wind stung Leannah’s ears and cheeks and set her eyes watering. It caught in her hair, flinging it backward.
    Leannah thought she heard a sound from her unwelcome passenger. It sounded almost like a laugh.
    Is he a madman? Or simply drunk?
    She’d just have to hope he wasn’t drunk enough to do something even more stupid than try to take the reins—like jump out and break his neck in a ditch, because she didn’t have time to go back for him. She had to catch up with Genevieve. She had to stop her sister from making the worst mistake of her life.
    She should have known something was brewing. She should have smelled it in the way Genny hadn’t made any trouble for the past two days. She hadn’t complained at all about hearing Jeremy’s lessons and had even taken him to the circulating library and the park. Leannah had let herself believe that, for once, someone in their family had come to her senses before a disaster rather than long afterward.
    She should have known better. She should have listened when her friend Meredith Langley warned her that something might be in the wind. But with Father doing poorly and Jeremy at home, there had been so much to do that she hadn’t been watching Genny as carefully as she should have. That, and she’d so wanted to believe everything would be all right.
    They were well past the city walls now, in the land of scattered cottages and open fields where the city folk would retreat or retire when they’d earned enough. Clouds scudded thickly across the moon and the stinging wind that rushed through her hair brought the smell of rain. Smooth macadam shone in the carriage’s lantern light. There were no other lanterns on the road ahead. They had the way to themselves, and at least two miles to the tollgate.