Читать книгу His Mask of Retribution - Margaret McPhee, Margaret McPhee - Страница 2

The highwayman’s eyes were not cruel and pale and blue but a warm honeyed brown, and his gaze was steady and strong and compelling, holding hers so that she could not look away. She felt her heart miss a beat and a shiver shimmy all the way down her spine. She did not know whether it was from shock or relief or fear, or a combination of all three.

‘What the hell do you want?’ her father snarled at him.

The highwayman glanced away, releasing her gaze, and only then did she realise that he had a pistol in each hand and both were aimed at her father’s heart.

‘Stand and deliver.’ The man’s voice was quiet and harsh, as if half whispered.

‘You’ll rue the day you picked me to thieve from, you scoundrel.’

‘I think not.’ He cocked his pistols. ‘I will kill you if you do not give me what I have come for. And once you are dead I will be free to take that which you seek to protect…without reprisal.’

‘Papa, please, if you have any knowledge of what this villain wants, I beg you to deliver it to him. Do not risk your life.’

Both men looked at her. Her father’s face was strained and haunted; he seemed to have aged a hundred years in those few moments. And the highwayman’s eyes held the strangest expression.

‘Run, Marianne,’ her father said, agony in his voice. ‘Run and do not look back.’

And she understood in that moment what it was that the highwayman wanted even before he said the words.

‘For what does a father love best in all the world but his only daughter?’