“Oh?” She batted her eyelashes innocently. “You mean you are not like Dicky, unable to function as a man with a woman? And here was I thinking perhaps you two suffered such an affliction because you had a strange man love for each other.”

“Bitch!” he snapped, slapping her so hard that her head turned on her neck without her being able to stop it.

“Say!” her father yelled.

Suzette saw him start back toward them, but turned slowly to look at Jeremy dispassionately and said, “I must have struck too close to the mark to cause such rage, Jeremy. Did you fancy Dicky, then?”

A roar of fury ripping from his throat, Jeremy lunged at her then.

Hands tied behind her back, all Suzette could do was try to back away. Before she’d taken two steps, Danvers’s fingers were at her neck.

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Sixteen

Something’s wrong,” Daniel muttered, staring out through the door of the stables and toward the trees.

“They are taking a long time,” Richard said sounding grim.

“They are walking, and one of them may have been injured, making them walk slower,” Robert suggested.

“If one of them was wounded, they would have hailed one of the carriages that passed rather than walk,” Daniel said with certainty. The innkeeper had told them that two other carriages had stopped at the inn before them and reported the overturned carriage and dead driver on arrival. The first had been almost half an hour before they themselves had arrived at the inn. It shouldn’t have taken much more than an hour to walk to the inn if they’d taken the road. Walking through the trees and underbrush may have slowed them down a little. It may even have added as much as another half hour if the land was very uneven, but he and the others had been waiting for nearly an hour now. Where were they?

“You don’t think they bypassed this inn and continued on to the next?” Robert asked worriedly.

Daniel frowned at the suggestion. He doubted Suzette and her father would have willingly done that, but Danvers might have forced them to. It was a long walk to the next inn though. Cursing, he turned and strode to the first stall holding one of their horses.

“What are you doing?” Richard asked, following him.

“I am going to ride back through the woods and see if I can find them. If I can’t we will travel on to the next inn and check there,” Daniel announced grimly.

“You can’t ride with your wound,” Richard protested.

“It’s a mere scratch. Doesn’t bother me at all anymore,” he lied blithely, grabbing a saddle off a sawhorse against the wall and moving into the stall to saddle the horse.

“I’ll go,” Richard offered, taking the saddle from him and lifting it onto the horse.