My hero abducts my heroine in Hold Me Fast. The image above belongs to one of the stories that inspired mine.

It was time, then. Jowan mounted his horse. “Wish me luck, Bran.”

“Always,” Bran replied from the back of his own steed, extending his hand. Jowan shook it and Bran rode off, away from the main ride.

After a nod for the boy on lookout, Jowan nudged his horse into a swift walk. So far, so good. Coombe kept coming. Jowan kept his head down so that the hat would shade his face. The conspirators had calculated that Coombe would not give Jowan a second look, given he was on a side ride and not likely, at his current pace, to reach the main ride before all of Coombe’s retinue had passed.

Good. Coombe was beyond the intersection of the two rides. Jowan gave the horse the signal for a trot, then a canter. One. Two. Three. By the time he counted to fifteen, he was pulling the horse up alongside Tamsyn, clasping her around the waist, and lifting her to sit on his pommel. The clever lady had already kicked her feet free of the stirrup, and so the transfer took a count of two, but that was enough time for one of Coombe’s men to react, forcing his horse foreward to block Jowan’s escape.

The horse Drew had provided for the rescue shouldered the other horse away out of the way and bounded away, reaching a gallop within a second. Ten strides and they were through the gate. They slowed and turned left, continuing to reduce speed. Drew had assured Jowan that the horse would be able to stop within ten yards of the gate, and so two of Jowan’s accomplices waited at that point.

The horse was still moving, if slowly, when Jowan let Tamsyn down into Drew’s arms. By the time he had dismounted himself, Tamsyn had abandoned her riding cape to Prue Wakefield and was donning the hat Prue gave her—a stylish flat hat that tied on with a scarf and hid part of Tamsyn’s face.

Jowan tossed Tamsyn up into the saddle of one of the two horses that a boy was holding, and himself mounted the other. Meanwhile, Prue had put on Tamsyn’s cape and Drew tossed her up on the horse Jowan had abandoned, and was mounting behind her.

“Thank you both,” Jowan called to them as they rode off along Park Lane. Jowan led Tamsyn in the opposite direction. They had organised several more decoys, and would fire off one of them as soon as they reached the corner of Cullross and Park. Drew’s horse would go one way along Park, and the near identical horse that was standing at wait would go the other. They’d repeat the ploy at three more corners, until sixteen chestnut geldings spread out across London, all around 16 hands high and all bearing a rider in a black coat and top hat, with a passenger sitting on the front of his saddle. All those decoys had to do was stay out of reach of Coombe and his men, but even if they were caught, they all had good reason to be out on the roads on such a day.

Meanwhile, Jowan must trust them to know their work, for his part of the plan was to turn off into a street away from the shell game of the multiplying horses, where a hackney waited that would take them west to Bran and the travelling carriage.

“We will go to Southall tonight,” he told the woman in his arms. “It’s two hours, so we will not need to change the horses.”

“They are lovely horses,” Tamsyn said, her voice distant as if she was thinking of something else. “We will send these beauties home to their owner,” he told her. “We turn here, and there, up ahead, is our transport for the next step. It’s not the final, though. The hack will take us to the last vehicle of the day.”

Tamsyn giggled. “It is like the children’s game. Stop the music, and if there is not a horse to plop down on, you lose.”

She willingly allowed him to help her down from her horse and see her into the hack.

So far, so good.