(A novella in A Twist Upon a Regency Tale)

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0D8BYJ8ST

Ruadh Douglas doesn’t want to go home. Years on the battlefields for the glory of the king have made him more beast than man and he won’t inflict his wounded mind and soul on his family. So, he wanders the streets of London, performing penance by rescuing those in need.

Rosalind Ransome is a misfit in London’s ballrooms, but in visiting the sick of all classes, she has found work she loves and the chance to make a difference. When she is attacked in the streets, she is rescued by the vigilante they call the Wolf.

Rose is drawn to Ruadh when he seeks her family’s help to free his ailing grandfather from a treacherous wife and servants. But is he the loving grandson? Or the wolf who patrols the streets at night?

Even as Rose discovers he is both, Ruadh realizes he must find a way to tame his anger if he hopes to win the maid.

But when Rose is in danger, Ruadh is glad he can still call on the wild.

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A Twist Upon a Regency Tale
Lady Beast’s Bridegroom
One Perfect Dance
Snowy and the Seven Doves
Perchance to Dream
Weave Me a Rope
The Sincerest Flattery
Inviting the Wild
Hold Me Fast
The Trials of Alaric

Excerpt

They came from the shadows, half a dozen men in layers of dirty rags, with knives or broken planks in their hands and hunger in their eyes.

Reuben, the footman, moved in front of Rosalind Ransome and her stepsister, Pauline Turner. Harris, the groom, brushed past the sisters to join Reuben. He muttered, for their ears only, “Get back, my ladies, and if you see an opportunity, run.”

Rose would have stepped up beside him, ready to fight, but Pauline grabbed her arm and pulled her back.

“We have to help them,” Rose objected.

Pauline did not agree. “The biggest help we can be is to stay out of their way, and to escape when we have the chance. They can make their own escape if they do not have to worry about us.”

She did not say it was Rose’s fault, but Rose knew. They were on London’s streets in this unsavory area after dark because of her. But how could she have left the hospital earlier? Private Brown had asked for her. He had not not expected to survive the night, and in fact he didn’t. Rose could do little but hold his hand. That helped, or so Mr. Parslow, the superintendent, believed.

When she’d agreed to sit with him, Rose had sent home the carriage her brother had sent for her, and her maid. She could not see any reason why her servants should sit up all night. That decision had brought them here, in the early hours of the morning, facing murder or worse for the sake of the clothes they stood up in and whatever price she and Pauline might fetch in the brothels. That was all the thieves would get, because neither of them was foolish enough to carry valuables on an errand into this part of town.

The footpads had still not attacked. Harris had a two-barrel pistol, which was making the footpads think twice, but Rose did not suppose it would deter them for long.

“Is it worth being shot?” Reuben was arguing, persuasively. “Harris is a good shot, so at least two of you will not survive. Just let us go our way and no one needs to be hurt.”

“I am sorry, Pauline. I never meant for this to happen.”

Pauline squeezed Rose’s hand. “You did not ask me to bring the carriage back to get you, and you did not arrange for the carriage axle to collapse.” Which it had done five streets after they drove away from the hospital and only three from the broader streets patrolled by the watch.

The footpads’ leader had a counteroffer. “How ’bout you gie us all the morts’ glimmers and you can go your way?”

Glimmers, Rose guessed, must be jewelry. “I am not wearing any jewelry,” she told Pauline. “Are you?”

“No, and I do not have money with me, either.”

I would rather die than be sold into a brothel, Rose decided. She put her hand into the pocket she wore under her gown, a slit in the side seam giving discrete access. At least Private Brown would not be disappointed when she did not return tomorrow. He had breathed his last some fifteen minutes before Pauline arrived with the carriage.

She unfolded the object she retrieved from the pocket, extracting the blade from the bone handle to give her a small but perfectly serviceable dagger. “I have this,” she announced. “If I kill my sister and myself, will the clothing you can retrieve from our bodies be enough to compensate for this area being overrun with Red Breasts for the next few weeks, until they find every last one of you? For we shall be missed, and my brother knows where we went.”

The footpads went into a huddle, most of them still keeping an eye on their annoyingly uncooperative prey.

“I’m not sure you should have done that,” said Pauline, and Harris, the groom, groaned. “Not a good idea, Lady Rose.”

In the next moment, Rose found out why, as the footpads’ leader shouted, “Take the skirts alive, especially the mouthy one!” Four of them hurled themselves towards poor Reuben and Harris, and two began skirting around the fight that ensued to grab Rose and Pauline.

Rose had no time to spare a glance for the servants, though she heard a shot. She was determined not to be taken. The man who attacked her jerked back, screaming imprecations, his hand spraying blood from the wound he had inflicted on himself when he grabbed her knife and not her hand. The second man took advantage of Rose’s distraction to seize Pauline, who hit him with her umbrella. He grasped the umbrella and ripped it from her hands, then stumbled backwards.

Rose took a moment to realize that a large someone in dark clothes and a cape had dragged the man away from Pauline and swung him headfirst into a wall. A meaty hand landing on her shoulder was her only warning that the assailant she had cut was back on the attack. Before she even had time to struggle, the caped man had punched him hard enough to hurl him backwards.

One of the other footpads shouted, “It’s the Wolf!” In moments, three of them were running. The two that had attacked Rose and Pauline lay where the caped man had put them. One of the servants’ attackers was also down, presumably shot, but so was Harris. Reuben was picking himself up from the ground. As far as Rose could see in the poor light, he was unharmed.

She hurried to Harris, kneeling to feel for his pulse. As she did, he groaned. Thank goodness! He was alive. “Harris, can you hear me?” she asked.

“Lady Rose.” He yelped as he rolled to get his legs under him. “Reuben, lad, a hand,” he begged.

As she got up from her knees, Rose did not voice her objection to him moving. She could not examine him in the dark, and they needed to get off these streets as quickly as possible.

Harris said out loud what she had been thinking. “We need to get the ladies out of here before they come back to get their men.”

The footpads! She had forgotten them. She took two steps toward the one who had been punched, and who was now groaning. The man they called the Wolf stopped her. “Stay back! If he can, he will use you as a shield, and your servants’ suffering will be for nothing.”

Oh dear. “But they have been hurt,” she pointed out. “I do not like to just leave them.”

“We shall leave them to their own kind,” Pauline decided. “We cannot risk Harris and Reuben for the sake of men who would have killed us or sold us without a second thought. Come along, Rose.”

“You are right,” Rose agreed, falling obediently into step with her sister. Reuben came behind, one arm around Harris to support him. The Wolf ranged around them, sometimes ahead, sometimes behind, and sometimes walking beside them for a few paces.

In the moonlight, filtered as it was through London’s fog, she could not see more of him than she had from the beginning. A large man, broad and tall. Dark clothes covered by a thigh-length cape, perhaps a domino. Try as she might, she could not see his face, even when he turned toward her to deliver a disparaging remark. He had an arsenal of them.

“This is no place for ladies of your kind.”

“What would your family do if you were killed?”

“I cannot always be here to stop you from being hurt.”

“You put your servants at risk. Did you think of that before you planned your little jaunt?”

All said in the accents of a gentleman and in a pleasant voice that sounded as if he might sing tenor.