Don’t miss the second in Minerva Spencer’s witty and daring
Outcasts series!
BARBAROUS
CHAPTER 1
Sussex, England, 1811
Daphne wondered if head-butting Sir Malcolm in the face had really been the best decision.
The thought had barely entered her head when a deafening ringing and agonizing pain drove it out again. She staggered back several steps and collided with one of the ancient tree stumps that circled the clearing. Black spots danced in front of her eyes and she clutched the rough wood to steady herself, blinking hard. When she could see—somewhat—she touched her throbbing forehead and winced. Her fingers came away with blood: hers or Cousin Malcolm’s or both. She pulled her eyes from her bloody hand and looked across the small glade.
Malcolm lay where he’d fallen, sprawled amidst the wreckage of the picnic lunch Daphne had been laying out when he’d accosted her. Her cousin had aged greatly in the decade since she’d last seen him. His brown hair, once thick and lustrous, had thinned and lost its shine, and his bloated body was a far cry from the slim, elegant dandy who’d briefly—and disastrously—held her future in his hands. There were eleven years between them and every one of them was etched into his thirty-eight-year-old face. A face now wreathed in pain and fury.
Malcolm scrambled into a seated position and shot her a murderous glare before yanking off his cravat and lifting it to his hemorrhaging nose.
Daphne couldn’t help thinking that a bloody, ringing forehead was a small price to pay for Malcolm’s obvious suffering. When she squinted to get a better look at his face, his puffy, blood-shot eyes shifted and blurred. She touched the bridge of her nose and bit back a groan. Blast! He must have knocked the spectacles from her face during their struggle.
She lowered herself into a crouch, angling her body to keep Malcolm in sight while searching the grass around her feet. The glasses were special, made with a split in the lenses to accommodate her poor vision. They were also the last gift from her husband before his death. If she lost them, it would be like losing even more of Thomas. It would be—
“Well, well, what have we here?” a deep voice boomed.
Daphne squawked like a startled hen and tipped forward onto her hands and knees, her eyes flickering over the surrounding foliage for the voice’s owner. A distorted shadow emerged from between two big elms and grew larger, shifting into the recognizable shape of a man on a horse. A huge man on an enormous horse.
His features became clearer—and more remarkable—with every step. He reined in midway between Daphne and Malcolm. The massive Shire horse was at least seventeen-and-a-half hands high and the man astride the beast matched his mount in both size and magnificence.
Deeply sun-bronzed skin and golden blond hair were an exotic surprise against the pallid gray of the May English sky. But it was the black eye-patch that covered his left eye and the savage scar that disappeared beneath it that were truly arresting. He lacked only a battered tricorn and cutlass between his teeth to be every maiden’s fantasy of a handsome pirate. Was he lost on his way to a masquerade ball?
Daphne blinked at the ludicrous notion and her thoughts, usually as well regimented as Wellington’s soldiers, then broke and ran when the stranger fixed her with his single green eye and smiled, submitting to her blatant inspection with obvious good humor.
“Are you quite alright, Lady Davenport?” In spite of his exotic appearance, he sounded very much like an English gentleman.
“How—” she began, and then noticed his attention had become stuck at the level of her chest. She looked down and gasped. Her jacket was ripped open from neck to waist and exposed a mortifying amount of chemise and flesh. She pinched the torn garment closed with her fingers and forced herself to look up.
But the stranger had turned to Malcolm and was staring at him as if he’d forgotten all about her. He slid from his huge horse in a single fluid motion and took a step toward the other man before raising an ornate gold quizzing glass. His blond eyebrows inched up his forehead as he examined the bedraggled, bleeding man on the picnic blanket.
Only the distant tweeting of birds broke the tense silence, which stretched and stretched and—
“Ramsay?” Malcolm’s voice was muffled by the bloody cravat that covered his nose and lips and he hastily lowered the ruined garment, his mouth agape.
Daphne looked from her cousin to the stranger and squinted—as if that might sharpen her hearing as well as her vision. Had Malcolm said Ramsay? The name teased her memory. Ramsay, Ramsay . . . wasn’t Ramsay the title of Thomas’s deceased nephew Hugh Redvers? Daphne worried her lower lip as she cudgeled her memory. Yes, he’d inherited the title through his mother—one of the rare hereditary baronies through the female line.
Her eyes opened wider and she looked at Malcolm, who was still staring at the huge stranger. Surely the idiot could not mean Baron Ramsay—Hugh Redvers? Daphne reached out to steady herself on the rock. Perhaps the injury to her head was worse than she’d thought?
The giant ignored Malcolm’s question, an expression of distaste settling onto his striking face the longer he stared at her cousin.
Malcolm raised the crumpled cravat higher as he endured the silent scrutiny, until only his eyes glittered above the bloody cloth.
Daphne recognized the malevolence in her cousin’s gaze. After all, she’d been on the receiving end of his temper more times than she cared to remember when she’d had the misfortune to live under his roof. She glanced at the stranger to gauge his reaction and encountered a grossly magnified green eye, the color somewhere between emerald and peridot.
She swallowed, suddenly able to comprehend Malcolm’s mortification. She now knew what an insect felt like beneath a magnifying lens.
But she was no insect.
Daphne threw back her shoulders and shot him a bold—if blurry—glare.
His lips curved and, after several hundred years, he lowered his vile glass, took a step forward, and extended a hand the size of a dinner plate.
Daphne wordlessly placed her own hand in his and he lifted her to her feet. He did not release her. Instead, he bowed over her captive hand and kissed the naked skin with lips that were warm and soft. Astoundingly soft, and yet the rest of him looked so very . . . hard.
“I beg your pardon for not introducing myself immediately, Lady Davenport. Sir Malcolm has the right of it. I am Hugh Redvers, Baron Ramsay.” A mocking grin spread across his face. “Your long-lost nephew.”