Marston tumbled to the ground at her feet with a crash like the fall of Goliath.

Chapter Twenty-Two

Still struggling to catch her breath, Amy stared in confusion at Marston’s fallen body. She really hadn’t thought she had hit him that hard. And then she heard it. The sound of another person’s breathing, issuing from the place where Marston had stood. Amy looked up abruptly, just as a shadowy figure bounded over Marston’s body and stopped short in front of her.

“Did he hurt you?” it barked.

Amy blinked, glancing from the crumpled figure on the ground to the hooded phantom in front of her. “If you’re not Marston, who are you?” she blurted out.

“You thought I was Marston? That’s why you—never mind. We’ll address that later.” If a masked face in the dark could contrive to look stern, his did. “Did he hurt you?”

“No.” Amy shook her head. Her heart still beat at triple the normal rate, but her thoughts scurried along even faster. How could she have ever thought Marston was the Gentian? Looking at the two of them together—admittedly, Marston was in a heap on the floor, which prejudiced the comparison somewhat—the distinctions were so obvious that Amy felt an absolute idiot for not having known, and run, the moment she saw Marston striding down that alley of trees. Where Marston was bulky, the Gentian had a graceful, slender strength. One broad-fingered hand lay on the ground near Amy’s foot, brown hair sprouting around the knuckles. So very different from the long-fingered hands in black leather gloves clenched at the Purple Gentian’s sides. Even Marston’s teeth seemed larger and coarser than the Gentian’s. Good heavens, could one have elegant teeth?

Amy pressed her palms to her face and rubbed them up and down, suppressing a gaggle of mad giggles.

“What in the hell were you thinking?” growled the Purple Gentian. “Well?” he bit out when Amy didn’t respond immediately. “How in the hell could you think he and I were the same person?”

The Gentian glared fiercely at the body on the ground.

“You don’t see the resemblance?” Amy shook with suppressed giggles. Hiccup! Hiccup! It was no use trying to contain it; her whole body quaked with laughter.

“Damn it, Amy, this is not funny!”

Amy doubled over, her arms wrapped around her stomach. “You look,” she gasped, “s-s-so indignant!”

“You’re bloody well right I’m indignant!” the Purple Gentian roared as he yanked Amy upwards until her streaming eyes peered directly into his. “Do you know what Marston was going to do with you? Do you? He was going to rape you, damn it!”

“I don’t . . . I can’t . . . Put me down!”

Eyes intent on hers, he opened his hands. Amy sat down heavily on the paced dirt of the pathway. Her legs didn’t seem to want to lift her, and on the whole, Amy agreed with them.

“Is that what you said to Marston? Did he listen?”

At the sound of his name, the recumbent figure on the ground stirred and moaned. The Gentian crossed over to him in one quick stride and administered a brisk, brutal kick to Marston’s jaw. Amy winced as Marston’s head snapped back.

“Wasn’t that a little . . . unnecessary?”

“Not at all. Do you want him waking up?” As Amy shuddered, the Gentian smiled nastily. “I thought not. You’d better hope that his brains are addled enough that he won’t remember any of tonight’s events. Let’s make sure of that, shall we?”

The Purple Gentian’s boot connected again with Marston’s head, flipping Marston neatly over. The Gentian surveyed his handiwork. “Much better.”

Amy scooted herself, crablike, away from Marston. Her arms throbbed where he had grabbed them and she could still taste his nasty slobbering mouth on hers. Amy wrapped her arms around her stomach and wondered what the Gentian would say if she was sick all over his shiny black boots.

“I think I’d like to go home now.”

“I’m not done with you yet.” The Purple Gentian crossed his arms over his chest and regarded Amy with asperity.

A bath. That was what she needed. She’d scrub out her mouth with tooth powder while the servants drew her a long, painfully hot bath.

“Please don’t start screeching at me again.”

“I am not screeching. Men do not screech. Damn it, stop looking at me like that!”

“Like what?”

“Like—” Richard bit off his words before they developed into a full-blown screech of the variety he had just denied indulging in. “Do you have no sense at all of the danger you were in?” Richard kept his voice cool and level. Ha! He’d defy her to label that a screech.

Amy frowned at him, stumbling slowly to her feet. “This would never have happened if you had told me who you were.”

“Who told you to go looking for me?”

“I had something I had to tell you! And I had no idea if you were ever going to deign to contact me. After the way you ran off last night . . .”

“Now this is my fault? I run like a madman to rescue you—”

“And I already told you I didn’t need rescuing!”

“So you were having a peaceful little chat with Marston when I approached? Was that it? And that’s the least of it! You left the house alone, unchaperoned, unguarded, at midnight of all idiot times! You’re lucky that Marston was the only one who attacked you! Footpads, pickpockets . . .”

Assaulted by images of Amy in danger—Amy being dragged into a dark alley, Amy being flung to the ground, Amy being hit over the head from behind, and, worst of all because it had been true, because he had seen it, because he couldn’t seem to stop replaying it in his head with varying degrees of panic, Amy being overpowered in Marston’s brutal embrace—Richard reacted without thinking. He reached out across the barrier of Marston’s body and grabbed Amy by the shoulders and hauled her right over the fallen man. Too shocked to resist, Amy didn’t struggle. She didn’t even squeal. She did let out a small whoosh of breath as she smacked against Richard’s chest, but that was clearly unintentional.

Richard didn’t give her a chance to make any other sound.

His lips covered hers with an urgency that bordered on the savage. All the anger and tension Richard had been feeling since Marston had first uttered Amy’s name poured into the kiss. His mouth molded against hers, pressing hard against it, as though the fabric of their separate lips could become one. Rather than shying back from the sheer force of his kiss, Amy threw her arms up around his shoulders, clasping him about the neck as she raised herself on tiptoe to match her mouth more perfectly to his. Richard groaned low in his throat and clamped her tighter to him, reveling in the way her body molded to his. Richard’s breath came fast and his lungs ached as though he had been running for miles, but he didn’t want to ever stop; he would keep running and running, with Amy’s hands in his hair, and every muscle in his body alive where she was pressed against him; his thighs, his chest, his shoulders, all throbbing with the feel of Amy against him.

Amy clung to the Purple Gentian as his lips seared away the dreadful taint of Marston’s unwanted kisses. Fire purifies, some dim part of her brain remembered. Amy blazed up, fired by the warmth radiating from the Gentian’s arms, his lips enveloping her, the way his black cape enveloped her as it wrapped around her. She was the phoenix, reborn through fire, rising restored from the flames that consumed her. That explained the crackling in her ears and the flames behind her eyelids.

The Purple Gentian’s lips left hers and his arms freed her waist. With an inarticulate gasp of distress, Amy lifted her face blindly towards his and locked her own arms more tightly about him. “Don’t let go. Not yet . . .”

“Oh, Amy,” the Purple Gentian groaned. Cupping her face in protective hands, the kid leather of his gloves soft against her skin, he pressed kisses on her forehead, her eyelids, her cheekbones, the tip of her nose, her lips. “God, Amy, you had me so worried. The thought of him touching you . . .”

“Didn’t much appeal to me either,” Amy riposted, leaning all of her weight against him. Just in case he had any ideas about pulling away again.

Amy rubbed her cheek against the Gentian’s waistcoat—no hard metallic watch fob to bruise her, as there had been on Marston’s clothes—and went limp with relief as she felt his arm steal back around her waist and his lips brush gently along the crown of her head.

“We should do something about Marston,” Richard mumbled into Amy’s hair, his voice scarcely louder than the muted rustle of the wind in the leaves.

“Couldn’t we just leave him here?”

Regretfully, Richard straightened, gently putting Amy at arm’s length. “It wouldn’t be prudent.”

“Should we return him to his house?”

“No. There’s bound to be a valet or a servant about, and we don’t want to cause too much comment.”

Richard grimly circled the fallen form of Georges Marston, thinking what a bother the man had proven to be. If he had any recollection of tonight’s activities, if he made the link between Richard and the masked man who had bopped him over the head, some of Richard’s best intelligence sources would evaporate with all the speed of spilled water in the Egyptian sun. And, of course, there was the more immediate concern of what the devil one was to do with the lout. Why couldn’t he have just collapsed from too much drink on the way over?

“Too much drink! That’s it!” the Gentian announced with as much glee as though he had just cracked the code of the Rosetta Stone.

“You want a drink? Now?” Amy, puzzled by the workings of the masculine mind, stepped out of the way as the Gentian swooped down on Marston’s recumbent body. “What on earth are you doing?” she demanded, as the Gentian began sniffing—sniffing!—at Marston’s waistcoat.