If He's Wild by Hannah Howell

Bayard away. She caught her brother trying to go back and fled with him. She heard the marchioness’s wailing abruptly stop as she pushed and pulled Bayard up a steep, rocky slope. She heard her father curse the men before he, too, was abruptly silenced. At the top of the rise, she saw a coach. When she saw who stepped out of it, she shoved her brother down and lay down beside him. It was as she scrambled along, pulling Bayard and trying to keep out of sight until she could get them away from that part of the road, that she lost the locket.”
    Hartley sighed, saddened by the wanton killing of a good man and his innocent family, yet hopeful that his niece and nephew had survived. Cautiously, he moved to look at what Alethea had drawn. The images were stark, chilling, and he was horrified by what his niece had seen and suffered. A drawing of Germaine’s face held him spellbound, the girl’s expression fascinating him even as it alarmed him. This was not the sweet, funny, laughing girl he had known.
    “Germaine looks as if she wants to kill someone,” he murmured.
    “She does. That was the last clear thing I saw and felt, and then the locket was lost. Germaine recognized the person getting out of the carriage.” Alethea pointed to the rose she had drawn.
    Staring at that and knowing whom it represented, Hartley felt nauseous. He had touched that woman, kissed her, would even have bedded her had not the Vaughns intruded. It had been bad enough to know she had had something to do with the death of his compatriots, but the proof of that had been so thin, it had been easy to doubt it all. But Germaine had seen the woman at the site of her family’s deaths. It was still not proof he could use, and he did not understand how Alethea could see such things, but he believed it all.
    “They escaped,” he whispered as he returned to his seat next to Alethea, blindly accepting the tea she gave him. “They did not die with the rest of them.”
    “No. They fled,” said Alethea. “Unfortunately, the locket was lost before your niece had any plan of action aside from keeping her brother alive. Oh, and killing that woman.”
    “If she tried to kill the woman, she would have died there with her family, simply done so a little later.”
    “True, and I grasped no sense of such a plan. Your niece was thinking coldly, clearly, and only of saving Bayard. I believe she would have chosen duty over emotion. There was no sense of immediacy to her thoughts of killing the woman. It was simply a fact.”
    Hartley cursed, rubbed a hand over his face, and then took a drink of his tea to steady himself. He would have liked something a great deal stronger but decided it was for the best if he stayed with tea. “Germaine was only fifteen, more child than woman, and Bayard was still more infant than child. So young. Too young to survive in the rabid air of France, alone, for three years.”
    Alethea sighed. “It would seem so, and yet, it was truly as if I were there with her, Hartley. No, with in her, seeing and feeling all that she did. There is a deep core of strength in your niece, Hartley. Think on it all. She saw her siblings dead, heard her stepmother die, and then her father. Yet she never faltered, never hesitated to act as she knew her father meant her to. She heard his last command, subtle as it was, and acted immediately. There was such pain and grief within her, a roaring agony of it, but she kept that boy moving, hiding, silent. Even when she heard the shots and the marchioness’s first scream, she did not run blindly toward her family, but moved toward them with the ever-present thought of the need to stay out of sight. I know, truly know, that the girl was desperate to go to her family, but she did not. That girl has hard steel in her spine, and, now, a deep need to avenge her murdered family. I wish I could tell you what happened after that moment on the beach, but once the locket fell from her neck, I lost touch with her. I do