Candice Hern (8 page)

“Why did you choose red?” she asked in a small voice.

Before he could convince himself it was not a proper thing to do, he dipped his head and kissed her hand. He allowed his lips barely to graze the soft skin on the underside of her wrist. She gave a tiny gasp, just a soft intake of breath, but it was enough to encourage his lips to linger a bit longer. He lifted his head, smiled, and said, “It reminded me of you.”

“Red?” She laughed softly and retrieved her hand, and, thankfully, did not then use it to slap him for his impertinence. “I would have thought the poet in you might have chosen green. For my eyes. Accompanied by flowery sentiments on my emerald orbs.”

He gazed into those green depths and knew he would indeed pay poetic tribute to them someday soon. But the ode to her upper lip had kept his pen busy last night.

“Green was too obvious a choice,” he said, returning his concentration to the moment. “I decided on red to match your fiery spirit.”

She laughed. “My fiery spirit? I am not sure if I should feel complimented or insulted.”

“Complimented, to be sure. From the moment you slapped my face, or perhaps somewhat later,”
he added with a sly smile, “I have admired your ruthless determination to save your niece from ruin. In my mind—my Romantic poet’s mind, you will say—you appear as a bold avenging angel, ready to combat anything to ensure her safety, strengthened with righteous anger, like Boadicea taking on the Roman army.”

“Good heavens. As formidable as that?”

“As admirable as that.”

She gave a little shrug. “Any mother would do the same. It’s a powerful instinct, to protect one’s young.”

He realized in that moment how very little he knew of her. “Do you have children of your own?”

A shadow flickered across her eyes for an instant, but she recovered quickly and said, “I was not so fortunate.”

“I am sorry,” he said. It was obviously a painful, and very personal subject he ought not to have broached.

“But I have had the care of Belinda these last five years,” she said. “She has been like a daughter to me.”

“And like a good mother, you shall avenge her, I have no doubt. In fact”—Simon took her hand once again, just for the sheer pleasure of it, and fingered the bright ribbon at her wrist—“let this red band be a symbol of your quest. You must wear it as a sort of talisman until we find Belinda. Then I will remove it myself and retain it, with your permission, as a keepsake of this journey.
And
as a reminder to
the Busybody to take more care in the advice handed out.”

“A talisman it is, then.” She tugged her hand gently out of his. “For both of us. And I shall hold the Busybody to that pledge.”

The strains of the violin grew louder as the musician wandered close by. They each grew silent and allowed the melody to waft into the carriage and weave its spell. By turns melancholy and passionate, plaintive and sumptuous, the lush music held Simon captive as it seemed to seep right into his skin. He did not believe he had ever before heard music quite so sensuous. The moment would be perfect, if only he were still holding Eleanor’s hand.

He looked to see if she was equally spellbound, and she appeared to be so. Her eyes had become heavy-lidded and her lips were parted slightly, as if the music held her in its hypnotic, seductive sway.

She looked thoroughly, deliciously irresistible. A sudden rush of pure desire swept over him. Simon wanted nothing more than to kiss her right then and there. No, that was not strictly true. He did indeed want more. He wanted to toss her back against the plush velvet squabs and make love to her.

He would do neither, of course. He was a gentleman, and had known her for only two days. They were on a serious mission, not a lark. Besides, she didn’t think much of him. She would not relish being kissed by a man she did not respect, a man who
was no more to her than an irksome, sentimental fool.

Yet the music moved him, stirred him. He felt a need to be connected to her somehow.

She had placed her hand on the squab beside her. Her fingers were curved and relaxed as she listened to the smoldering melody of the violin. Simon laid his hand next to hers, inching closer, until the kid leather of his glove touched the knitted silk of hers. She did not move, did not even seem to notice.

And so he grew bolder. He arched his little finger and ever so gently rested it atop hers. Still, she did not move or raise her voice to object. Simon closed his eyes and savored the tiny, innocent joining. It was sweet. It was warm.

It was just a beginning.

He lifted his other fingers to bring his full hand to rest over hers—

The carriage jerked into movement. Simon opened his eyes and snatched his hand away. Eleanor had been thrown back hard against the seat and shifted her position on the bench. Had she even noticed his hand—his finger—on hers?

Hell and damnation.

“The stage has moved off to the side of the road,” Eleanor said, craning her neck to watch the action. “At last, we can pass. Thank heaven. We have lost so much time. But the music was lovely, was it not?”

It was indeed. Too lovely. It had made him stupid. Thank God he had been saved from making an
even bigger fool of himself. For if she had allowed his hand to rest on hers—and he thought she would, after letting him place a fulsome kiss upon her wrist—he would have been tempted to press on, to kiss more than her hand.

The moment was gone, however, and they did not speak of it as they hurried along the road to Market Harboro. It was just as well. He would have spoiled the amity growing between them by pressing unwanted attentions on her. Eleanor had grown less strident with him, seemed to be more in charity with him. She still had little respect for him, because of the Busybody, and the notion galled him. She continued to think him a fatuous fribble because he wrote for a ladies’ magazine. But he could not reveal the truth about
The Ladies’ Fashionable Cabinet
. It was dangerous enough that she knew Simon to be the Busybody. He could not put others at risk.

So he would continue to suffer her scorn for being the Busybody, but there were other ways to win the good opinion of the very desirable Mrs. Tennant. He had made some progress already: she had let him kiss her bare wrist. It was a small step, but it was something.

The single postillion kept up an almost reckless speed to make up for lost time. The road was muddy from the rains, and the front window soon became streaked and dirty so that it was difficult to see.

The countryside of Northamptonshire did not
offer much in the way of scenery in any case. Even Simon, who was moved by natural beauty in all its forms, could find little to inspire him as they traversed the undistinguished landscape. Once graced with great forests, the land had been almost thoroughly cleared in the last few years to accommodate new enclosures that created a crisscross pattern of hedges, drains, and ditches. Tiny limestone hamlets scattered about interrupted the grid, and an extraordinary number of church spires were silhouetted black in the distance against the dark blue skies of approaching twilight.

They had just driven past one of those squat hamlets when the carriage took a hard bounce, dipped to the left, and jerked wildly. In the next instant, horses shrieking and mahogany creaking, the carriage took a dangerous tilt and came to a noisy, ungraceful, and very abrupt halt, landing half on its side in the thick mud.

Simon was thrown hard against the window. And Eleanor was thrown on top of him.

S
he fell so hard against him the breath was knocked clean out of her with a whoosh.

“Eleanor! My God, are you all right?”

Stunned and a bit disoriented, she did a quick survey of her body and found nothing amiss, nothing broken, no great pain. Except that she couldn’t seem to breathe properly. She tried to answer him, but found her mouth buried in the stiff, starchy-smelling fabric of his neckcloth. When she lifted her head and said, “Yes,” she caught Simon’s nose sharply with the brim of her bonnet.

“Ow!” He recoiled as best he could, flattened against the carriage door, which now stood almost,
but not quite, horizontal. When he lifted a hand to his nose, his elbow whacked Eleanor on the chin.

“Argh!” Her hand reached instinctively for her abused chin, and her elbow crashed violently into Simon’s with a loud thwack.

Trying to get his long arms out of her way, Simon knocked her bonnet askew, causing the ribbons tied beneath her chin to tighten along her jaw almost to the point of strangulation. Lord, he was choking her! She gave a constricted gasp, and Simon, visibly alarmed, fumbled about trying to loosen the bow. But in doing so he somehow managed to pull her sharply down so that their foreheads crashed together with a resounding crack.

They groaned in unison and lay silently face-to-face, each of them breathing heavily. Then, lifting her head, Eleanor looked down into Simon’s perplexed face and choked on an uncontrollable gurgle of laughter. It bubbled up until she could no longer contain it, and she lowered her head to his shoulder and gave in to the absurdity of the moment. Simon’s laughter joined her own, and his body beneath her rumbled with it so that she bounced up and down atop him. One of his arms was squashed beneath her. He snaked the other tightly around her waist, holding her close so she would not fall.

She lifted her head at last, blinking away the moisture from her eyes. “Don’t move an inch,” she managed between chuckles, “or one of us is likely to kill the other.”

His eyes twinkled with mirth as she gazed, smiling, down at him. But all at once he stopped laughing and his expression darkened with something more intense. Eleanor sobered and met his gaze squarely. A heavy silence fell between them. Her face mere inches from his own, their eyes locked, their breath mingled. She suddenly became aware of the unbecoming and thoroughly improper nature of her position as she lay sprawled and ungainly on top of him.

Simon was the first to break the silence. “Are you truly all right, Eleanor?” Anxious blue eyes studied her face. “You are not injured? You are not hurt?”

“Aside from the whacking you gave me, I believe I am unharmed.” Disconcerted by her sudden, unsettling awareness of him, she wanted to get away. She shifted her weight a bit, but Simon held firm.

“You’re certain?” he asked.

“Yes, I am quite all right. Just shaken and flung about like a pair of hazard dice. And irritated at the prospect of yet another delay. Drat it, we seem to have nothing but bad luck. Maybe that
was
a curse the Gypsy woman spoke. Now if you will just let me go—”

“Oh, I do not think I should do that.” Wry amusement, and something else, glinted again in his eyes. “I think I should do this instead.”

He brought his arm up from her waist and snaked a hand beneath the bonnet to rest on the
back of her neck. He pressed her head down to close the distance between them, and kissed her.

It was a gentle kiss, not urgent or hungry or particularly passionate. It was a simple meeting of lips. Even so, it sent shafts of heat darting through Eleanor’s body and awakened a terrible yearning she thought she’d overcome years ago.

She pulled back, a bit frightened at her reaction, at how tempted she was to let him take the kiss to another level. But she could not allow that. It would be too dangerous. Besides, now was not the time or place for such foolishness.

“Let me go, please.”

He did, and Eleanor wriggled herself slowly and rather clumsily into an upright position, straddling his waist. She looked down and found the merriment gone from his eyes and replaced by an intense and horribly disconcerting gaze. Even worse, she could not fail to recognize what her rough movements had inadvertently brought about. She froze at the realization of his arousal. Their gazes locked for another charged moment before she got hold of herself and crawled off him.

She refused to consider what had just happened and gave herself over to the business of getting out of the carriage. It was awkward in every possible way. She pushed open the door above her with some difficulty—the angle made it almost impossible to keep it from closing again. She had to hold it open with one hand and swing herself, very ungracefully, up and out, all the time giving the still
prone Simon a view of much more than any man had a right to see. Once she had all arms and legs out of the door, she slid down to the road with a splat, landing in mud up to her ankles.

So much for her second best pair of half boots.

The horses were frightened and dancing about while the poor lone postboy darted between them trying to keep them calm and untangled as they heaved against their harnesses. They made their unhappiness clear in a barrage of whinnies and snorts. “Are you all right, ma’am?” he shouted to her over the cacophony of discontent.

“Yes, thank you. And you? The team?”

“They’re just confused an’ all. They’ll be fine once we get this rig upright ag’in. What ’bout Mr. Westover? Is he injured?”

Eleanor was ashamed to realize she did not know. She had never bothered to ask. The carriage door had slammed shut after she’d got herself out and had remained shut. Wrenching her feet from the mud, she had to half crawl over the carriage to reach the door and open it again. Poking her head sheepishly inside, she found Simon exactly as she’d left him. He had not stirred an inch. Good God, was he hurt?

“Simon, are you injured? Dear heaven, why didn’t you say something? Can you move at all?”

He stared at her for a moment with an unreadable expression in his eyes, then drew a deep breath and began to shift his weight. “Yes, I can move. I am quite unharmed.” He had to twist his
long legs into a contorted arrangement, but was then able to lift himself up and swing out of the door with rather astonishing catlike grace.

Eleanor, on the other hand, fell to her knees when she let go of the door. Simon, pristine but for his boots, reached out and pulled her to her feet. She looked down at her dripping skirts and pelisse and swore beneath her breath, cursing the heavens for more than mere mud.

She did not appreciate the niggling and entirely unwelcome little stirrings, low in her belly, brought about by this contrary, provoking, odious troublemaker. Not only was it the wrong time and place for such nonsense, it was the wrong man. He was a foolish Romantic with his head in the clouds. He had a perfectly silly occupation and was afraid to stand up to his own father. He wrote horribly overblown prose, and probably worse poetry. Some might find his blue eyes, straight nose, and classic cheekbones handsome, but that did not signify. Besides, there was that red hair. He might call it auburn, but it was red. Dark red. And Eleanor had never liked red hair.

He was not remotely adorable. She had no business feeling anything but contempt for the wretched man whose advice had sent Belinda into the arms of a scoundrel. Any other feelings must be stopped. Now. At once.

The object of her muddled thoughts was conferring with the postboy and helping to manage the horses. He then set about examining the carriage.
“The axles are sound,” he reported, “and the wheels are unbroken. The damned thing is simply stuck. Once it is pulled out of the mud, it should be fine.”

Not for the first time, Eleanor reflected on how unfortunate it was to be saddled with the skinny, bookish brother. The brawny, sportsman brother would have been more useful in the current situation. With only Simon at hand, however, she figured there was nothing for it but to lend her assistance. Her garments were already filthy, so a little more mud would certainly do no harm. She unbuttoned her pelisse, which was too close-fitting to allow free movement, and began to shrug out of it.

“What the devil are you doing?” Simon asked, his brows lifted in wary surprise.

Eleanor nodded her head toward the stuck back wheel. “I believe if the two of us work together, we may be able to work it free.”

“Are you out of your mind?” He stared at her as though he thought she must be. “Do you realize how heavy this carriage is? It may appear light because it is so much smaller than a four-passenger coach, but it is deceptively sturdy, with an extremely solid undercarriage. And even if it were lightweight, do you think I’d allow you to attempt to lift it? Dash it all, Eleanor, you could injure yourself.”

“Not if we worked together. You cannot—”

“I will not have you lifting this carriage, so you can stop arguing right now.”

“Simon, if you refuse to allow me to assist you, then we’ll have to wait for help. And who knows how long that could be? But you and I could—”

“Go help Meeks with the horses. He needs your help more than I do. I will need them to pull out as soon as I have this thing upright again.”

“But I—”

“Dammit, Eleanor, do as I say. You’re always harping on me to be sensible. Well, this time it is you who must be sensible. It is much more important that you help manage the team. Now, get out of my way. And as soon as I give the word, get those horses moving.”

Eleanor stood gaping at him while he removed his jacket, waistcoat, and cravat, pulled the carriage door open—no easy task at that angle, as she knew—and tossed the garments inside. She was still gaping when he turned back around and stood facing her in white shirt, buff pantaloons, and top boots. He looked…different.

“What are you waiting for?” he said irritably. “Go!”

She could hardly believe it. He really thought he could do this alone. He would no doubt cause himself an injury, and then where would they be? She did as he asked, though, and went to help Meeks. The postboy mounted the left leader, and Eleanor held the harness of the right wheeler while she watched Simon.

Coatless, he was not so skinny after all. What she had assumed to be the flattering effect of good tai
loring was in truth a very good set of shoulders. He rolled up the sleeves of his shirt to his elbows, revealing well-muscled forearms furred with dark red hair. The same auburn hair peeked out from the now open collar of his shirt.

Was this thoroughly masculine creature her misty-eyed, head-in-the-clouds poet? Eleanor stood mesmerized by the transformation. She thought back to that awkward business in the coach. If she’d had her wits about her she would have realized the body she was clasped so tightly against was no thin-boned weakling. She remembered what else she knew of that body, and her cheeks flared.

From her angle, she could not see all that he did, and after some testing and adjusting, he seemed to disappear altogether.

And then the carriage moved.

“When I call out,” he shouted from somewhere behind it, “start pulling.”

Creaking and groaning, the carriage shifted inch by slow inch to an upright position. Simon, grunting with effort, came into view at last, in a squat position as he pushed the vehicle from below. The muscles of his neck, thighs, and arms flexed taut with the massive weight of the vehicle, and his teeth were bared in a grimace. He was moving it! He was going to free the wheel.

Just when she thought he’d done it, he continued to push and the carriage began to tilt slightly in the opposite direction.

Good Lord, he was going to overturn it again.

But then he shouted, “Now!” and Meeks started the leaders moving. Eleanor had little to do but guide the wheeler straight, and the team began to pull hard. In only a few steps, the stuck wheel came free with a jolt, and the horses flew ahead, pulling the released carriage. Eleanor stepped quickly out of the way. Meeks slowed the team and led them to a drier stretch of road up ahead before bringing them to a halt.

Eleanor turned back to look at Simon. Covered in mud, he was bent over, hands on his knees, and taking in great gulps of air. His face was flushed, but for once it was not from embarrassment.

Eleanor could not help staring. He was not adorable. He was magnificent.

Simon straightened, and every muscle in his body screamed in disapproval. Lord, he was going to be sore tomorrow. But at least the damned carriage was still intact. He had better check it out, though, before going any farther.

Extricating his boots from the thick mud, he began to slog toward the carriage. Eleanor stood like a statue in the middle of the road, staring at him. He looked down to find he was covered in mud. His shirt clung to him like a second skin. Lord, what a fit Jennings would have to see him like this.

“I suppose I look a fright,” he said, and chuckled at the thought of his valet’s ire when he returned home with ruined clothes and dull boots. He
looked back up and noticed Eleanor’s skirts were thick with mud from the knee down, as were her sleeves from elbow to wrist. The Gypsy’s bright red ribbon, though, must have been protected by the cuff of her pelisse, for it stood out like a beacon amidst the mud. She had a muddy streak across one cheek and a delightful smudge at the end of her nose. Her bonnet listed to one side, its ribbons limp. He grinned at the sight of her.

“I may look a fright, but if I may say so, Eleanor, you are not exactly spotless yourself. What a pair we make.”

She did not speak, but only stared, her green eyes wide with…something. What the devil was the matter with her? Was she so shocked to see a man covered in mud? She did not strike him as the type of prudish woman who was horrified by the sight of a man in his shirtsleeves.

Recollecting their brief kiss, and how boldly she had pressed against him in the overturned carriage, he did not believe she was prudish at all. Though their kiss had been almost chaste, there was no doubt in his mind that she had been very much aware of his arousal. There had been that heated moment when their eyes had locked before she came to her senses and rolled off him. So heated that he had remained behind afterward to get control of himself. Even now, he had to fight against the memories of her lips against his, her soft, round breasts pressed against him, the almost unbearable carnality of her untangled legs straddling his tight
groin. Then there had been the sight of those shapely legs as she crawled out of the carriage.