He let go of her. Looking extremely surprised at finding herself so suddenly at liberty, she reached up and, apparently from force of habit, adjusted her bonnet.
“Now,” he said, slowly. “What’s this nonsense about us not seeing each other anymore?”
Dropping her gaze to her feet again, she took a deep breath, and said, “It’s just that this afternoon, I happened to run into Lady—”
The sound of a whip cracking interrupted her—caused her, in fact, to jump, and Braden to throw an arm around her shoulders defensively.
25
B
arely a foot or two away from Caroline, the ice cart driver lifted his arm to deliver another blow to the ragged horse hitched to his wagon.
“Come on,” the iceman snarled at the mare. “Git a move on, then.”
But this time when he lowered his whip, instead of hearing the satisfying snap of leather to hairy flank, he heard bones crunching. His own bones, primarily those in his wrist, which had been seized by Braden Granville’s fist.
“Oy,” shouted the old man. “What do you think you’re doing? You’re breaking my arm!”
“No more than you deserve,” Braden growled, “ cracking that whip so close to the lady.”
“Not to mention—” To Braden’s bemusement, Caroline stepped forward, and, putting her hands on her hips, confronted the iceman in a manner not unlike the mothers of his friends back in Seven Dials used to confront them after a long night’s carouse. “—the fact that you are abusing this poor animal. Look at her! No meat on her bones, her ribs sticking out everywhere—when is the last time you fed her a decent meal? Or let her stop for water?”
The iceman looked from the gentleman to the lady and seemed to decide that, despite the painful grip he had on his arm, the gentleman was the more rational of the pair.
“Look,” he said, in a wheedling voice. “I’m right sorry about affrighting the lady. How would you like a little free ice, sir? You and the lady? A nice little bit of ice to lick on a hot evening—”
“I think you ought,” Caroline said, “to give some of that ice of yours to your poor horse.”
The iceman looked to Braden for help, but he only said, “You heard the lady.”
Sighing, the old man climbed down out of his seat and, after Braden released his punishing hold on his arm, shuffled to the back of his wagon. Caroline, meanwhile, had bent over, and was examining the animal attached to the wagon’s front.
“Oh,” she cried, clearly dismayed as she scrutinized the many oozing welts on the nag’s flesh, to which flies were proving to be powerfully attracted. “Oh, Braden, look. Look at the poor thing.”
Braden didn’t so much as glance at the horse. His gaze was instead fully locked on the woman exclaiming over it. He was recalling, with rather startling clarity, the way in which Caroline had thrown her head back the day before, when she’d climaxed in his arms. Her throat, fully extended, had looked so long and slender, the skin ever so slightly tanned, all the way to the point where it disappeared beneath her lace collar. How far, he wondered, did that tan extend?
Caroline straightened. “This horse will be dead by next week if he is allowed to continue abusing her in this manner.”
Braden recalled how, at the peak of her orgasm, Caroline’s fingers had clutched convulsively at his shirt, then slowly uncurled as the shudders of pleasure lessened. Watching Caroline Linford climax in his arms had been the most erotic moment in Braden Granville’s life.
“How much?” Caroline was saying. “How much do you want for her?”
Braden shook his head, trying to focus on the situation at hand. The iceman, he saw, was staring very hard at Caroline.
“Pardon?” The iceman looked confused.
“You heard me.” Caroline reached into her reticule. The last rays of the afternoon sun touched her curls, setting them aflame. “How much for your horse, sir? I’d like to buy her from you, if I may.”
Finally realizing what Caroline was about, Braden reached into his waistcoat pocket, not quite believing what was happening. Apparently, they were buying this flea-bitten nag.
“Allow me, my lady,” he said.
Caroline looked up from the depths of her reticule. Seeing that he held his wallet in his hand, she blanched.
“Oh, no,” she said. “Mr. Granville, you mustn’t—”
“How much?” Braden asked the iceman.
The iceman, clearly no fool, took one look at Braden’s face, and another at his wallet, and said, firmly, “ Twenty-five pounds.”
Caroline said, “Mr. Granville, I must insist that you allow me to—”
“Fine,” Braden said, and thrust the money into the old man’s hands. “Unhitch her and tie her up to the back of that curricle over there, just across the square.” Then, taking hold of Caroline’s arm, he began to steer her, too, in the direction of his vehicle.
But Caroline was still sputtering, even as she walked. “Twenty-five pounds!” she cried. “Twenty-five pounds! Why, I doubt he paid above three for her in the first place. And I said
I
would buy her, Mr. Granville. You simply can’t go around—”
“Caroline,” he said through gritted teeth, as he hustled her along, ignoring the street peddlers who, having seen him purchase the iceman’s horse, seemed convinced he’d be stupid enough to buy their ill-gotten and ugly wares, as well.
“You don’t understand.” Caroline did not notice in the slightest how much attention they were attracting. “That horse is going to require weeks of nursing. She’s been half starved and most foully abused. You must let me take her.”
“Caroline,” he said again, as he nodded to Mutt, his driver, who was watching with an appalled expression as the fly-ridden cart horse was tied to the back of his handsome black curricle.
“I insist,” Caroline went on, passionately, “that you let me buy her from you, Mr. Granville. It’s the very least I can do—”
Braden handed her into the curricle. She didn’t even appear to notice that, in spite of the fact she had said she couldn’t see him anymore, she was actually about to be driven away by him. Not, he supposed, that there’d have been much for her to do about it if she had noticed. Every hansom cab in the area had already been spoken for, every omnibus packed to capacity.
“I’ll take her to Emmy’s,” Caroline was saying, as he swung into the seat beside her. “She has a country place in Shropshire, where I send all the horses I rescue. Her parents don’t mind—I pay them for room and board, of course. And they’ve so much pasture, they hardly know the difference if there are ten or twenty horses grazing on it. They have the most excellent groom. He’s done wonders with animals worse off than this one, you’ll see. He’ll have her rolling in the grass in under a month, I swear to you.”
Braden leaned forward and said, “Home, Mutt, nice and easy,” to his driver, and the carriage suddenly lurched into motion.
Caroline flung out a hand to steady her bonnet, which had snapped forward with the movement of the curricle.
“Where,” she wanted to know, as if realizing for the first time just what, exactly, was happening, “are we going?”
“Home, of course,” Braden said.
“Home?” she echoed.
“Your
home?”
Not liking the rising note of alarm he detected in her voice, he said, calmly, “We have to see to the horse, don’t we?”
“But—” Caroline twisted in her seat, peering back the way they’d come.
“I sent your carriage home, Lady Caroline.”
Caroline whipped her head around to glare at him. “Who gave you permission,” she demanded, “to do that?”
“No one,” he replied, with a shrug of his heavy shoulders. “But I needed to speak with you, and this was the only way I could think of to do it.”
“Speak with me?” Her expression softened. “Oh. You mean about my brother?”
“That, and . . . other things.”
“But he listened to you, didn’t he?” Her brown eyes were warm in the half light that filtered around the sides of the blinds he’d pulled down over the carriage windows. At Braden’s nod, she said, with a gusty sigh, “I knew he would. I was sure if there was anyone who could talk him out of such foolishness, it was you. Thank you.”
She held out her right hand. Braden looked down at it as if it were a foreign thing. And indeed perhaps he thought it was, because it seemed exceedingly odd to him to be shaking hands with a woman whom only the day before, he’d touched in a much more intimate capacity, right in this very carriage. . . .
“Don’t thank me,” he said. His voice sounded strange, not his own. But he had to say it. He had done nothing to deserve her thanks. What had he done but use her, and for his own selfish pleasure? He had fought her at first, that he would admit. But as soon as things became inconvenient for him—in this case, when Weasel had been injured—he had capitulated, and ever since, had been leading her down a path that would, if he didn’t put a stop to it soon, bring about her ruin.
But how could he stop it? How could he keep away from her, when every inch of him burned for her touch? It was wrong. He knew that. She was a lady, gently born and reared, while he was . . . what he was. It wasn’t right.
And yet he couldn’t stay away.
She reached across the seat, plucked up his hand in hers, and squeezed it, a brief, warm contact.
“Thank you,” she said, then put his hand down again, and turned to peer worriedly at the nag they were pulling along.
“Does your groom,” Caroline asked, “know anything about tending horses as sick as this one?”
Braden, still feeling raw, as if it were he, and not that wretched horse, who was being dragged behind a carriage, said, “I haven’t the slightest idea.”
“Perhaps,” Caroline said, “we should take her to my house. My father often brought sick and injured horses home, and our grooms are quite—”
He could not say what made him so churlish, except that he knew if they went to her house, that would be the end. He would have to say good-bye to her, and that he would not be able to abide.
“No,” he said, curtly. “She’s my horse. I paid for her. She stays with me.”
“Well,” Caroline said, chewing her lower lip. And then, just as he’d secretly hoped she would, she said, “I had better go along with you, then, hadn’t I? Just in case? I mean, I’ve had rather a lot of experience with injured animals like this one.”
Braden had to bite down on the corners of his mouth to keep them from curling up. “If you think that’s best,” he said, mildly.
“I still don’t understand, though,” Caroline said, tearing her concern-filled gaze away from the mare, and turning it upon him, instead, “what you were doing down at the courts.”
“I’ve been meaning to put the very same question to you,” Braden said.
“But I explained what I was doing there,” Caroline said. “In the note I sent you, explaining why I could not meet you today.”
“You explained that you were going to post bail for Lady Emily,” he said.
“That’s right. And I did.”
“You did not, however, explain why such a task should fall upon you.” He regarded her as calmly as he could, which, considering his feelings when he’d opened her note and seen where it was she intended to go, was not very calmly at all. “There are several places in London, Caroline, where young ladies such as yourself haven’t the slightest business going, and the Central Criminal Courts is most definitely one of them.”
He could not keep a note of anger from creeping into his voice. She heard it, and those eyes, which had grown so soft as she’d gazed upon the injured horse, hardened.
“That’s
why you came?” she demanded. “To scold me for going?”
“To insure your safe return,” he corrected her, politely.
She let out a little bark of disbelieving laughter. “Mr. Granville, I am not in need of a protector.”
Braden lifted a questioning hand. “Why? Because you have one already? If that’s so, I hope you won’t mind my asking . . . where is he?”
Her chin slid out challengingly as she set her jaw. “Hurst didn’t even know I was going down to the courts.”
“He ought to make it his business to know. Not to be offensive, but any man who would allow his betrothed to frequent this part of town unescorted except by some slow-witted domestics is either a coldhearted devil or a jackass.”
To his horror, those wide, dark eyes filled suddenly with tears. The chin which had been thrust out so stubbornly trembled, and she said, looking significantly more wounded than the emaciated beast they were towing, “I
told
you. Hurst didn’t know.”
Braden, torn between a desire to stop the tears that were already glistening, jewel-like, in her long dark lashes, and an equally strong desire to tell her exactly what he thought of the fool she was engaged to, settled for saying, gruffly, “I’m sorry.”
She didn’t say anything right away, and he could no longer see her face, because she’d turned it so that it was hidden by the brim of her straw bonnet. He sat berating himself for several seconds, wondering why it was that with every other woman in London, he’d always known exactly the right thing to say, but with this one he seemed instinctively to say the very worst thing he possibly could every time.
“I apologize,” he tried again, awkwardly, “if I seemed . . . censorious.”
To his surprise, she let out a burbling little laugh, and the next thing he knew, she was flashing him a smile— tentative, at best, but still a smile.
“Wherever did you learn a word like
that?”
Not certain that the tears were well and truly gone, he shrugged uncomfortably. “I don’t know,” he said. “I suppose I just picked it up.”
“You didn’t just pick it up. You don’t just pick up words like that. You learned them somewhere. I know you didn’t go to school. Tommy told me so. So how did you learn them? From books?”
He shrugged again, losing interest in the conversation. “A book, anyway. The dictionary.”
Her eyes, which had always seemed a little large for her face, appeared to widen to the size of saucers. “The dictionary?”