Elisabeth Fairchild (12 page)

“Why did you not call out for me?”

He shrugged. “Military training. One must do for oneself. How did you know I was hurt?”

She held his gaze a moment. “I happened to look back,” she admitted, focusing on his foot again, color rising in her cheeks.

He could not stop a smile, enjoying the idea that she had felt compunction to look back.

Finished with the knot, she gave his boot tip a pat. “There. Best I can do. A pity neither of us brought a walking stick.” She rose, hand out for grabbing. “You will have to lean on me.”

He clasped the firm strength of her hand and rose, testing his weight on the ankle, for the moment not at all displeased with the absence of walking sticks.

“Much better. As good as any field surgeon. And now, with your permission.” He held out his arm.

She had to step into the curve of it, into what amounted to an unavoidable embrace. She must allow him to drape his arm across her shoulders, to brace his waist with her arm. Her cheeks fired scarlet. She refused to turn her head to look at him.

He relished the contact, amused by her discomfort, did not hesitate to settle the length of himself against her. “There. My pretty crutch, “ he said dryly.” Let’s give it a try.”

He smelled of sandlewood, and wet wool, and the kisses they had shared. With his arm about her, she could not help but think of them, and when he turned his head, on occasion, to look at her, to speak, she got the feeling he remembered, as well.

Their progress was necessarily slow, and far more intimate than she had anticipated. Their bodies must move as one, a rhythm established between them not unlike that in a three-legged race.

They made adjustments, her hand shifting, grasping more firmly his waist, the pit of his arm settling more firmly against her shoulder.  Like puzzle pieces, they were, interlocking. Their hips and thighs must come together for better balance. Unsettling, such contact.

Laughing nervously, they struggled to match their gait, awkwardness bonding them, her heartbeat racing. Eventually they hit a bumping, jolting stride and could be more comfortable, and in that level of comfort closer, more intimate. She actually allowed herself to look into his eyes on occasion, into warmth and appreciation, and pained amusement.

“Think we will be able to hobble back to the village before nightfall?” he asked.

“We must. You shall have to marry me, else.”

“Or set you up as my mistress.” He winced.

“Does the thought pain you?” she asked, pained by the suggestion that he would not care to offer marriage.

He laughed. “The ankle pains me.”

“You would make me an offer, then?”

He laughed again, as she had intended he should, his chest moving against her ribcage. Then he looked at her, his cheek very close, mischief in his eyes. “I would know more of you if we are to be bound to one another in any way more intimate than we already are.”

Again the suggestion that it was not marriage he considered. She kept her eyes on the path, her voice steady, and yet the words came out thickly. “What would you know?”

“Everything.” The heat of his breath at her ear left her knees weak.

Dear Lady Anne.

She stopped and adjusted her hold on his waist before setting off again. “Surely you jest. A man cannot know everything of any woman.”

“True, he can but attempt to unveil the mystery. Care to uncover something of yourself, Penny?”

That he called her by her given name added even more intimacy to a moment already unsettling in its closeness. She could not look at him, did not dare. “There is little to tell,” she said, watching the movement of his legs, so close to her skirts, lost in them when the wind blew. “I live a very mundane life. Not full of danger and adventure as yours must have been.”

“A life I choose to forget for now. I would be pleased to hear of the mundane.”

“It is painful, then?”

“The foot? Not too bad.”

“No.” She turned her head, daring a glance despite their close proximity. “Remembering.”

He said nothing for several strides, his turn to look away, and in the silence she tried to imagine him, gun in hand, shooting.

“I was lucky,” he murmured at last. “I survived. Now I would hear of the living. Is she Val’s?”

Penny caught her breath, injured again by his low opinion of her. She drew on the strength of Lady Anne, as she always did in such moments. “And if I said she was,” she said bitterly. “Would you tell him?”

He did not want to imagine the two of them together, Val and this young woman, locked in carnal knowledge, swept away by passion, and yet the image rose unbidden.

“If he is the father should he not know?” He pulled away so that his hip and thigh no longer pressed hers. A foolish move. It left him suddenly unsteady on his pins, bereft of her support, though he still depended upon her shoulder.

“I am afraid,” she said, words so soft he leaned closer to hear. settling once more against her hip.

“Why? He is not all bad. Assuming the responsibilities of fatherhood might be the making of Val.”

“He would take her from me,” she whispered.

A peregrine falcon floated on the wind above, keening. A lonely sound. The bird’s shadow drifted over them, over the rock strewn path they navigated with care.

Would Val take the child? He wondered. Would he even want her?

“It must be difficult for you,” he said gently. “Living with that fer.”

Her head snapped in his direction.

“In battle I found it best to face your fear head on. Perhaps it is time you told him.”

Her eyes smoldered with angry intensity. For the first time he regretted how closely she was bound to him.

“You’ve no idea what you’re talking about,” she snapped.

Chapter Fourteen

She said nothing more, but her whole body spoke stiffly of angry rejection.

“Might we take a moment’s rest?” he asked.

She nodded, even seemed glad to shed him. He sat where she led him, raised his foot on a slab of rock, that it might throb less, and said, “I regret my presumption.”

She stood silently staring back the way they had come, wind spreading the folds of her cloak about her like dark, velvet wings, the edge of her bonnet guarding her expression.

He tried again. “You are quite right. I’ve no idea what you . . . your life is like, what might happen if you did tell Val.”

She sighed, raised her hand to her neck, rubbed the nape of it. His weight on her shoulders had taken its toll.

“I am too heavy?” he asked.

She shrugged. Still the treasure of her gaze was kept from him.

“Come.” He beckoned.

Her wariness was back. Had she been a dog her hackles would have been raised, and yet she turned, first to look at him, then to obey.

“Sit here.” He shifted his injured foot to one side on the slab of basalt.

“Why?” She stood above him, all resistance, cheeks pinched by the wind, her eyes--he must tell her at a more appropriate moment how incredible he considered those amethyst eyes.

“I will take that kink out of your neck,” he said.

She considered him a moment, suspicion in those eyes.

He kept his expression carefully neutral.

Hesitantly she sat.

He put gloved hands upon her shoulders.

At once she stiffened.

“Relax,” he said. “My batman used to do this at the end of a long day, when my neck and shoulders ached most abominably.”

“From shooting?”

He had not meant to speak to her of shooting. “Yes,” he said, voice low as he removed his gloves, and rubbed his hands together, and blew on them to warm the cold flesh.

He pulled back the collar of her cloak,  and lifted a lock of hair out of his way, and though she shrank from his touch, he persisted, fingers seeking the heat of her neck, the tensed joining of neck and shoulder.

Gently he kneaded the muscle.

“Ow!” she cried, “That hurts!” and might have pulled away, had he not stopped her with, “It may pinch a bit to begin with, but it gets better. I promise.”

He tried a fresh spot, using both hands, on both sides of her neck, the odor of jasmine rising from her hair, his eyes closing as he leaned a little closer, drinking her in, feeling his way.

“Mm!” She gave a surprised moan. Her shoulders sank a little, less resistant, and he knew he had hit a sweet spot.

He smiled, pled.

“Was it a difficult thing to learn?” she asked.

“No. I just paid attention to what my batman . . . ”

She halfway turned toward him, neck muscles contracting, straw bonnet swiveling, one smooth cheek exposed, lips too soft for the words. “I mean the killing.”

Odd juxtaposition, he thought, the sensation of her muscles loosening beneath his hands, while his mind tightened around memories he would rather forget.

“A dreadful business,” he said, straightening her shoulders, so that her head must turn, too, the bonnet a welcome barrier between them. He could not bear it should she look at him in that instant. “One shoots rather than be shot, and trusts . . .”

Her neck arched into his hand. She uttered another surprised little moan.

In the touch of his hands on her shoulders, he thought, in the delicate curl of her hair at the nape of her neck, in the slow rise and fall of her breasts as she took breath. He trusted in these implicitly.

What he said was, “In the idea that there is too much living yet to do--to die.”

He leaned forward to smell her hair, eyes closing, voice soft.

She turned her head, the silk of her cheek brushing his knuckles, shocking his eyes open again.

“There were mornings when I hated to see the sun rise . . .” he said.

She shuddered beneath his hands. He knew not if words or touch stirred her, only that she pulled away, with a sigh.

She rose, stretching, her hands first pressed to the small of her back, then rising to touch her neck where his hands had been. “Feels much better,” she said. “Thank you.”

“Least I can do, seeing as I am the cause.”

He accepted her assistance in rising, and carefully, an almost overwhelming level of desire swelling in his chest, he slid the weight of his arm onto her shoulders again.

She turned her head as they set off, her bonnet scraping his ear, her breath briefly warming his chin--he might have kissed her had she not said in that instant, “She is Val’s.”

The words struck him like unexpected gunshot. He staggered, might have fallen.

“Ah!” His own sense of stunned disappointment surprised him as she pressed him more firmly to her, steadying him.

“I suppose I must tell him as much eventually,” she said quietly into the curve of his neck.

The smell of jasmine seemed suddenly too sweet.

Betrayed. He felt betrayed.

Chapter Fifteen

A carter hailed them on the road, offering them a ride. He volunteered to deliver them either to the apothecary, or the barber of Dufton if they preferred.

“The latter serves quite ably as local tooth extractor, bone setter and surgeon,” Penny explained.

“Indeed, he does.” The well muscled fellow jovially boosted Alexander into the back of the wagon amidst a load of baled woolens, and offered Penny a seat beside him on the bench with a friendly wink.

As the horses were set into rumbling motion to the tune of his whistling, Penny flexed the throbbing arm with which she had braced her Cupid’s waist, and threw a glance over the shoulder he had taken time to rub the soreness from. “ all right back there?”

Hip and thigh still tingled with memory of his body’s movement against hers.

“Fine,” he replied. “Enormously glad to get off that foot.”

He sounded polite, his look her way no more than a glance, as if nothing had happened between them, as if she had said nothing of importance.

What had possessed her? Why trust this stranger, Val’s friend, with a secret so powerful he might destroy her with it?

She shivered, clutching her cloak tight. How cold the wind blew against the shoulder Mr. Shelbourne had warmed, almost as cold as his reaction to her revelation that Felicity was Val’s.

She should have held tongue. Dear Lord, she should have held tongue.