She stepped on the hem of her skirt. Her foot slipped, and her legs were suddenly dangling over open air.
A cry went up from the people assembled below as everyone surged forward to try to help, but Leonard was faster than all of them.
He reached the tree, grabbed the lowest branch, and hauled himself up, starting to climb to where she was.
“Your Grace, come down,” someone protested from below. “We’ll handle it. We’ll go up after her. You shouldn’t.”
But no one had gone up after her yet, and she was on the verge of falling. How long did they expect him to sit around and wait? Fear coursed through him at the sight of her dangling over open air. Why did she always have to be so… so foolhardy? Why couldn’t she ever use a scrap of common sense? It was abominable.
Above his head, her feet kicked, scrambling for purchase, and she finally found it. She balanced on a lower branch and was able to pull herself upright, gripping the branch above her for balance.
Leonard froze where he was, worried once more about startling her into making a mistake. To think that just ten minutes ago, he had been worried about what he would say to her over the breakfast table! That seemed like such a trivial concern now. What difference did it make what they said to one another? The important thing was surely having the ability to speak to one another at all.
As Leonard watched, the cat walked carefully along the branch Prudence was holding on to, almost as if it had known what she wanted all along. She released the branch with one hand and carefully collected the animal. “I’m going to drop him,” she called down. “Can someone catch him?”
She turned and looked over her shoulder. For the first time, she realized that Leonard was beneath her, and her eyes widened. “What are you doing out here?”
He didn’t bother to point out that he could easily have asked her the same question. “Drop the animal,” he told her.
“Are you going to be able to catch him?”
Leonard had no idea whether he would or not, and he didn’t much care—he wanted her to have both hands securely on that brach. “Of course, I will,” he lied. At the very least, he’d make the effort. “Go on.”
She held out the animal, hesitated, for a moment, and then let go.
The cat yowled as it plummeted. Leonard stretched out a hand and caught it by the scruff of its neck just as it was about to drop past him. He closed his eyes, let out a sigh, and dangled it above the sea of outstretched hands below him, dropping it the last few feet. He saw it land in the hands of one of the men below and was briefly relieved.
He turned his attention back up to Prudence. “The animal is safe,” he said, hearing the tension in his own voice. “You’ve done what you set out to do, now come down before you get yourself hurt.”
He feared she might try to argue with him even now. It would be very like her.
But she didn’t. For once in her life, she seemed to have decided to be reasonable. She lowered herself slowly, maintaining a careful grip on the branches.
The moment she was far enough down that he was able to reach her, Leonard wrapped an arm around her waist and eased her the rest of the way down to the ground, doing all he could to ignore the way his heart hammered violently in his chest.
CHAPTER 21
“Indoors,” Leonard barked. “Right now.”
Prudence paused long enough to collect the cat she’d rescued from the arms of one of the footmen. The poor thing was shaking like a leaf. She held it close to her body as she followed Leonard into the house, feeling angry and defiant.
If she was honest with herself, she’d known he would react like this. He could never tolerate her doing anything remotely strange or unpredictable. Prudence had no particular desire to climb trees and might have asked someone to do the job for her were it not for the fact that she’d known exactly how her husband would react to her actions. That probably should have been a reasonnotto do it, really. Perhaps she couldn’t blame him for being angry.
He whirled to face her once they had reached the sitting room. “I can’t imagine what you were thinking,” he said in a low voice,eyes narrowed and boring into hers. “Behaving like that… Don’t you realize that you might have been killed?”
“I couldn’t have been killed,” she protested. “Even if I had fallen, I wasn’t up high enough to be killed by a fall. Hurt perhaps but notkilled.
His expression didn’t change. “Am I supposed to be happy with that?” he wanted to know. “My wife might have been grievously hurt, but she would have survived, so that’s all right? Is that what you expect me to say?”
“I don’t expect you to say anything, Leonard, but why are you so upset?” Prudence asked. “You must see that even if it worried you, everything turned out for the best in the end. You can see that I’m fine now.”
“I can see that you were lucky. I can’t believe you would do something like this. But I suppose I should believe it, shouldn’t I? You’ve shown me right from the start, and again and again, that this is who you are. I have no right to be surprised by you anymore.” He sighed. “I’m going to have to cancel my plan to go to the country.”
“Of course, you don’t have to cancel,” she protested. “Don’t be hasty, Leonard.”
“Hasty is the last thing I’m being. I’ve overlooked many indiscretions,” he told her firmly. “I should have understood the situation we were in the when I caught you sneaking out. I couldn’t possibly go off to the country and spend everyday wondering whether you were taking risks with your life—whether I was about to receive a letter informing me that something dreadful had happened and I needed to rush home for your funeral.”
“You are overreacting,” she told him. “Ridiculously so.”
