Page 69 of The Baronet’s Bartered Bride

“You are…” He sputtered, pulling the reins as the gelding tossed his big head and tried to nip overhanging greenery from a passing tree.

She waited. What was she to him? Did he even know?

“You could be my lady,” he settled for saying.

She studied him while she had him here, close at her side and with no other person to lay claim to his time and attention. She surveyed him as thoroughly and as greedily as Mr. Treen, not a gentleman, had surveyed her. Joseph was so much to look at, and every piece of him pierced her heart in so many ways, that sometimes she did not simply sit back to take in the whole of him. The way his limbs came together in that kind of powerful grace that made her think of a wild, territorial animal, a deer or a bear or a ram.

Some men affected ennui or disinterest, but never Joseph. That light of intelligence, of keen interest in the world around him, animated his eyes from the moment he opened them in the morning, his mind already working over some thought that had come to him in his sleep. He could not be diffident if he tried; he felt everything deeply. He was loyal and passionate and God above, so stubborn, and she wanted nothing more than to walk beside him her whole life and brush the wet from his collar because he would have forgotten his umbrella and be too preoccupied with his thoughts to care about stepping out of the rain.

But baronets did not marry the daughters of lascars and whores.

“I cannot,” she said.

Whatever reply he might have made to that was lost in an enormous cracking sound. Then the horse bolted.

Inez fell out of the cart at once. She was no seasoned horsewoman or farm girl; she’d known to cling to the top of the stagecoach, but the sudden leap forward left her unprepared, and she simply toppled sideways off the bench. She hit the ground before she could draw breath to scream, and to her good fortune, she was thrown free of the wheel, which churned a clod of dirt that spattered her apron.

The next events happened more quickly than she could quite comprehend. Joseph shouted something, to her or the horse, she didn’t know. The horse whinnied and fought as Joseph pulled back on the ribbons. Another sharp cracking sound, like a great falling branch; Joseph swore; and then he was tumbling off the side of the cart as well, and Inez cried out and did not catch her breath again until she saw him roll to his feet, unscathed, and start toward her.

“Inez. Are you hurt?”

She shook her head, not yet able to form words. Her chest was an empty cave. Her head felt like she’d stuck it inside a ringing bell. Before she could protest Joseph was on his knees beside her in the mud, his hands moving over every part of her.

“Wh-what happened?” Her teeth were chattering. Astonishing. She had never been afraid for her life before; it felt a bit like the ague, leaving her shaking and feverish and weak.

“Gunshot.” His mouth was a grim slash. “Someone is shooting on my land, or close to my land. Spooked the horse.”

“Sp-spooked me,” Inez said, her teeth still chattering.

Joseph kissed her forehead, then her temple, as if relieved to find her unhurt. “Swivel gun,” he said under his breath. “The first shot was the big barrel, which is meant for larger game. The second was the bird shot.”

Joseph was a scholar. Aside from playing bowls now and again, he didn’t engage in sporting activities, not even drinking to excess. How did he know about the firing of guns?

“M-missed his shot, I s-spose.”

“Kept me from gaining control of the horse,” he growled. “I hope Arthur has the sense to head back to the stables, where Thaker will guess we’ve gone astray.”

“Arthur.” Her mind, still whirling in great loops, clutched on the small thing it could encompass and be sure of. “The horse’s name is Arthur.”

He grinned at her, but there was something feral in it. His hat had come off when he leapt out of the cart and lay some distance away down the lane. The birds that had scattered at the shot and the bellow of the horse slowly regathered in the treetops of willow and downy birch that lined the banks of the stream. She sat in a bed of soft grasses, the flowers of the bird cherry blooming above her. It was an enchanted bower, and if she were not recovering from a fright that had made her heart do somersaults and a fall that jarred her teeth, she would make something of it, being spilled into this woodland glade with her love.

“You could have been hurt,” he muttered, pressing kisses to her cheeks, her temple, her chin. “You could have been hurt.”

Inez snaked her arms about his neck and pulled his mouth to meet hers.

There was a wildness in his kiss that she answered immediately. The tender welcome and soft forays with which he met her in the evenings, when they stood in his chamber in a penumbra of candlelight, were gone. This was need, fierce and clawing. Want roared up within her like a bear at the baiting.

She wanted to show him she was not hurt, and she wanted to assure herself that he had not been harmed, and she wanted to assuage this keen buzzing that swarmed every nerve, like a hive of bees. She’d told him she could not be with him, when what she wanted with every fiber and granule of her being was to be with him.

She pulled him against her as she fell backward onto the grass and there was no finesse in her, no calculation, no cunning. She wanted him to cover her, she wanted him to fill her, and she wanted to possess him completely.

“Inez.” He held one arm around her, supporting her against the earth, and the other he dragged down her breast and belly. “Darling.”

“Joseph.” She gave his name back to him, a promise on his lips. She was in the grip of a frenzy. Her blood pounded as it never had. There was one need driving her. She thought with the edges of her mind that it might be the fright urging her on, the response to that soul-cleaving moment of fear she might die and never be with him again. But she had him now, all the weight and strength and beauty of him here in her arms, and she wanted him fused to her so completely that he could never be taken away.

“Ye gods, Inez,” he murmured against her lips as she tore at his breeches, yanking the flap free, and sliding her hand around his manhood, already erect and rearing.

“You want me,” she said, and almost laughed with the heady promise of relief to come soon, soon. “You want me.”