Page 34 of The Rogue and the Viscountess

“You need an escort.”

Stubborn man. She couldn’t poke about asking questions about him with him standing at her elbow, all enormous chest and furrowed brow and the huge, touchable expanse of him. “We cannot be about our business with you looming over us. It is…” She floundered for the best way to put him off. “Lady business.”

He raised his brows. Not a man easily put off, then.

She scowled. “A delicate matter, and none of your concern.”

“Your safety is my concern. All of your well-being,” he added softly, “is my concern.”

Oh, how she wanted to be his concern. The thought turned her insides into an unset jelly.

Prunella abandoned good sense and decorum and put her hands right where she wanted them, on the lapels of his coat, pulling him close. He huffed out a breath of surprise before his mouth was there to meet hers, warm and open and seeking. He took possession of the kiss with the same gentle firmness he had shown their night together, testing, tasting, questing.

She wanted to consume and be consumed, but he taunted and teased, running his hands over her hips and up her back to cup her shoulders, using his tongue to stroke hers. She groaned, feeling a bit mad at the taste of him and at the heat that swamped her. She was occasionally silly, but she’d never been a fool.

“We doan have the time for this, mum,” Jenny said behind her, tone stern and disapproving.

Prunella pulled away and blinked into Pete’s gaze. He blinked back.

Something was confirmed between them in that exchange. Shifted and settled. A handshake. A promise.

A surrender to the inevitable.

“It does appear Jenny can look out for you,” Pete said.

Prunella nodded, not trusting herself to speak. She harbored suspicions about this man’s character, and yet she kissed him as if she lived only for the moments he touched her.

And what did that say about her?

“So ye mean to marry him? Is that why he kidnapped ye, then?” Jenny waited with her question until Creon was hitched, the women were settled in the whiskey, and Prunella was steering them down the tree-lined drive showing more confidence than she felt.

“I haven’t plans to marry again,” Prunella said, which was still true, though she had to think a moment to assemble her reasons.

“He fancies ye,” Jenny mused. “He’s got a title, and he lives in that big house. Though I s’pose it’s a step down for a viscount’s wife to marry a baronet.”

“It’s a wonderful thing to be able to marry for love,” Prunella said.

Jenny snorted. “As only happens in the romance books and the fairy stories. Ye and I both know, mum, a woman needs be canny if she plans to give her whole self away.”

That was true, and that was why she was driving to Corsham to chat up utter strangers instead of lounging around Rowan Hill munching on Turkish delight.

“At least he allowed me to drive the whiskey,” Prunella remarked. “Otherwise we’d be walking, and I daresay your shoes could use a rest after the past days.”

“It’s you fine folk that don’t walk a mile,” Jenny retorted. “Us country girls know how to use our feet.”

“I am a country girl,” Prunella objected. “Raised on a farm in Huntingdonshire. I never saw London until my first Season.”

“Someone else worked yer home farm,” Jenny said severely, “and paid for yer fancy dresses and yer London coach. Do ye marry the baronet, will ye be walking yerself about? I daresay not.”

“I’d have to wade through sheep if I did,” Prunella said. “And they’re rather terrifying.”

Jenny stared for a moment, then laughed till tears started and she had to wipe them from her cheeks with her cotton mittens. “Oh, mum, if ye want that man, ye’d better snap his lure while ye’ve got him. Another’s going to come along and throw her cap at him, just you see.”

“I don’t suppose you’d want to stay here. You’d hoped to see London.”

“I jest might fix meself with you, mum. You’re not the worst sort, and if you do gad to London now and again to see th’other viscountesses, I s’pose that would do me well enough.”

This conversation took them to Corsham, and Prunella turned at the Methuen Arms to take them down the High Street. This was where she would begin.