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‘Did I hurt you?’
‘What? No. I was...’ She shivered. ‘I was thinking about my maid, Bessy.’ She paused. Up to now she’d been too busy just surviving to face what her aunt had tried to do. But her mind had been steadily clearing all day. Or perhaps the pain of Gregory tending to her feet was waking her up to the unpleasant truth.
‘I’m afraid you will have to make do with my clumsy efforts tonight,’ he said. Then reached up and twined a curl round one finger. ‘Though it seems a kind of sacrilege to confine all this russet glory in braids.’
‘Russet glory!’ She snorted derisively. ‘I never took you for a weaver of fustian.’
‘I am not. Not a weaver of anything.’ He leaned back on his heels. His eyes seemed to be glazed. ‘But surely you know that your hair is glorious?’
The look in his eyes made her breath hitch in her throat. Made her heart skip and dance and her tummy clench as though she was flying high on a garden swing.
Oh, Lord, but she wanted him to kiss her. Out of all the men who’d paid court to her—or rather to her money—none had ever made her want to throw propriety to the winds. And he hadn’t even been paying court to her. He’d been alternately grumpy and insulting and dictatorial all day. And yet... She sighed. He’d also rescued her from an ostler and a group of bucks, forgiven her for pushing him out of his gig and throwing a rock at him. Even made a clumsy sort of jest of the rock-throwing thing.
A smile tugged at her lips as she thought of that moment.
‘So you accept the compliment now?’
‘What? What compliment?’
‘The one I made about your hair,’ he breathed, raising the hank that he’d wound round his hand to his face and inhaling deeply.
‘My hair?’
Why was he so obsessed with her hair? It must look dreadful, rioting all down her back and all over her face. A visible reminder of her ‘wayward nature’, Aunt Charity had always said. It was why she had to plait it, and smooth it, and keep it hidden away.
He looked at her sharply. ‘If not that, then why were you smiling in that particular way?’
‘I didn’t know I was smiling in any particular way. And for your information I was thinking of something else entirely.’
‘Oh?’ His face sort of closed up. He let her hair fall from his fingers and bent to dab at her feet again.
Good heavens, she’d offended him. Who’d have thought that a man who looked so tough could have such delicate sensibilities? But then she hadn’t been very tactful, had she? To tell him she’d been thinking of something else when he’d been trying to pay her compliments.
‘I was thinking,’ she said hastily, in an effort to make amends, ‘of how funny you were, searching about for rocks for me to throw.’
He shrugged one shoulder, but didn’t raise his head.
‘How very forbearing you have been, considering the abuse you’ve suffered on my account.’
He laid her feet down gently in the hay. ‘That is all I can do for them for now,’ he said, and scooted back. Looked at his hands. Cleared his throat. Scooted another foot away.
Which was both a good thing and a bad. Good in that he was determined to prevent another scene from developing in which their mouths ended up scant inches apart. Bad in that... Well, in that he was determined to prevent another scene from developing in which they would be tempted to kiss.
No, no, it was a good thing he wasn’t the kind of man to attempt to take advantage of the situation. They were going to have to spend the night together in this barn, after all. And if they started kissing, who knew how it would end?
Yes, it was a jolly good job he was maintaining some distance between them.
It would have been even better if she’d been the one to do so.
‘We had better eat our supper before the light grows too dim to see what we’re putting in our mouths,’ he said, opening his valise and taking out what was left of the provisions they’d bought in Tadburne Market.
‘We know exactly what we have for supper,’ she said wearily. ‘About two ounces of cheese and the heel of a loaf. Between the two of us.’
‘If it were only a few months later,’ he said, spreading the brown paper in which their meagre rations had been wrapped on the hay at her side, ‘I might have found strawberries growing by the stream.’
‘Strawberries don’t grow by streams,’ she retorted as he flicked open a penknife and cut both the cheese and the crust precisely in half. ‘They only grow in carefully tended beds. Where they have to be protected from frosts over winter with heaps of straw. Which is why they’re called strawberries.’
