She shushed him, pressing her nose right to the crystalline windowpane. The sight came again—a meadow beyond the trees that lined the road, and in that meadow, gold on gold.
“Stop!” she squealed. “Stop the carriage! We must halt!”
And before the carriage had fully come to rest, she flung open the door, leapt down onto the soft loam, and hurled herself into the woods.
The familiar scent met her nose even before she was fully in sight of the meadow: a warm, sweet smell, like dripping honey. She felt a brief spasm of delight, and she caught her skirts in her hands and ran, her half-boots sinking a little into the spongy soil.
Her heart leapt when she found the little clearing that she’d spotted from the carriage. It was all there, exactly as she’d thought: a grove of spiky stalks covered in tiny, four-petaled yellow flowers. She clutched a stalk in her hand, laughed, and brought it to her face, her pulse bounding in delight.
She was still standing like that, her eyes closed, her nose full of the creamy scent, when the Earl of Warren’s voice met her ear. “Find something that pleases you?”
Quitecloseto her ear, in point of fact. She opened her eyes, looked up and up until she met his blue gaze. She felt a sudden flip in her lower belly, a pleasure that was not due to the clearing full of yellow flowers.
“Ah,” she said nervously. “This is a plant I use to make my dyes. Lady’s bedstraw. The pigment, when extracted from the roots, makes a kind of pearly rose-pink—my most popular color of thread. The demand has exceeded what I can comfortably supply from the fields around Llanreithan, and I’ve been in a state wondering how to cultivate more. I—”
He was staring down at her, a peculiar expression on his face. She closed her mouth on the anxious tide of words. Absurd—she was absurd to lecture him onGalium verumand the economic intricacies of her handmade embroidery floss. He had no reason to care.
“I need to mark the site,” she said. “So that I can come back here later and determine whether the landowner will permit me to harvest the plants. After London, I’ll need to be able to find this place again.”
His brows rose. “And that’s why you demanded that we stop the carriage?”
Yes, she had rather demanded, hadn’t she?
“It will only take a moment.” She tried to make her voice sound blithe, the verbal equivalent of a flick of her fingers. “I shall climb a tree and see if I can identify any nearby landmarks.”
“You shall climb a tree?” he repeated.
The skepticism in his voice only strengthened her resolve. “Certainly. I am a sheep farmer, Lord Warren. I spend most of my waking hours performing physical tasks. I am perfectly capable.”
“That was not precisely my concern.”
But he did not say anything else as she made for an enormous wych elm, its heavy limbs trailing near to the ground. She hitched her skirts up in her hands and then—trying to pretend Lord Warren wasn’t three feet away—knotted her skirt and petticoat together above her knees. Her legs were decorously encased in stockings, of course—though one stocking had a large hole in it at the back of her knee.
She felt a trifle warm, though the early October sky was overcast.
She ignored the temperature. She ignored everything except the feel of the elm’s bark under her palms, the sturdy weight of the limbs beneath her boots as she climbed, putting the earl soon out of her immediate line of sight.
Before long, however, she found herself stymied. She twisted, easing her body farther out onto the limb, her fingers scrabbling against the yellow autumn leaves that blocked her view, but it was no use. She could not see beyond the trees around her. She could not safely gain enough height to mark their location.
“All right up there?” Lord Warren called. His voice—what a lovely voice he had, deep and rich and warming.
Winnie swallowed and scrambled back down.
Once she’d reached the relative safety of earth, she unknotted her skirts hastily and gave a negating shake of her head. “I could not climb high enough to see. There’s still too much foliage.” She looked around the clearing ruefully—the other trees were either far too short for her purposes or much too tall and impossible for her to climb. “If only it were December and all the branches bare. Perhaps on the way back from London I can try to spot this clearing again.”
Though the lady’s bedstraw would not be in flower then, of course. Disappointment was a pang in her chest that she tried to quash.
“I can climb,” the earl said.
“You?”
His brows drew together, a baleful auburn line. “Of course. Why shouldn’t I?”
“Ah…”
Because he was an earl? Because his boots probably cost more than every stick of furniture in her cottage put together?
Because he had no reason to help her. She could not imagine why he would do it.
