He was enormous, tall and broad-shouldered and muscled of thigh, with overlong reddish-gold hair. His riding clothes were expensive—she could tell that at a glance—and he looked the faintest bit flushed and windblown. As though he’d just come off a hunt, perhaps: a great javelin in his hand as he took down a boar in the forest.
Fasten a beard to his face and the man would be the picture of a marauding Viking. A Norse God.
Perhaps shewashallucinating. She’d certainly gone rather muzzy-headed.
“Who are you in truth?” she managed to get out as the towering man dragged her across the yard toward where a dappled gray horse stood hitched to a post.
Good Christ, the horse was huge too.
“Who the devil areyou?” he countered.
“I am”—she tried to yank her elbow out of his grip—“Winnie Halifax.”
“Mrs. Spencer Halifax?”
“Yes!” she said reflexively, and then promptly winced at the expression on his face.
His voice was something of a growl. “Like hell you are.”
She yanked at her elbow again. They were rapidly approaching the horse. “Let me go!”
“Not on your life. I didn’t secure your release from that cell so that you could steal my damned horse and ride off with it—”
“Horse thievery is a capital offense in this country, sir.” She tried to pretend she had not been considering whether she could manage exactly that.
“So is posing as a countess!”
“It most certainly is not.” At twelve, Winnie had memorized the list of capital crimes in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, mostly to ensure that her mother wasn’t committing any of them.
And then his words registered. “A countess?”
“Indeed.” He mounted the horse in one smooth movement and then, heedless of the muck that covered her body, dragged her up in front of him and into his lap. He banded one arm about her middle and took the reins in his other hand. “I am Spencer Halifax, the fifth Earl of Warren. And you, Mrs. Halifax, have a great deal of explaining ahead of you.”
It was at this point that Winnie considered swooning.
This idea was suggested in part by her vision, which had gone slightly gray about the edges. Her brain, however, proffered a quick treatise on the strategic value of a tactical collapse. She could go limp, perhaps slither right off the horse and run as far and as fast away from this man—this Viking earl, for heaven’s sake—as she possibly could.
But she must’ve given herself away. His grip on her waist tightened further, and he bent his head to her ear. His voice was a grim whisper. “Don’t even think about it.”
She swallowed and nodded and did not swoon.
Mr. Halifax—no, oh God, he would be Lord Warren, wouldn’t he?—led them swiftly to Llanreithan. Winnie’s sheep farm lay on the outskirts of town, but he didn’t direct his horse toward her residence. She prayed he did not know where she lived. Instead, he directed the horse to the village’s only thoroughfare and stopped at the Slippery Hen, the village’s sole inn.
He brought the horse around to the inn’s stables without once loosening his grip on her arm. He saw to the horse’s tending and installation alongside three more well-matched grays. And then Winnie saw in the courtyard a gleaming polished coach, a lacquered blue-and-red crest emblazoned on its side, and felt that fuzzy sensation in her head again.
The man had not been lying. He truly was an aristocrat.
He hauled her inside the inn. Mrs. Upholland, the landlady, froze in the act of placing a tankard of ale in front of Archibald Davies.
“A room,” Lord Warren said shortly.
Mrs. Upholland’s normally pinched expression had been replaced by one of outright shock. “Winnie? Is that you under all that muck?”
She winced. Surely she was not so unrecognizable.
She looked down at her blackened fingernails and grimy hands and decided that she was. “Yes, Mrs. Upholland,” she said. “It is I.”
Mrs. Upholland’s sour expression returned. “I’m going to tear a piece from Turner Green’s hide, you see if I don’t. Letting them take you down to the jail like a commoncriminal—”
