She leaned out of the window and gave him a dark look. “I suppose you think you’re going to stay here out of harm’s way?” She jerked a thumb toward the carriage door. “Get in.”
Thomas gave a deep sigh and climbed in beside her.
Her footman was going to earn his wedding gift today. She suspected she’d need more than just the threat of destruction from her arrows to separate two brawling war veterans.
Richard dabbedat the blood dribbling from his cut lip and propped himself up on a corner of the newly built stoop. He stretched his left leg out in front of him, grinding his boot heel against the pebbles.
The knee he’d nearly destroyed in a leap during a ship boarding years before pinged a sharp warning pain. Damn. He’d have to seek the stream behind Thorne’s cottage later to soak the offending limb in the bite of cold water. He stared across at his formidable opponent. The duke sat dazed, cross-legged on the ground, his previously well-groomed sandy hair now fell across one eye, an eye dangerously close to swelling shut. Bruises covered the rest of his face. Richard did not need a mirror to know he himself exhibited similar signs of combat.
The Saints preserve Ireland - now he’d broken so many laws, he might as well put the noose around his own neck and walk all the way back to London to face his fate. An Irish commoner brawling with an English duke? A century before, he’d have been strung up to the nearest tree already by Sidmouth’s tenants. In 1820, the laws were barely more humane when an Irish nobody committed an unspeakable act against his English betters.
Lady Blandford’s obnoxious, lordly cousin levered himself up off the ground from where he’d fallen and limped toward him. Richard, too exhausted to launch another defense, closed his eyes, stuck out his neck and pointed to his chin to make it easier for the man to take him out permanently.
They turned as one at the sound of a large carriage lurching perilously fast up the narrow, rocky path. A loud crack, similar to a cannon volley, made them look at each other and say, “She’s broken an axle.”
Sidmouth gave Richard a shove, and he joined him on his walk down the path after grabbing a long staff of wood and the axe. This would be a different sort of battle, requiring tools to repair and extricate Lady Blandford’s carriage. And, even in his brain fog induced by the duke’s fists, Richard knew it would not do at all to lecture her on her hair-brained scheme to stop the fight they’d already finished.
He hadn’t known this woman for long, but he knew her well.
Harriet rubbedat a fast-swelling bump near her elbow. They’d stopped so quickly in their head-long flight up the winding narrow roadway, she and Thomas had banged around in the carriage violently. She wasn’t sure of all the places on her body that would be sore in the days to come. Thomas had somehow cut the side of his cheek, and the shallow wound was spreading blood over him, the carriage, and her.hare
From the loud crack just before they lurched to a dead stop, she was certain they’d destroyed one of the carriage’s cross axles in their mad dash to make sure Sidmouth and Richard didn’t kill each other. The absurdity of stopping either of those two stubborn men in their single-minded wrong-headedness suddenly struck her as silly. She began to laugh and then could not stop. Was this a form of the hysteria she so abhorred in other women?
She lay partially atop poor Thomas who moaned beneath her. Just as she grasped the side of the seat to right herself and take her weight off her footman, the door jerked open and there were the two men who had caused the entire broth of a mill. Even though covered with bruises, they pushed and shoved each other in their haste to pull her and Thomas from the wrecked carriage.
In that moment, she had the strangest urge to throttle both of them, but her organized, logical side prevailed. She batted their searching touches as they sought the source of the blood on her face and down the bodice of her dress. “There is nothing wrong with me. All of this gore belongs to Thomas. Get him out of the carriage…but gently.”
Once they’d lifted her footman out of the carriage with the help of the driver and made him comfortable in the grass at the side of the roadway, Harriet ripped a band of cloth from the bottom of her skirt and wrapped it in a bandage about the poor man’s head. Now that she could see him in better light, it appeared he’d suffered only a slash to one cheek which had bled, nonetheless, like a butchered pig.
Satisfied that Thomas, though pale, would recover from his wound, she rounded on the two reasons they found themselves in the current mess. “What were the two of you thinking?”
Neither man said a word, but apparently, had found something exceedingly interesting in the vicinity of their boots to ponder.
“You, Sidmouth. You’re a peer of the realm.” At the smirk from Richard directed at her cousin, she turned on him. “And you, Lieutenant Bourne? You’re supposed to be an officer and a gentleman in the King’s Navy. How did you think brawling with a duke would end for you?”
Sidmouth seemed to rally and took on the familiar autocratic sneer she’d come to dread from their years in the nursery. “You are the cause of all of this. You who have a duty to your son and estate. You who promised me you would reconcile your betrothal to Viscount Grantham whilst I traveled on the Continent with my new wife. Yet, when I returned, I found you comfortably ensconced with a Marine, an Irish Marine, and when I tried to make you see sense, what did you do?”
Harriet lowered her head and recounted in her mind the strange conversation she’d had with her cousin over tea in the sitting room at the lodge that morning. She remembered all the things he’d lectured her about, and then she remembered the one thing he hadn’t said, the one thing that had been niggling at the back of her mind ever since.
When she lifted her head and gazed directly into his eyes, there was a glint of triumph in the look she gave him. “Sidmouth, you said many things this morning aboutmylife. The one thing you said nothing about wasyours. I have two questions: First, why did your three-month honeymoon end after only six weeks? And, secondly, where is your new wife?”
After the severethumping he’d just endured, Richard marveled at the impudent, courageous front Harriet presented to her cousin. The swaggering Duke of Sidmouth had immediately hung his head at her blunt questions, and now there’d been a long, uncomfortable silence. Finally, he spoke. “I’m going to ignore your first question, because it is none of your business. The answer to your second, even ruder question is that the duchess is quite happy and safe where she is.”
“And that would be?”
For a moment, there was a heavy silence and Richard readied himself to protect Lady Blandford if her cousin erupted like the volcano the redness of his face indicated.
The tall duke sucked in several unsteady inhales before answering her in a low, clear tone. “My lady wife abides at Bocollyn.”
“But why hasn’t she accompanied you to see the rest of the estate, and to visit me?”
“Her Grace is very busy.”
“With what? Is she ill?”
His next answer after a long pause was muffled, due to his having lowered his head. “She’s managing my stables, from the head groomsman’s cottage.”
Richard worried that Lady Blandford’s mouth would remain permanently open, but finally she stated the obvious. “She’s left Bocollyn House for the stables? What did you do to her?” Richard laid a calming hand on her arm only to have her wrench it away and nearly break his wrist.
