And that naked flesh was but a few layers of clothing removed from hers.
She would start perspiring any moment now.
Best to concentrate on the matter at hand and not… bare chests. “You’re not serious.”
He couldn’t be.
“You’ll find that I am.”
She studied the hill. It was woolly with trees and shrubberies and… entirely too massive to consider climbing.
Before she could voice a sturdier objection than the one she’d already made, he said, “You can do it, Miss Tait.”
And there it was again. His belief in her.
Oh, how she liked it.
Too much.
Then, inexplicably, she nodded, and he smiled, and she realized a woman might agree to just about anything to coax a smile from a man like Mr. Kendall.
Oh, she was in trouble.
No doubt about it.
But perhaps it was just the sort of trouble she could afford to get into. After all, she would never see this man again in a few days.
Perhaps Tilly had the right idea.
Perhaps a holiday was all about getting into the right amount of trouble.
* * *
Not half an hour later,Nell was regretting heryes.
London, where she’d been born and bred, was flat, and this “hill” was decidedly not. It was, in fact, interminably, obstinatelysteep. So steep it had her huffing and puffing at Mr. Kendall’s back. So steep she wasn’t at all embarrassed that her huffing and puffing was the only sound for a mile around besides the crunch of their footsteps making the ascent in steady, dogged progress.
Really, though. The man had coated her in mud upon their first encounter. Bared his chest in their second. Now this marching her up what she decided was definitely a mountain.
What new torture would he devise next?
Actually, that wasn’t quite true.
His bare chest hadn’t been a torture on her eyes, at all.
“Almost there,” he called over his shoulder. “Are your boots holding up?”
“My boots are the least of my worries,” she puffed.
“Would you like a rest?”
“Best if we keep on.” She took a few steps before she added, “I might be tempted to turn around if we stop.”
The man had the temerity to snort.
A thought only now occurred to her. “Are you familiar with this place?” she asked, unable to keep a note of accusation out of her voice. He was entirely too adept at scaling this large “hill.”
“I visited several times as a child. My—the duke’s family seat isn’t very far south of here.”
