There was a short silence. “From where we are staying,” she said warily.
“And where is that?”
“That’s my business,” she said firmly. “Thank you for your concern. Good-bye.”
Gabriel admired her spirit. She’d dismissed him like a little duchess, and on his own land. “I’m not going anywhere, without you,” he informed her. They were in dire straits and it was not in him to abandon any woman and child to their fate.
She edged away from him, clutching the boy to her. “Don’t be ridiculous. You don’t even know us. And we don’t know you.”
She took another step backward…Another…
He strode forward and grabbed her as she started to slip. Before she knew what he was about, he placed both hands around her waist and lifted her away from the brink.
“Let me g—Oh,” she stammered, as he released her. She glanced behind her and saw. “Oh…Th-thank you.”
“My pleasure. Gabriel Renfrew, at your service.” He bowed. “And you are…?”
She drew herself up straight, fighting desperately for dignity. “Appreciative of your…assistance. But my son and I shall do very well now, thank you, good-bye.”
“It’s my land,” Gabe reminded her gently.
“Yes. Of course. We shall leave. Come, Nicky.” She took the child’s hand and took three lopsided steps away from him. Then she hesitated and said with a further heartbreaking attempt at dignity. “This is the path to Lulworth, I take it?”
“It is, but you’re not going to Lulworth tonight.”
“Indeed we are,” she said as certainly as a female could whose teeth chattered like Spanish castanets.
Gabe ignored her. He took Trojan’s reins and knotted them lightly on the horse’s neck. He pulled out his caped overcoat from the saddlebag and took the bandbox from the boy.
“What are you doing? That’s my bandbox,” she said. “Give it back at once!”
Gabe tied the bandbox to the saddle, put on the overcoat and held out his hand to her. “Come on.”
She pressed back against the rocks at the rear of the path. “I won’t!” She gave a panic-stricken glance at the horse and in a different voice said, “I can’t!”
He shrugged and swung the boy onto a ledge above the path.
“Let him go!” In desperation she swung a fist at Gabe, but he caught it easily.
She lifted her fist to swing at him and he caught her hand in his. At that moment the moon came out from behind the clouds, flooding the cliff top—and the woman’s face—with clear, silvery light.
Gabriel had had the breath knocked out of him a dozen times. Each time he’d thought he was dying.
He’d been kicked in the head by a horse once. It had scrambled his wits for a while.
And a couple of times in his life he’d been so drunk that he’d lost all sense of time and place.
Seeing her face in the moonlight was like all of those rolled into one. And more. Gabe’s breathing stopped. He forgot how to speak. He was unable to think. He could only stare. And stare. And stare.
She had the sweetest face he’d ever seen, round and sweet and sad and somehow…right, framed by a cloud of dark, wavy hair. An angel come to earth. With the most kissable mouth in the world.
He swallowed, drinking in the sight of her like a man facing a waterfall after a lifetime of thirst.
She gazed back at him. Her eyes were beautiful, he thought, eyes a man could happily drown in. He wondered what color they were.
“Release me this instant!” the angel snapped, and Gabriel’s breath came back in a great whoosh of air. The angel was very, very human. And very, very frightened.
He held her clenched fist up, nearly at eye level. “This,” Gabe shook her right fist a little, “would have hurt you more than it would have hurt me.” He turned her fist palm up and explained. “See how your thumb is placed here? If you’d connected with my head, it would have been shockingly bruised, maybe even broken. I have a very hard head.”
