“Oh, there’s a list now?”Lucy asked.
“Not yet, but there will be.I intend to be systematic about this.”
“Girls,” Henrietta protested again.“My poor head.”
Refraining from pointing out that she might be less prone to headaches if she didn’t insist on wearing bonnets weighed down with dead bird carcasses, Gemma went back to watching out the window for her first glimpse of their new home.
Hedgerows and the occasional low stone fence ran alongside the road and divided up the fields.Dotted about the countryside here and there, Gemma saw thatched-roof farmsteads and stone outbuildings.Sheep placidly cropped the grass and lay in the shade of tall, sturdy trees.
They were only two days’ journey from London, yet Wiltshire was so different, Gemma felt as if they’d somehow traveled to another world.
They crossed a stone bridge, the rushing brook below loud in her ears as a collection of small buildings came into view.Built from the local limestone, their crooked rooftops and smoking chimneys seemed to glow in the fading afternoon light.
Before Gemma had time to register more than the size of the village (tiny) and its level of quaintness (extreme), the carriage was slowing once more, and turning off the mail coach route, through a stone archway and into the courtyard of a ramshackle coaching inn.
Gemma stared across the dirty cobblestone courtyard.Streaky bare windows stared forlornly back at her as chickens scratched around the sunken steps.A wooden door hung ajar, giving a glimpse into the dark interior of the inn.
It opened, and a tall, bearded man in laborer’s clothes stepped out to lean one broad shoulder against the crumbling doorframe.He watched impassively as the coach rolled to a stop in front of him.
The tips of Gemma’s fingers went cold and tingly and her breath came short, striking against the confines of her light corset.
“What is this place?”Henrietta asked tremulously.“Are we lost?”
“Don’t be silly, John Coachman never gets lost,” Lucy reminded her, but her voice was uncharacteristically small.
“Perhaps he has stopped here to ask for directions.”Unable to bear the tension, Gemma put her head out of the window again to speak to John.It was terrifically unladylike, but there was no one but that uncommonly tall laborer to see her, and Gemma had never been very good at being ladylike anyway.
“John?Are we lost?”she called.
“No, your ladyship,” came John’s implacable reply.
Gemma’s heart stopped.For some reason, she glanced back at the man in the doorway, who straightened with slow, insolent grace.Pulling his hands from his pockets, he strolled unhurriedly toward the coach.
Behind Gemma, her mother and sister were talking over one another, asking questions she couldn’t answer in high-pitched tones of distress that blurred into an incomprehensible din in her ears as she stared into the man’s face.
His features were rough and angular, the lines of his square jaw softened only by the gleaming chestnut of his short-cropped beard.He wore no hat and he had the sun-bronzed skin of a man who worked outside, though the creases that fanned out from the corners of his vivid green-gold eyes could’ve been from laughter rather than squinting against the glare.A lock of light brown hair fell over his forehead, gleaming with strands of copper and gold in the waning sunlight, and for a mad moment, her fingers buzzed with the urge to smooth it back.
He was extraordinarily well built, tall and broad with real muscles that came from hard physical labor rather than the discreet padding of a dandy.His every movement spoke of power, a leashed animal vitality that stirred Gemma’s blood and stole the breath from her lungs.
This man was temptation incarnate.
Oh no, she thought blankly.This cannot be happening.I don't have time for an inconvenient attraction!
Then he opened his beautiful, sensually shaped mouth, and Gemma somehow knew what he was about to say before he said it.
“Welcome to Five Mile House.”
ChapterTwo
Hal sprawled on a tall chair by the bar, stretched his tired legs out in front of him, and enjoyed the view.
After a long day of helping one of the Havilocke estate’s tenant farmers mend a broken plough, which had led to helping shore up the crumbling wall of the pigsty and digging out a new well, Hal had earned his afternoon’s entertainment watching the long-absent owners stand in the middle of his local pub to flap and squawk like the hens did when the mail coach came through.
At the moment, the three ladies were an indistinguishable froth of black bombazine topped off by that truly ludicrous hat.The stuffed crow bobbed and jerked above the fray.
But Hal was uncomfortably aware that he could recall the finest details of the face of the young woman he’d spoken to in the carriage.It was an extraordinary face: a perfect oval with high cheekbones, pretty pink lips curved in such a way that they would always hold a hint of a smile, and an unusual—and highly kissable—divot in the center of the small chin.Her dark blue eyes had been wide with something like shock or despair, framed by excessively long lashes and set off by strong, straight brows.
All three ladies had the pale, satiny skin that spoke of a leisurely life lived primarily indoors.
