“No.” The word came out more steadily than she felt. “I apologize for?—”
“Later.”
He was already moving, already reaching for her, and Seraphina had the odd sensation of being managed with the same brisk economy he had applied to the horse, without unnecessary ceremony.
His hands came to her shoulders as he stripped the sodden pelisse from her back with two skilled movements and dropped it to the gravel. The cold struck her at once, driving through her gown’s wet fabric with a thoroughness that stole the breath from her lungs. Then his overcoat came around her.
Heavy wool. Thoroughly warm. The warmth of a body, not of a fire, immediate and absolute, soaking into her frozen shoulders with a relief so sudden it was almost painful. The garment enveloped her past her hips, entirely too large, carrying the scent of rain and leather and clean linen and something else beneath it. Something warm and indefinably masculine that her traitorous senses cataloged before she could tell them not to.
She closed her eyes for one involuntary second.
Do not,she told herself.Do not.
She opened them. He was looking at her as though he were accustomed to assessing difficult situations and had determined that she required a moment before further action. His eyes were an unusual blue, the color of flint in certain lights, and they were entirely focused. She found this simultaneously reassuring and unsettling. Not the unfocused social regard of a man looking at a young woman and seeing her station and her face and not much else. He was actually looking at her. At the situation. Ather.
When had anyone done that?
“You are frozen through.” A diagnosis, not a question. “If I may.”
He did not wait for a complete answer. Before she had formulated one, he had bent and slid one arm behind her knees and the other at her back, and lifted her.
Seraphina Oxley, eldest daughter of the ninth Duke of Oxley, four-and-twenty years old and possessed of a considerable and well-founded opinion of her own competence, was lifted off the ground as though she weighed approximately nothing.
She did not protest.
She was entirely incapable of protesting. Not because he had incapacitated her, though the removal of the question of whether she could walk a quarter mile on frozen, shaking legs was a considerable relief, but because some part of her that she had not consulted had decided, without reservation, that this was acceptable.
She knew who he was. Alistair’s man, the new steward, orman of businessas she had heard them say, which struck her as a distinction worth understanding. He had arrived with Alistair, had spent the intervening days closeted over maps and ledgers when not riding the estate, and was not, in any sense she had yet discovered, like the previous steward.
Nathaniel Beckwith was perhaps in his early thirties, with the kind of face difficult to date because it had never, she suspected, been notably young. A face that thought a great deal and said considerably less, those unreadable eyes filing everything away for later consideration.
He had looked at her twice in recent days. Not rudely, but with a focused directness she associated with genuine assessment rather than social performance. Which irritated her, because she was accustomed to the anxious deference of male servants who did not look on her directly. She was not accustomed to being regarded as a problem worth taking seriously.
She was not sure what to do with that.
He murmured to the bay, then spoke to her.
“Hold to me,” he said.
She did not argue. She was too cold for argument and, if she was honest, with no keen wish to. Her arms went around his neck, he settled her sideways across the saddle, and swung up behind her in a single movement so smooth the horse barely shifted, her pelisse in his gloved hand.
She found herself sitting across his thighs, her back turned against his chest, one arm coming around her waist with the automatic certainty of a man securing something valuable against the possibility of further mishap.
The warmth of him hit her like the first breath of a warm room after long cold. He was solid. Not rigid, but dense with the kind of real, working physical presence that had nothing to do with any drawing room she had ever occupied. His arm tightened fractionally as the horse moved, and she was acutely conscious of every point of contact … his thighs beneath hers, his chest behind her back, his chin brushing the top of her head when he bent to guide the horse around a rut in the drive. She was aware, too, of the steady rhythm of his breathing against her temple which was slow, controlled, entirely at odds with the hammering of her own pulse. And she thought that it was deeply unfair for a man to be quite so composed when she was not composed at all.
She felt remarkably far from London.
She had been anticipating that journey with the concentrated excitement of one who had never left Yorkshire, positively vibrating with it when Alistair first proposed it. London. Shops and assemblies and the possibility of society, and the air of a world that was not Fortunestone Hall and its particular catalog of ghosts and constraints. She had wanted it with an urgency that was almost embarrassing.
At this present moment, London felt curiously theoretical. A destination that would still be there. A collection of streets and drawing rooms that was not, to any great extent, going anywhere.
That,said the stern and sensible portion of her mind,is the cold and the shock speaking, and you will feel very differently once you are warm and dry.
Probably. Yes. Almost certainly.
She watched his left hand on the reins, guiding the bay with small delicate movements, adjusting for the horse’s restlessness with a patience that was neither indulgent nor intolerant, and thought about what she actually knew of him … which was remarkably little for a man who had been living under the same roof for the better part of a week.
He was from Hertfordshire, she believed she had heard Alistair mention. The son of a land agent, which would explain the quality of his education evident in his speech and the straightforward confidence of his manner. He had neither the polish of aristocratic breeding nor the deference of service, but something more self-possessed than either. The confidence of a man who had earned his position and knew it. His clothing was good, she had always had an eye for fabric and cut despite having had very little occasion to employ it, and he had not dressed for a ducal estate the way a man trying to impress would dress. He had dressed for work. There was a difference, and she found, somewhat to her surprise, that she preferred it.
