Love With the Perfect Scoundrel (2 page)

“Just the wind, my dear. It’s more than a mite wicked in the vales.”

“But it sounds like a child crying most piteously.”

“Some say it’s the lost heir of the moors.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Just a sad tale told by—”

The carriage bounced out of a frozen rut and lurched to one side. Grace became stiff with the ill feeling of disaster. And in one suspended instant in time, everything changed.

Rounding another sharp turn, the carriage careened across the ice-slicked lane. Mr. Brown levered his aged frame into the space beside her and braced her shoulders as the old, ill-suited carriage floated on a long skid to the far side of the road. The driver shouted, and with an awful creaking sound, the tiny single-horse-drawn carriage teetered sideways before losing its fight with gravity, and tumbled onto its side. The loud crack of a wheel or axle rended the air at the same moment Mr. Brown’s heavy form fell on top of her and a pain lanced her ribs.

In that moment, Grace envisioned the distraught, pitying expressions of her two former fiancés, the Duke of Helston and the Marquis of Ellesmere, as they searched the wreckage. Mr. Brown and she would appear like frozen herrings in a tin under a hedgerow.

For a few seconds there was blessed silence before the carriage horse whinnied and the ruined vehicle slid a few inches forward. The old carriage’s off-kilter frame creaked in outrage and cracks snaked down the joints.

“Lady Sheffield? Lord, I’m crushing you,” Mr. Brown croaked.

“No,” she whispered. “I’m perfectly fine.”

“Thank God.” He awkwardly reached for the door, which was now above them. Maneuvering, he wrenched it open and a blast of cold wind rushed inside the tiny carriage, which had never been meant for long-distance travel.

“Roman? Roman, are you there, man?” When there was no response, Mr. Brown toed a buckled bench and heaved himself through the opening, muttering a Scottish oath.

Breathless, Grace righted herself despite the tangle of her gown’s skirting and the blankets, and then knelt on what had once been the side of the carriage. She collected all the objects flung about—her book; Mr. Brown’s ledger; her embroidery bag; and her large jewelry pouch. The latter she put in her voluminous pocket.

“Lady Sheffield, can you hear me?”

“Yes.”

“Look, we’ve a dilemma. Mr. Roman is knocked senseless and his head is bleeding. At least the horse is unharmed. You’re going to ride pillion—behind Mr. Roman, holding him—toward the last town. I’ll walk. Give me your hand and I’ll help you out.”

“Mr. Brown, I’m afraid I can’t do that.”

“What? Come along now. I’ve wrapped Roman’s wound but we have to make our way out of here straightaway. The wind is up and—”

“Mr. Brown, I cannot ride astride with this narrow gown.” She prayed it would be an acceptable excuse. “And I certainly won’t be able to prop up Mr. Roman if he’s unconscious—especially without a saddle. He’s a very large man, is he not? You must take him. I’ll wrap myself tightly with these blankets and wait until you send someone back for me.”

Mr. Brown muttered another oath. “Lass, you will get out o’ this wreck and mount the blasted horse now. And I’ll hear no’ another word about it.”

“Mr. Brown,” she replied calmly, “if you don’t do what I suggest, you might very well find yourself with two injured people on your hands without any sort of shelter—not even a wrecked carriage—and then what will Ata do to you? Especially when I tell her that I begged you to send help. And I could also hail the mail coach when it passes. The man at the inn mentioned it was traveling this same road, did he not?”

She heard him climb down the outside of the carriage while mumbling something about ladies and their
blooming
ability to make men bow to their ill thought out ideas. Then a heap of clothing was tossed through the door. She swaddled herself in a mélange of thin shawls taken from her trunk strapped to the rear of the rickety carriage.

Mr. Brown draped his torso through the opening and thrust a flask into her fingers. “Here’s a bit o’ false fire.” He cradled her cheek with his gnarled hand. “I don’t like this at all, mind you. No’ one bit. But you’ve got that look about you. That mulish look I’m thinking Ata taught you. Och, I know it too well.” Mr. Brown’s Scottish burr always became more pronounced when he was agitated.

“You’re correct. Go on, now. I don’t want Mr. Roman to suffer a moment more than necessary. I shall be perfectly fine. I’m stifling under all these shawls. And I have the basket of food from the inn.”

Mr. Brown was remarkably good in a crisis, and even better at taking direction.

He shook his head. “Don’t you dare set one foot out o’ this carriage. I promise I’ll return for you.” He glared at her until she shook her head once. Then he shut the carriage door above her.

Within minutes, the sounds of Mr. Brown and the carriage horse muted and she was surrounded by silence. It was the first time she’d been alone for days—no, months. Actually, she realized, it felt like the first time she’d been truly alone for
years
.

She exhaled in one long, almost endless breath, and became lightheaded. For the last month she’d thought she might burst from the pent-up emotion. She’d not dared to show an inch of sorrow, even around her sweet Cornish maid.

During the journey, she’d been so grateful for the cold. It had numbed her limbs, which had been screaming at her to get away from Cornwall, and then London, as fast as possible. The chill had also allowed her mind to see everything with crystal clarity.

She was not meant to be living with other people. She was completely different from other ladies. And the thing of it was, she would be entirely happy living alone as she had done most of her childhood. Her friends often mistook her love of solitude for loneliness; they didn’t understand the contentment that could be found by leaving one’s heart sheltered and one’s mind to quiet reflection. She tried to breathe, but again felt a hitch in her side from the effort.

There—she’d admitted it all to herself. Mr. Brown had been wrong. She possessed a great defect in her character—in her moral fiber. She was weak and she approached everything in life tentatively and without any sort of passion. It was the reason she had not secured the affections of two fiancés.

She was a retiring coward in the fruitful garden of her pampered life. And running away from her disappointments was something of an art form she had perfected. But sitting here, growing dizzy, she accepted the truth. She was never going to be able to run far enough away this time—for she could not run away from herself.

Agony darkened the edges of her vision before she struggled against all the binding layers of impractical thin clothing. Pain hit her rib cage like an avalanche gaining momentum at the same moment she noticed a small streak of blood on her glove.

Glancing behind her only to find the broken glass of the carriage sconce, she guessed she’d fallen against it during the accident. Now scared, she refused to examine the wound; instead she wrapped a silk mantlet around her ribs and bound it as tightly as she could bear.

Grace knew she should be worried about her predicament, but instead she could only feel tired. And she was grateful. She hadn’t been able to sleep more than an hour or two at a time since leaving Cornwall. Then again, she’d never slept well. Surrendering to exhaustion, Grace Sheffey’s mind sloughed off her worries and flew out of the confines of this wreck of a carriage all the way to the oblivion of a deep, dreamless sleep.

The fragile strands of consciousness lay just out of her grasp for Lord only knew how long. With a strength she hadn’t known she possessed, Grace clenched her fingers repeatedly to waken. She lay there a long time before she forced down some of the contents of Mr. Brown’s flask and coughed violently against the burn.

Her mind blurry, she wasn’t sure if she had swooned or fallen asleep. But she wasn’t foolish enough to succumb to it again. This unnaturally dark, frigid cocoon frightened her.

The hinges creaked as she shoved at the door above. In a rush, the door fell from its moorings, taking a portion of the carriage siding with it. Clumps of snow littered her as she toppled over from the exertion.

The silence of the snow showering from the ever more gloomy sky clawed at her. When had the storm started? Surely, it would stop soon. Mr. Brown had said it never snowed this early in the season.

What had happened to Mr. Brown and the driver? Lord…Perhaps they’d met with ill luck. Mr. Brown would’ve returned for her by now if he could.

Well, she had to get out, had to start walking. No one was coming for her. She would perish if she remained here. Yet it was hard to make her limbs obey. Tears of frustration almost froze inside her eyelids as she twisted herself from the wreckage.

Bent with weariness and the edge of pain furrowing her side, she leaned into the wind, into the gloaming, and trudged toward the main mail coach road—away from the direction Mr. Brown had taken. It was her best chance. She was certain she would find a house or village around the next bend.

The world around her became ghostly, the flakes falling on a slant, drifting onto the heavy branches of the trees, hedgerows, and the lane, softening the ugly ruts in the road. She shivered and drew the blankets more tightly about her.

Snow cascaded from a nearby conifer and the tawny shadow of an enormous owl emerged from the branches, its wings spread in flight. How she wished she could fly away too.

Icy flecks invaded the tops of her inadequate half boots while Grace trudged onward. Only the crunch of her footsteps on the new snow breached the silence of the northern Peak District. Her breath crystallized in the blanket near her mouth as she tried to regulate her thoughts and her breathing.

Just past the first turn, she realized there was no house, no village in front of her, only a long stretch of whiteness bordered by snow-powdered hedges without a telltale rise of smoke in the distance.

She didn’t dare look up again for a long while.

Time lost all meaning as she walked onward, her cheeks stinging, then without feeling, as hints of even-tide crept in behind the melancholy December sky.

It was then that Grace Sheffey murmured an almost forgotten prayer from her childhood…a little something to her guardian angel begging an entree to paradise.

M
ichael Ranier tugged his brushed-beaver hat lower on his head and was grateful for the protection against the heavy snowfall. An eerie calm had settled on this land, despite the outpouring from the heavens. He loosened the reins and gave his powerful mare her head so she could choose the best path in this sudden, wretched blizzard. He wouldn’t have pressed onward from the last village if all the physical features of the landscape had not proved he was close to the first view of his new beginning…Brynlow.

Then again, the fast-forming drifts were quite effectively covering any trace of his passage. It helped quell the ill ease that had dogged him since the moment he had stepped onto the filthy English docks less than a week ago.

Only a few miles now separated him from the mysterious property his childhood friend had left to him in his will. Poignant memories tinged his thoughts. Who would have guessed that little Samuel Bryn would one day tempt Michael from the hard-won productive life he’d cobbled together in the colonies during the last decade and a half or more?

Michael rounded another turn in the road, grateful for the guide of the hedgerow blanketed in snow, and hoped more than anything that Sam had left him a huge pile of split wood, for it was going to take a cord of well-seasoned red oak to ease the cold from his heavy bones.

Michael began to hum in an effort to calm and encourage his mare. After eight long hours on the road, her strength was not waning nor her spirit, but he knew she liked it when he sang to her. She whinnied and shook the melting flakes from her heavily muscled black neck.

Michael chuckled. “Sorry sweetheart, pipes are damned near frozen.”

He stroked his mount’s shoulder, then clucked to urge her to turn onto the northwesterly route, a long, straight, desolate roadway.

There was something moving far in the distance. A stag, most likely. He squinted.

He had imagined it. There was nothing there. Michael continued onward, leaning into the brunt of the storm. The effort to encourage his horse with song was stripped from him by the increasing gusts of the tempest.

The mare raised her head and stopped, her ears pricked up. She sidestepped and her neck swung around before she snorted.

A small hooded form leaned against an ancient, towering hemlock, its huge branches shielding the figure.

Good God.

He called out, “Hey…you there.”

The hood moved toward him but the effort appeared too great to bear. His heart lurched. Everything screamed this was a person poor in spirit and material goods, two things he knew all too well.

Without hesitation, Michael eased his weight onto his left stirrup and swung off, landing in a quagmire of snow.

“Hey, are you all right? Caught by the storm, were you?”

He reached the shelter of the tree just as the pitiable, blanket-covered sod raised his head again.

Two soft blue eyes, drowning in the wisdom of the ages, stared straight into his soul, piercing his heart. He staggered backward.

Why, he’d stumbled across something from heaven. No earthly eyes or flesh possessed such translucence. Beyond the fringes of the dull, worn blanket wrapped about her, pale hair shimmered silver in the fading light.

Her gaze faltered not. “For–forgive me for being so ridiculous, but are—are you an illusion?”

A deep chuckle rumbled within his chest. “I was about to ask you the same, miss.”

“Well, this is a f-f-first. My prayers have n-n-n”—her teeth chattered uncontrollably—“never been answered before.”

“I’ve never been the answer to anyone’s prayers, sweetheart.” Michael scratched his jaw and smiled. “But I’ll try my damnedest to live up to your expectations.”

He wanted to ask what in hell she was doing out here, alone and facing the elements, but knew the importance of helping her keep whatever shreds of pride her obvious poverty allowed—and so he remained still and silent, waiting for her.