Page 25 of The MacGregor's Lady
Except it wasn’t the smith. The man emerging from the gloom of the smithy, standing there without his shirt, naked to the waist and bulging with muscles was none other than Lord Balfour.
God in heaven, no wonder he’d been able to keep the chill off her. Hannah scooted around to watch as Balfour braced the coach, then hoisted it so the wainwright—no delicate flower himself—could wrestle the wheel back onto the axle. The two men continued taunting each other, with Balfour’s tone—andhisphysique—suggesting he could hold up a wagon all day if need be.
And all the while, his chest, arms, and back bunched and rippled with his every breath.
She’d seen men without their shirts, even seen fit young men laboring without their shirts, but this…Steamrose off Balfour’s shoulders, as if he were some magnificent Vulcan come to the shires for his own entertainment. He hadn’t yet shaved, and his countenance was darker than ever. The skin of his arms, belly, and chest had the same sun-bronzed hue as his face, and when he smiled at her, his teeth fairly gleamed…
She’d been found out.
Caught gawking like a schoolgirl. Hannah turned without acknowledging Lord Balfour or his smile. The Englishmen she’d met in her father’s parlor would have expired of mortification if she’d seen them without their shirts as others looked on.
Nor would she have wanted to see them.
How long she churned around the little common she could not have said, but at some point, she became aware that she was sharing the path.
“Just think,” Balfour said. “All that vulgar muscle could have become your sentence for life had I not prevailed on the goodwife in the dale and her spouse.”
He wouldn’t be a sentence; he’d be a citadel. “And I haven’t thanked you yet.” She did thank heavens, though, that he was once again properly clad, right down to his many-caped coat.
“You’re thanking me for coming across a convenient way to avoid a marriage between us?”
“I do thank you for that,” she said, “but compared to preserving my life when the elements were threatening a dire fate, preserving me from scandal comes a distant second.”
“So you would not have married me had we been found out on the moor cuddled up in our bide-a-wee?”
Hannah couldn’t read his expression. She would not have married him—earls needed to stick close to their earldoms, even a Boston heiress grasped that much—but, wonder of wonders, she would have been tempted.
Hannah liked Balfour, she respected him, and—most curious of all—she trusted him. “I think it more the case we would not have married each other.”
“Despite the display you came upon in the smithy’s yard, I am a gentleman, Miss Cooper. I would have had no choice.”
“I know.” And that had bothered her most as the sleigh had taken them back to town.
“What do you think you know?”
“You didn’t enact that little charade in the dale to protect my good name or to preserve my marital options this spring. You did it to preserve your own.”
She dropped his arm—when had she taken his arm?—and tried to make a dignified retreat, but he kept up with her easily.
“This bothers you?” His tone was jaunty, and yet the topic mattered to him, or he wouldn’t have raised it. “It bothers you somebody might want the same freedoms you seek to appropriate for yourself?”
They were in view of the smithy again, with its complement of men passing the time of day with one another. Hannah had never thought of a smithy as a dark, mysterious place before, never had the urge to linger where she could watch one from the shadows.
If Hannah claimed the right to remain unfettered by marriage, she had to accord Balfour the same latitude. She also accorded him a bit of honesty. “I am not used to being rejected.”
The words had come straight from her brain to her mouth, the insight striking her even as she spoke. She was used to being marginalized, notquiterejected, but tethered to the fringes of acceptability by a stout rope of inherited fortune—or had she simply decided she preferred to dwell there?
Balfour—he’d given her permission to call him Asher—picked up her hand and tucked it around his forearm. A forearm she could now visualize thick with muscle, dusted with the same dark hair as he had in such abundance on his head. That hair was downy soft. She’d felt it against her cheek the night before as he’d drawn her body close to his.
“Ah,” said his lordship, but it was a teasing “ah,” not an insulting one.
“Ah, what?”
“I wasn’t rejecting you, Miss Cooper, I was protecting your dreams. Don’t pull away, if you please. The last thing we need is for you to do yourself another injury and delay us yet more on our way to London.”
In his words, in his jocular discussion of reasons not to marry each other, Balfour did Hannah’s heart an injury—a small injury. She kept silent, took a firm hold of his arm, and walked more quickly in the direction of the inn.
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