Page 28 of The Mad Baron's Bride
Her in his arms. The instant, powerful flare of lust, and a certain triumphal possession. He’d wanted her back against him the moment she slid off his lap in the coach. She was light yet substantial, her curves fitting against his, and shebelongedhere.
“Are you glad now you did not leave me kicking my heels at the Angel? I am saving your boots.”
“You are giving me palpitations. Please do not drop me.”
“Wrap your arms around me.”
“Then if I fall, you fall, too.”
“You trust no one to look after you, do you?”
A silence followed, then she said quietly, “No one ever has.”
He curled her closer to him and kept his balance as a board shifted beneath him. Water, speckled with grains of silt and algae, slipped over his boot. He tried not to wonder if it would stain the fine leather. “Parents?”
“Fine, upstanding people, concerned with one thing only: that my sister and I make marriages reflecting well on them. At least with my sister, they succeeded.”
“And your husband was cruel.”
She did not answer, which said enough.
He cradled her against him. Almonds and forget-me-nots teased his nose. “And with my aunt, you do the looking after.”
“It is the purpose for which she hired me,” she said drolly. “Nay, don’t step there—that pile is rotten. Try that tuft.” She pointed.
“And now you are going to direct me in how I carry you.” The tuft gave way, a deceptive mound, and his boot squelched into mud. Water leaked through a seam. The leather would definitely be ruined.
“You needn’t carry me at all. I can walk.”
He hoisted her more firmly against him, bringing her head closer to his face. He wished to hold her till his arms gave way. “Have you considered that a different husband might look after you?”
“Husbands do not acquire wives to pet and coddle them.”
Jack pressed his nose to the buckram of her bonnet over her temple. His breath stirred the wisps of hair peeking from beneath the brim.
“I would pet you. Often.”
Her eyes feathered shut and a muscle spasmed in her throat, above the high collar of her jacket. A shiver passed through her into him, a ripple of desire.
She desired him, perhaps as much as he desired her, but she was valiantly fighting.
“Put me down here. By the monument.”
Drawing out the effort as long as possible, he set her on her feet on the plank pathway, which held firmer now that the ground had risen to river meadow. She smoothed her bodice and skirts while Jack read the inscriptions on the monument, again dedicated to Maud Heath.
Atop the pillar, metal flags marked a sundial on all four sides, with the usual epigram. “Let us do good while there is time,” Jack read. “That is your motto, I think.”
“You know your Latin.”
“Only what was beaten into me at King’s Ely.”
She joined him to regard the weathered monument. Warm sun glossed her cheek.
“Perhaps beatings would have improved my French. My governess despaired.”
So she’d had a governess who taught her French and parents concerned about how high she married. She’d been born to a gentleman’s family, which explained why she had sought employment as a lady’s companion and not in trade.
He could marry her. Not that there was much family left to bemoan if he married beneath him, but Leda Wroth would not lower the Burnham name or the Brancaster title. If anything, Jack lowered it. As a baron’s lesser son, his father had stooped to trade—never mind it was a profession he loved—and Jack had himself been apprenticing to a trade of his own when a distant uncle’s sudden death passed the estate and the title to him. Ten years later, he still didn’t feel easy in his role of lord ofthe manor, certain that behind his back, both his neighbors and tenants referred to him as the shoemaker’s son.
