“Oh, no!” she cried again, more forcefully this time and half shrank away from him. “I weigh a ton. Besides …”
“I doubt it, ma’am,” he said. “I believe I am quite capable of carrying you without dropping you or doing permanent damage to my back.”
He bent over her, wrapped one arm about her shoulders while he slid the other beneath her knees, and straightened up with her. She freed one arm hastily from her cloak and flung it about his neck. But it was quickly obvious that she was startled and alarmed—and then very indignant.
He had, of course, offered her a choice but had not waited for her to make it. But really there had been no choice. Only a daft woman would have chosen to hop along at his side merely to preserve a bit of feminine dignity.
He strode upward with her as best he could while allowing for the give of the pebbles.
“Do you always,” she asked him, her voice breathless and coldly haughty, “do exactly as you please, Mr. Trentham, even when you appear to be offering an option to your victims?”
Victims?
“Besides,” she continued without giving him a chance to answer her question, “I would have chosen neither option, sir. I would prefer to make my own way home on my own two feet.”
“That would be downright silly,” he said, not even trying to hide the scorn he was feeling. “Your ankle is in a bad way.”
She smelled good. It was not the sort of perfume that all too many women splashed all over themselves, the sort that assaulted one’s nasal passages and throat and set one to sneezing and coughing. He suspected that it was a very expensive fragrance. It clung enticingly about her person but did not invade his own. Her dress was a pale mushroom color and appeared to be made of finest wool. Expensive wool. This was no impoverished lady.
Just a careless and silly one.
And were not ladies supposed to be trailed by maids and assorted chaperons wherever they went? Where was her entourage? He might have been saved from personal involvement if she had been properly accompanied.
“That ankle is always troublesome,” she said. “I am accustomed to it. I habitually limp. I fell from a horse and broke it a number of years ago, and it was not set properly. I really must ask you to put me down and allow me to go on my way.”
“It is badly swollen,” he said. “If you have come from the village, you have a mile to go to get back there. How long do you estimate it would take you to hop or crawl that distance?”
“I believe,” she said, her voice cool and disdainful, “that is my concern, Mr. Trentham, not yours. But you are the type of man who must always be right, I perceive, while other people must always be wrong—at least in your estimation.”
Well, good Lord! Did she think he was enjoying playing Sir Galahad?
They were still on the upward slope, though they had left the pebbles behind and were on the firmer ground of coarse, scrubby grass. He stopped abruptly, set her down on her feet, and took one step away from her. He clasped his hands behind his back and looked steadily at her with an expression that had used to wither soldiers in their tracks.
He was actually going to enjoy this.
“Thank you,” she said with chilly hauteur—though she had the grace to look suddenly apologetic. “I thank you for coming to my assistance, sir. You could easily have avoided doing so. I had not seen you, as you must have realized. I am Lady Muir.”
Ah, definitely a lady. She probably expected him to bow and scrape and tug on his forelock.
She took one step back from him—and collapsed in an undignified heap on the ground.
He stood looking down at her and pursed his lips. She would not like that loss to her dignity.
She rose to her knees, set her hands flat on the ground, and … laughed. It was a merry sound of pure amusement, though it did end in a little hiccup of pain.
“Mr. Trentham,” she said, “you have my permission to say ‘I told you so.’ ”
“I told you so,” he said—one must not disoblige a lady. “And it is Lord Trentham.”
Silly of him to insist upon that detail, perhaps, but she irritated him.
She turned to sit on the ground. It was probably still damp from yesterday’s rain, he thought. Serve her right. He gazed down at her with hard eyes and set jaw.
She sighed as she looked up at him. Her face had turned pale again. He would wager that that ankle was throbbing like a thousand devils. Maybe five thousand after her attempt to put weight on it.
“You gave me a choice a short while ago,” she said, all the haughtiness gone from her voice, though a trace of her laughter remained. “And since I am not a silly woman, or at least do not wish to appear silly, I choose the second. If the option is still open to me, that is. You would be quite within your rights to withdraw it now, but I would be much obliged if you would carry me to Penderris, Lord Trentham, even though I find the thought of imposing my presence there deeply distressing. Perhaps you would be good enough to lend me a carriage when we get there so that I do not even have to enter the—”
He bent and scooped her up again. As humble pie went, she had eaten a fair portion.
He strode onward in the direction of the house. He did not try to make conversation. He could only imagine the sort of reception he was going to get, and the sort of teasing he was going to have to endure for the rest of his stay at Penderris.
“You are or have been a military gentleman, Lord Trentham,” she said, breaking the silence a couple of minutes later. “I am right, am I not?”
“What makes you say so?” he asked without looking down at her.
“You have the bearing of an officer,” she said, “and the hard-jawed, intense-eyed look of a man accustomed to command.”
He looked down briefly at her. He did not reply to her words.
“Oh, this is going to be horribly embarrassing,” she said a couple of minutes later as they approached the house.
“But better, I daresay,” he said curtly, “than lying out on the slope above the beach, exposed to the elements and waiting for the seagulls to come and peck out your eyes.”
Uncharitably, he wished that that was precisely where she was, though he would not wish the eye-pecking gulls on her.
“Oh,” she said with a grimace. “When you put it that way, I must confess you are right.”
“I sometimes am,” he said.
Lord! Today’s grand joke had been that he was to go down onto the beach to find a personable woman to marry. And here he was, right on cue, carrying a genuine lady back with him. A damnably pretty one too.
Perhaps she was not single, though. Indeed, she almost certainly was not. She had introduced herself as Lady Muir. That suggested that somewhere, perhaps in the village a mile away, there was a Lord Muir. Which fact would not save him from the teasing. It would merely enhance it, in fact. He would be accused of the most naïve form of miscalculation.
It was going to take him a long time to live this one down.
Gwen would have been experiencing surely the worst embarrassment of her life if her mind had not been more preoccupied with pain. She felt embarrassed nevertheless.
Not only was she being taken to a strange house owned by a man of some notoriety who was not expecting her, but also she was being carried by a large, morose stranger who had done nothing to hide the fact that he despised her. And the trouble was that she could hardly blame him. She had behaved badly. She had made an idiot of herself.
She was pressed against all that muscled strength she had observed as he approached her across the pebbles, and he felt really quite disturbingly masculine. She could feel his body heat through his heavy clothing and her own. She could smell his cologne or his shaving soap, a faint, enticing, distinctively male scent. She could hear him breathing, though he was not panting from his exertions. Indeed, he made her feel as though she weighed nothing at all.