Chapter 4
The lie she’d told Prudence soured on Emma’s tongue as the afternoon wore on.
It was not the wedding.
It was the woman.
Amélie. Her name was a secret prayer, a blasphemy Emma kept tasting on the back of her teeth with a restless tongue.
To escape it, she’d sought the familiar solace of a horse between her knees and the wind in her face.
Dressed in her sturdy riding habit, she urged her borrowed mount along the Brighton cliffs, the turf thudding a frantic rhythm beneath them.
The salt spray misted her cheeks, cold and sharp, a welcome sting against skin that still felt feverish from a single, fleeting touch.
She galloped as if pursued, not by a physical foe, but by the memory of Amélie’s hands.
Capable hands. Hands that held charcoal with the same delicate precision with which they might hold a lover.
Emma imagined them sketching the curve of a landscape, the line of a jaw, the fall of light on a woman’s throat. Her own throat.
The thought was a hot, coiling thing in her belly, both shameful and exquisite.
She urged the mare faster, the wind tearing the pins from her hair, whipping strands of it across her face.
The world dissolved into a blur of gray sky and churning sea.
Faster. She had to outrun the image of that small, private smile, the one that had not been for the room, but for her.
A smile that had seen through the callused, practical shell of Emmaline Goode and found something else beneath. Something breakable.
A sudden explosion of color and frantic noise erupted from the gorse to her right. A pheasant, panicked and iridescent, burst into the air with a deafening whir of wings.
The mare, already on a razor’s edge, screamed and shied violently.
One moment Emma was one with the animal, a creature of speed and wind; the next, the world spun on a sickening axis.
The sky was where the ground should be. She felt a brief, terrifying weightlessness, a desperate scrabble for purchase that found only air, and then a brutal, bone-jarring impact.
She landed on her right side, her shoulder taking the brunt of the fall against the rocky earth.
A sound, a wet, grinding crack, echoed inside her own skull.
A bolt of white-hot agony shot from her shoulder down her arm and up into her neck, stealing her breath and her sight.
For a long moment, there was nothing but the pain, a blinding, all-consuming universe of it.
The world swam back into focus slowly, gray and tilted.
The taste of dirt and blood filled her mouth.
The wind, which moments before had felt like freedom, was now a cold, indifferent hand against her cheek.
Her horse, its panic spent, stood a dozen yards away, trembling and blowing, its reins trailing on the ground.
Alone. She was alone and injured. A wave of fury at her own weakness washed through her, momentarily eclipsing the pain. She was Emmaline Goode. She did not fall. She did not get thrown. She did not lie helpless on the ground like some swooning maiden in one of Felicity’s romance novels.
Gritting her teeth, she pushed up with her left hand, trying to rise.
The movement sent a fresh wave of fire through her right shoulder.
A strangled gasp escaped her lips, and the ground tilted again, nausea churning in her gut.
She collapsed back, her head hitting the turf with a dull thud.
The pain was a living thing now, a clawed beast settled deep in her joint, digging in with every shallow breath she took.
She lay there, defeated, listening to the cry of the gulls and the relentless crash of the waves below. Humiliation a bitter bile in her throat.
The sound of hoofbeats, slow and deliberate this time, cut through her pained haze. She twisted her head, wincing, and saw a figure on a large black gelding emerge from the morning mist.
Oh no. A man.
He rode closer, and she recognized the well-tailored cut of his coat, the strong line of his jaw. Lord Bainbridge. He had been at the dinner, a quiet presence at the far end of the table, his eyes more observant than his conversation suggested.
He dismounted with a fluid, practiced ease that spoke of a life spent in the saddle, not just in drawing rooms. He looped the reins of his horse over his arm and approached her, his boots making little sound on the damp earth. His expression was not one of alarm, but of calm, measured concern.
“One of the ubiquitous Misses Goode, if I’m not mistaken,” he said, his voice a low baritone that carried easily over the wind. “A nasty fall. Please, don’t try to move.”
He knelt beside her, his closeness a sudden, surprising intrusion into her private bubble of agony.
He smelled of wool and leather and the clean salt air, a grounding scent that cut through her dizziness.
His hazel eyes, a similar shifting color as her own, assessed her with a startlingly direct gaze.
“Where does it hurt the most?” he asked, his tone gentle but firm.
“My shoulder,” she managed to grit out, the words feeling clumsy and thick on her tongue.
He nodded, his gaze moving to her right arm, which lay at an unnatural angle. “I saw it happen. Those damned pheasants get their revenge on us sometimes. May I?” He gestured toward her shoulder, a request for permission that felt both archaic and deeply respectful.
She gave a jerky nod, bracing herself. His fingers were surprisingly warm as they probed the area around her clavicle, his touch careful but assured.
It was nothing like the spark she’d felt with Amélie; this was different, a steady, impersonal warmth that sought to diagnose, not ignite.
Yet it was an intimacy all the same, a stranger’s hands on her injured body.
“We need to get you back to the house.”
The idea of being moved sent a fresh spike of dread through her. “I can’t…”
“I’ll help you,” he said simply, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world. He shifted, positioning himself to take her weight. “On my count. One…two…three.”
He lifted her to her feet with a strength that belied his gentlemanly appearance.
A raw cry was torn from her throat as her injured arm was jostled, and for a moment, the world went dark at the edges.
She sagged against him, her head swimming, her body trembling with shock and pain.
He held her steady, his arm a solid band around her waist, until the dizziness passed.
“Easy,” he murmured, his voice close to her ear. “Just breathe.”
He led her to his horse, a magnificent animal that stood placidly, unfazed by the drama. “I’m going to lift you up. It will hurt, I’m afraid, but only for a moment.”
Before she could protest, he had scooped her up, his arms strong and sure, and settled her sidesaddle on the gelding’s broad back.
He mounted behind her with an athletic grace, his body a warm, solid wall at her back.
His arm came around her waist, holding her securely against him.
The position was shockingly intimate, her skirts crushed between them, her head resting just below his chin.
He gathered the reins and nudged the horse into a slow, careful walk.
The jarring motion sent pulses of agony through her shoulder, but Bainbridge’s steady hold kept her from swaying.
She closed her eyes, surrendering to the pain and the sheer, mortifying fact of her own dependency.
The steady beat of his heart against her back was a slow, calming rhythm, a strange comfort in a world that had just been violently upended.
As Lord Bainbridge’s horse rounded the drive, the grand facade of the house swam into view.
The front doors burst open before they had even halted, and Emmett ran out onto the gravel, his face ashen, his cravat already askew.
He looked from Emma’s pale, sweat-sheened face to the proprietary arm Bainbridge kept around her waist, and his expression tightened with a new, sharper anxiety.
“Emma! Good God, what happened?” he cried, his voice thin with alarm.
“She was thrown,” Bainbridge said calmly, swinging down from the saddle before turning to help her. “Her shoulder is dislocated.”
Emmett reached up, his hands fluttering uselessly, his own panic making him clumsy. “Let me help.”
Between the two men, they eased her from the horse’s back. The movement sent a fresh wave of grinding pain through her, and she gasped, her legs threatening to buckle. Emmett’s arm was frail under her weight, but Bainbridge’s was like iron, supporting her until her feet were steady on the ground.
“Thank you, Lord Bainbridge,” Emmett murmured, his voice strained.
In the small, necessary space of transferring Emma’s weight between them, their hands brushed.
Masculine gazes met over her head. It was a glance that lasted no more than a second, but it was not the look of two near-strangers united in a crisis.
It was something else entirely. A current passed between them, a flash of shared history and a deep, aching familiarity that made the air hum.
Emma, exquisitely attuned to the electricity of secrets, felt it like a physical shock.
It was the same hidden language she was just beginning to learn, the same silent acknowledgement of a truth that could not be spoken aloud.
In that fleeting moment, she recognized her own forbidden longing mirrored in her brother’s eyes, and the world shifted beneath her feet once more.
They supported her inside, through the grand hall where preparations for the wedding feast continued in a chaotic ballet of servants and silver.
They guided her into the solarium, a room drowning in sunlight and the scent of damp earth from a hundred potted palms. The bright, cheerful space felt like a mockery of the agony clawing at her shoulder.