Epilogue #2
She was not entirely sure what to do with that.
He murmured something to the bay, then spoke to her.
“Hold to me,” he said.
She did not argue. She was too cold for argument, and if she were honest, held no real wish to argue regardless.
Her arms went around his neck, he settled her sideways across the saddle, and swung up behind her in one motion so smooth the horse barely shifted its weight, her pelisse still caught in his gloved hand.
Across his thighs she found herself seated, back against his chest, one arm coming round her waist with the automatic certainty of someone securing something valuable against any further mishap.
His warmth struck her like the first breath of a heated room after a long cold spell.
Solid, he was. Not rigid, but dense with the sort of real, working physical presence belonging to no one she had ever met inside a drawing room.
His arm tightened by fractions as the horse moved forward, and every point of contact between them registered sharply in her awareness.
His thighs beneath hers, his chest at her back, his chin brushing her hair as he bent to guide the horse round a rut in the drive.
She was aware, too, of his breath against her temple, slow and controlled, entirely at odds with her own hammering pulse.
Deeply unfair, she thought, that a man could manage such calm while she could manage none at all.
London felt very far away just now.
That journey she had anticipated with the concentrated excitement of someone who had never once set foot outside Yorkshire, nearly vibrating with it the moment Alistair first proposed the idea.
London. Shops and assemblies and the mere possibility of society, the air of a world that was not Fortunestone Hall with its own distinct ledger of ghosts and constraints.
She had wanted it with an urgency bordering on embarrassing.
At this present moment, London felt curiously theoretical. A destination that would still be there waiting. A collection of streets and drawing rooms going nowhere at all, not yet.
That, said the stern and sensible portion of her mind, is the cold and the shock talking, and you will feel entirely different once you are warm and dry again.
Probably. Yes. Almost certainly.
She watched his left hand on the reins, guiding the bay with firm movements, adjusting for the animal’s restlessness with admirable patience. She considered what she actually knew of him, remarkably little for a man who had been living under the same roof for the better part of a week.
He came from Hertfordshire, she believed she had heard Alistair mention once.
The son of a land agent, which would account for the evident polish of his education, plain in his speech, and the straightforward confidence of his manner.
He carried neither the polish of aristocratic breeding nor the deference of service, but something more self-possessed than either.
The confidence belonging to someone who had earned his position outright and knew it well.
His clothing was good. She had always kept an eye for fabric and cut, despite having had precious little occasion to use it, and he had not dressed for a ducal estate the way a man eager to impress might have dressed.
He had dressed for work instead. There was a difference, and she found, somewhat to her own surprise, that she rather preferred his way.
Her thoughts turned to the previous steward.
That obsequiously bent spine of his, the habit of addressing her as ‘My Lady Seraphina’ in a tone somehow both deferential and subtly repellent at once, and the way he waited outside Margaret’s sitting room every single morning for instructions, as if the household’s rightful authority lived not in its duke but in its dowager instead, even when her father had still lived.
Beckwith had spent a mere matter of days at Fortunestone Hall, and already she had seen enough to judge him by.
Coal orders doubled without so much as consulting the dowager.
A tenant farmer’s wife redirected clean away from the servants’ entrance to his own desk, and genuinely heard out once she arrived there.
Here stood a man who trusted his own judgment and bowed to no authority beyond Alistair’s alone.
Which was, she reflected, the exact opposite of everything the old steward had ever been.
He was not, in any sense she had yet discovered, servile.
She was not entirely sure what to do with that either.
You are cataloging him, said the stern portion of her mind, the way a naturalist notes the habits of some unusual specimen. This is not appropriate behavior for a woman in a man’s arms.
She was well aware of that. She was also cold, exhausted, four-and-twenty years old, and apparently reduced to cataloging a man’s eye color simply because his coat smelled of leather and warmth and nothing she had encountered in all her years thus far.
Which did not, she decided, constitute sufficient grounds for self-reproach.
She had read a great deal about men, in the philosophical and political essays in the family library, and had formed strong opinions from observation and literature and her own father’s considerable failures besides.
She was not entirely innocent. She was simply, it now appeared, entirely unprepared for an actual encounter with a real man of marriageable age.
This is not useful information, she told herself firmly.
Through the rain ahead, the lights of the hall appeared at last, warm yellow rectangles, drawing room windows and entrance lanterns burning bright against the gray.
The familiar mix of relief and reluctance moved through her, entirely unreasonable, as she well knew, and fully intended to be ignored regardless.
The bay slowed to a walk as they came up on the gravel sweep before the entrance. She expected him to dismount at once. He did not. He drew the horse to a halt just short of the lantern light’s reach, and for one suspended moment neither of them moved.
“You are safe now,” he said, low and quiet, rougher than mere professional concern running beneath the words like a current beneath ice.
Her face turned toward his, instinct rather than any decision, and their cheeks brushed together.
Cold against cold, wet skin against wet skin, and yet the contact sent heat flooding beneath her skin with an immediacy owing nothing whatsoever to temperature.
He went entirely motionless in that moment, holding something very deliberately in check, and the restraint of it read plainly enough that her own breath caught.
Then came the lightest press of his lips against her temple. Not quite a kiss. Near enough to one that the difference felt almost unkind.
Gently he released her from his lap, dismounted in one smooth motion, and reached back up for her. His hands spanned her waist, lifting her down from the saddle and setting her on the gravel with a care suggesting he had noticed the tremor in her legs and was quietly allowing for it.
Her eyes lifted to his.
He stared back at her, blue eyes nearly level with her own and entirely too readable in that moment before he made them otherwise, his expression not quite neutral and not entirely resolved either.
No warmth to it. No coldness either. Recognition, rather, that was the word.
He had noticed an inconvenience and had not yet settled on what to do about it, rain still running freely down his face.
That look she recognized. She was, most likely, wearing its twin herself.
The front door opened and Clara appeared, eyes wide, blankets already bundled in her arms, wearing the resigned expression of someone expecting exactly this outcome. Servants stirred into motion. Warmth and light and the smell of fires drifted out to meet her.
Beckwith had already turned to the groom who came running for the horse, speaking low, his back to her now, attention already given over to the next task waiting.
She let Clara draw her on toward the door.
But at the threshold, she paused … just for a moment, sheltered by the entrance arch, with his overcoat still around her shoulders and rain still hammering the gravel … and glanced back at him standing in the downpour.