her to support herself. And finally, the benefactor who’d willed her this cottage, safe haven in which to begin over again.
A safe haven still, she told herself firmly, squelching the swirl of unease in her stomach. She need only continue to act the woman everyone believed her to be. Young or not, a simple country gentlewoman could be of no more interest to the great earl than a pebble.
As long as she stayed in her role—no more jerking away in alarm if his eye chanced to fall upon her. She grimaced as she recalled that second blunder, more serious than the first. “The Puzzlebreaker,” as the ton had dubbed him after he’d founded a gentleman’s club devoted to witty repartee and clever aphorisms, was a gifted mathematician and intimate of the Prince’s counselors. But as long as she said or did nothing to engage that keen intellect or pique his curiosity, she would be perfectly safe.
Be plain and dull, she told herself—dull as the dirtbrown hue she always wore, plain as the oversize and shapeless gowns she’d inherited from her benefactress.
And avoid the earl as much as possible.
Dull, dull, dull as the ache in her head from the pins that had contained her long braided locks for too many hours. With a sigh of relief, she loosed them and, tying on a long frayed apron, set about washing her hair.
Beau smiled as he surveyed the modest gig and the even more modest chestnut pulling it. How London’s Four Horse Club would laugh to see him tooling such a rig.
But after a few hours’ sleep took the edge off his fatigue, a deep-seated worry over Kit roused him irretrievably from slumber. A check on his brother, whose color had gone from unnatural pale to ominously flushed and whose rapid, shallow breathing was doubtless responsible for the frown now residing on Mac’s tired face, had been enough to refuel his anxiety.
His physician friend looked exhausted after a ride doubtless as arduous as his own. Humbly acknowledging, at least to himself, that he’d feel better sending Mac off to bed with Mrs. Martin present to direct Kit’s care, he’d offered to fetch the nurse. At least the drive in the pleasant early fall sunshine gave him something to distract himself from his gnawing anxiety.
As the squire’s son promised, her cottage was easily located. He pulled the gig to a halt before it and waited, but as no one appeared to assist him, he clambered down and hunted for a post to which he could tie the chestnut. Finding none, he set off around the walled garden. Surely behind the cottage there would be some sort of barn.
Having found a shed, by its look of disuse no longer home to horse and tackle but still sturdy, he secured the rig and headed back to the cottage. A gate to the garden stood open, from which, as he started by, a black and white spotted dog trotted out, spied him, and stiffened.
Kneeling, he held out a hand. After a watchful moment, apparently deciding Beau posed no threat, the dog relaxed and ambled over. Beau scratched the canine behind his large ears, earning himself an enthusiastic lick in the process, after which the dog collapsed in a disgraceful heap and rolled over, offering his belly.
“Some watchdog. Where’s your mistress, boy?”
The dog inclined his head. When the rubbing did not resume, with an air of resignation he hopped up and loped off into the garden. Amused, Beau followed.
Behind the walls he found cultivated beds, herbs interspersed with a charming array of asters and Michelmas daisies and alternating with chevrons of turnips, onions and cabbages. Inhaling the spicy air approvingly, he was halfway across the expanse of tilled ground when a slight movement near the cottage drew his attention and he halted.
Halted, caught his breath, and then ceased to breathe.
A young woman leaned back against a bench, eyes closed, her head tilted up to a gentle sun that painted a straight nose, arched brows, high cheekbones and full lips with golden highlights. The collar of her gown lay unfastened, revealing an alluring triangle of warm skin from her arched neck downward to the top of an old worn apron, whose blockage of the view that might otherwise have been revealed below he would have fiercely resented had not the garment redeemed itself by clinging snugly to its wearer’s generous curves.
The lady’s hair, which she was drying in the sun, swirled over the back of the bench and cascaded down beside her in a thick fall of burnished auburn curls.
Just then she reached up to comb her fingers through one long section, fluffing it as she progressed. The movement stretched the threadbare apron taut against her body, its thin white cloth silhouetting her breast against the dark bench, full rounded side to sun-kissed tip.
Beau’s mouth grew dry, then dryer still as one curl tumbled from her shoulder, caught on the apron’s edge and came to rest cupped, like a lover’s hand, around the outline of that perfect breast.
She sighed, a slight exhale that parted her lips and made her look like a woman rousing to passion’s whisper. His body tensed in automatic response, his mouth tingling to trace the outline of that arched throat, taste the honey promised by those lips, his fingers itching to tangle themselves in that cloud of copper silk and pull this arresting vision closer.
A vision that was, he realized with a shock that rippled all the way to his toes, the woman he’d hitherto identified as the mousy, nondescript Mrs. Martin.
He tingled in other places, as well. And had not yet regathered wits enough to decide what to do about it when the dog, whose presence he had totally forgotten, had the deplorable ill timing to seek out his mistress.
At a lick to her hand, Mrs. Martin sat up and opened eyes as piercingly blue as the clear autumn sky. Eyes that went in an instant from sleepy to shocked. With a small shriek, she leaped up and backed away.
Conscious of a sharp sense of loss, he nonetheless endeavored to set her at ease. “Please, don’t be alarmed, Mrs. Martin. It’s Hugh Bradsleigh—Kit’s brother. I’m sorry to have startled you.”
As big a plumper as he’d ever told, he knew, realizing he’d never have been treated to this glimpse of heaven had the reclusive Mrs. Martin sensed his presence earlier. He still couldn’t quite believe the silent woman who had toiled at his side all night and this enchanting siren were indeed one and the same.
“L-lord Beaulieu! You—you startled me. Misfit,” she scolded the dog, who hung his head, tail drooping, “why did you not warn me we had visitors?”
Misfit. Beau grinned. Now there was an apt name. If he’d had the foresight to bring a bone, the wretched animal probably would have given him the run of the cottage.
Nonetheless, the pooch had led him to The Vision and thus Beau felt compelled to defend him. “He did inspect me rather thoroughly before he let me in.”
He watched regretfully as with one hand Mrs. Martin fumbled to fasten the buttons at her collar and with the other gathered her glorious, sun-burnished hair into a knot. Though he was somewhat guilty at having startled her, he wasn’t so conscience-stricken that he felt compelled to point out the dowager’s cap for which, with sidelong glances as if she expected he might at any moment attack, she was quite obviously searching.
Instead he picked it up. “Your cap, Mrs. Martin.” With a slow smile, he held it out, just far enough to be polite but not so close that she could reach it without approaching him.
And, ah, how he wanted her to approach. After a moment, skittish as a startled doe, she did. “Thank you, my lord. I’ll take it now, if you please.”
Come get it, he almost said. Biting back the words lest he frighten her off, he simply stood, waiting.
She took the few steps that separated them, then snatched at the cap. Her hand grazed his palm as she grabbed, and for a moment, their fingers caught.
He felt the flame of contact in every nerve. And so, he realized exultantly as he watched her, did she.
Her blue eyes widened in shock, her lips once again parting slightly in surprise—an unconscious invitation. She even forgot, for a moment, to take the bonnet.
All too soon