Redemption Of The Rake. Elizabeth Beacon

Hester said impatiently.

      ‘Then go and gather the driest and softest bits and bring them here so we can make a cushion with my shawl for the poor man’s head to rest on,’ Rowena said and hoped the silent listener had no idea she was thought to be a sensible woman the rest of the time.

      ‘Didn’t you say he should be kept...?’ Hester’s still slightly shaky voice tailed off at the sight of Rowena’s fierce glare. She hoped the fact she was being moved out of the line of fire wouldn’t dawn on her reckless sister. ‘Oh, very well, it really is taking for ever for Jack to get back with Sir Gideon or his lordship and that tree root must be very hard,’ clever little Hes said with her bottom lip stuck out, as if she felt sulky and furious and a bit bored.

      Rowena tried to make it seem natural to shift round a prone man, then hover slightly hysterically. She took her time forming her least favourite shawl into a square and wondered aloud if it would ever be the same again if the man bled all over it.

      ‘Not even the most careful laundering will get the stain out of wool and it’s not as if I have dozens of them to be ruined,’ she twittered fussily.

      ‘Here, this ought to make him comfortable as the Sleeping Beauty,’ Hester said as she trudged back with an armful of leaves and moss and some bleached and dry grass harvested from the edge of the clearing.

      Rowena bundled the driest of her sister’s offerings into her shawl, then wrapped it into a makeshift pillow. Keeping between her sister and harm, she thrust the neatly wrapped bundle at Hes, then knelt at Mr Winterley’s other side to frustrate his attacker.

      ‘The instant I lift his head you must put my shawl between his poor head and that nasty tree root,’ she ordered as if she and Hes were nearly as dimwitted as one another.

      ‘Yes, of course, sister dear. How you do fuss,’ Hes said with such a huge sigh of long-suffering patience Rowena frowned at her for overacting. Nothing stirred behind her, though, so maybe it was working.

      ‘Right pocket,’ Mr Winterley murmured when Rowena bent even closer. She felt almost as fluffy and distracted as she was pretending to be as she fought off the feeling of being too close to a sleek and magnificent predator. ‘Get your sister out of here,’ he added so softly she bent over him like a ministering angel to hear him and her hair tumbled out of the last of its pins and hid even more of him from prying eyes.

      Close to he was lean and vital and ridiculously tempting as she breathed a little too heavily in his ear and heard him grunt with pain when she lifted his mistreated head. Hes pushed the improvised cushion under him and Rowena watched as fascinated by him as the silly debutante she was doing her best to ape. He smelt of clean woods and a faint, cool undercurrent of spice and lemon water and man. The scent pleased her somehow as Nate’s linen rarely had, even when she laboured hard to keep it clean herself when they were on the march and he said the laundresses were too rough with his precious shirts. How unfair of her to contrast a man intent on fighting his country’s mortal enemies with this idle fop. Cross with herself, she flinched away, then saw him frown as if in pain and called herself every sort of a fool under her breath.