Page 9 of To Seduce a Stranger

With a curt nod, he gestured her toward the door. “All right.” As she turned away from him, he reached for the almost-full tumbler, downed its contents in a single swallow, and grimaced.

She had told the truth about one thing, at any rate. He’d be damned before he’d dignify that swill with the name of brandy.

* * *

When Charlotte saw the horse, she began to have second thoughts about her request for aid. She’d imagined speeding away from the inn in a carriage, curtains drawn, unobserved by passersby. The discovery that he intended her to share his mount was, to say the least, alarming.

“Do you ride, Miss Blake?” he asked as he strapped her satchel to the saddle before swinging up with apparent ease.

Standing just out of reach of his outstretched hand, she shook her head.

“You aren’t frightened of horses, are you?”

“No.” The reply came quickly. Too quickly. That sort of obvious lie had on occasion earned her a rap across the knuckles or a pinch from Aunt Penhurst. She could hardly hope that Mr. Cary would prove less astute.

At least, however, he did not seem to be as quick-tempered. “You’re perfectly safe,” he insisted, his voice warm and his eyes smiling down on her. “Samson here is one of the most—er, placid animals I’ve ever encountered.”

Placid? No judge of horseflesh, she could not be sure whether he was sincere or merely trying to sound reassuring. The distinctions between a sway-backed nag and a high-strung racehorse were entirely lost on her. All of them were enormous and behaved unpredictably, as far as she was concerned. Looking about the muddy yard, she was forced to acknowledge that she had little choice, however. It was either back to the inn, or up.

Had the man questioning the innkeeper been the same man she had seen earlier? And if so, had he spotted her?

He was probably nothing more than a newspaper man, on the hunt for fodder for a gossip column. Well, she did not mean to stay and give him what he wanted. Laying her hand in Edward Cary’s, she set her toe on his boot and allowed him to pull her up in front of him.

“All set, Miss Blake?”

Tangling her fingers in the horse’s dark mane to hide her nervousness, she held her spine rigid. One of those wretched nervous giggles bubbled in her chest, but she fought it down. Although the ground looked to be an alarming way off, and the toss of the horse’s head made her certain they were about to be thrown, she managed to nod in acknowledgment of Mr. Cary’s words.

“Try to relax,” Edward said, his voice low and calm. “Samson can feel your fear. We won’t let you come to any harm. Trust me.”

Another awkward laugh almost escaped her. How ridiculous to speak of trusting a perfect stranger.

Although, of course, she was trusting him. At least a little.

What choice did she have?

Concentrating on each muscle, she forced her limbs to ease. The task proved far more difficult than the one she had set for herself in the public room: keeping herself from shivering and tossing back the tot of brandy like an old sailor. For one thing, the change in posture made her uncomfortably aware of the breadth of his chest against her back, the band of his strong arm about her waist. When he guided the horse around a treacherous-looking rut, she could feel the flex of his muscled thighs along her hips and legs.

No one had ever held her so close.

Well, that was not entirely true. Someone must have, when she was a child. Surely she had once been nestled against a breast or dandled on a knee, although she had no memory of it. More recently, there had been that Mr. Sutherland, a friend of her cousin Roderick, the young Baron Penhurst. Late one night, Mr. Sutherland had grabbed her on the servants’ stairs and tried to steal a kiss . . . and a bit more. She had made short work of his roving hands with the press of a pointed heel to his instep, and had taken secret delight in the fact that he had still been limping when he left the house three days later. When Aunt Penhurst had asked him the cause of the injury, he had looked pointedly at Charlotte before claiming he had tripped, sparing her for once from having to make up some story that her aunt would never have believed.

In any case, if physical contact was not quite unprecedented, it was still unusual enough to leave her feeling a bit breathless and longing to sit up straighter again, if only to fill her lungs properly and shake off the unaccustomed sensations. She would not do it, of course, because she did not want to incur Samson’s, or Mr. Cary’s, displeasure. Besides, the change of posture had made the motion of the horse almost bearable.

At least, until Mr. Cary urged him to a faster pace.

“O-oh!” The jarring motion of the trotting horse rattled the gasp from her chest.

“Tell me, Miss Charlotte Blake.” His voice in her ear was a distraction, as she suspected he had intended. “How does a Frenchwoman come by such an English name?”

“My—” Husband, she had been about to say, but she bit the word off just in time. “Er, that is, I—my father was English.”

“But you were raised in France?”

“Yes.”

Usually, that fragment of her story was sufficient. Anyone who did not know the rest was quick to sketch in the blank spaces, rarely to Charlotte’s advantage.

“By your mother?” Mr. Cary prompted.