Page 53 of The Scoundrel and the Debutante
“But that’s just the thing, isn’t it? You must help me right a terrible wrong. Drive faster! Can you not make them run faster?”
“We’ll lather the horses!”
“But it may be too late! Please,pleasetry and make them run faster.”
“Hiya!” Robert roared, startling her, and slapped the reins against the horses’ backs. They broke into a run so quickly that Prudence bounced high in her seat, she shrieked with surprise as she grabbed the handrail to steady her.
A quarter of an hour later, they barreled down High Street, and slid to a rough halt between the inn and the post house.
“Oh no,” Prudence said. “No, no, no.” It was too late—the mailbags that had been set out this morning were gone.
“What do I do now, miss?” Robert asked.
But Prudence had already launched herself from the wagon’s bench. She ran into the post house, startling the clerk inside. “Has the Royal Post coach come?” she asked him anxiously.
“Yes,” he said, as if that were a ridiculous question. “She ain’t never late, not unless there’s rain. Left promptly at a quarter past.”
Prudence gasped and pressed a hand to her chest. The pain to her heart was very real, bubbling through her like a streak of hot grease. “Which way?” she asked.
“Only way it’ll go this time of day.” The clerk pointed north.
Prudence whirled around and ran outside. She looked at Robert and his team of two horses. The Royal Post was pulled by a team of four. It was impossible that a team of two horses could catch a team of four fresh horses.
It really was too late, and Prudence felt her body sag with the weight of her loss.
CHAPTER TWELVE
ROANFELTILL.
Not physically ill—he would have welcomed something as mundane as that. Just...ill.
He’d taken one look into the interior of this coach, seen the young mother with her two children and a highborn gentleman who nodded congenially at him, and he’d shut the door without a word. He’d stalked to the back of the coach, where the coachmen had loaded his bags, and two sacks with the official seal of the Royal Post, and had climbed onto the back bench.
He was angry with himself for having allowed this...affairwith Prudence. That’s what it was—a dalliance. What else could it have been? He could tell himself that she was beautiful, and that he, being a man with urges more powerful than any force, had no hope of resisting the temptation of her. He told himself that like the dalliances before this, the sting of ending it would subside by the time the coach left Himple.
Roan could tell himself any number of things, but as that damn post coach positively meandered down the road, none of the things he told himself seemed to ease him. The only thing working in him was a fervent, regretful longing.
He was being irrational. Childish. Where was the man in him? Where was that mighty being capable of tamping down useless emotions? The one who could agree that a marriage to Susannah Pratt would benefit all concerned and easily convince himself that was reason enough to marry? That man was apparently lying in the road, trampled by his runaway emotions because Roan was truly and utterly heartsick.
They stopped in a hamlet to change horses. Roan glanced at the two men in worn brown coats and buckskins who rode up top with him. None of them looked very talkative, and for that Roan was grateful.
As the coach rolled away from the hamlet, the fresh team as plodding as the first, Roan closed his eyes, hoping to block the image of Prudence leaving, twisted around on the seat beside that boy to see him. But in his effort to block that image, another one, of the two of them last night, invaded his thoughts. Of Prudence’s creamy flesh, of the soft curves of her body, of how fragrant she smelled and how silky her hair.How she’d gazed at him. How it had felt to be inside her.
A strong shiver ran down his spine.
The coach rocked unsteadily, and his mood grew blacker. He hoped they reached West Lee soon, for who could say what tree he might fell, what beast he might taunt if this ordeal didn’t end. He stared off into the distance, watching fields turn to forest, then turned his attention to the ribbon of road they left in their wake as they jangled along. That was when he noticed a wagon coming at them. And at quite a clip, too.
The driver was bent low over the reins, and Roan couldn’t make out if the driver meant to catch them or pass them. Whatever he meant to do, he was driving much too fast for that wagon.
The guard had noticed them too and pulled his gun from his shoulder and readied it. “Highwaymen?” a passenger asked, but the guard said nothing.
Roan squinted at the wagon through the dust the post coach was kicking up. That was no highwayman. Highwaymen did not make daring mistakes in wagons, they made them on horseback. A movement to the driver’s right caught his attention and Roan gasped.Thatwas Prudence, and she was trying to stand!
“Slow the coach!” he shouted and surged to his feet. “Stop!”
“Sit down, sir!” the guard ordered him. “You’ll fall and break your neck but good.”
“Halt!” Roan shouted. “Halt, halt!”
