Page 54 of The Scoundrel and the Debutante
“What call have we to stop?” one of the men demanded. “So that we might be robbed?”
“That wagon is for me!” Roan yelled. “It’s for me!”
“Then let them be for you at the next stop,” the man barked. “We don’t all stop for it.”
“Halt the goddamn coach!”Roan roared. The guard shouted at the driver, and the coach began to slow so quickly that Roan did indeed almost fall from it.
“Bloody hell,” the man in buckskins swore at him as the wagon shuddered to such a violent halt behind the coach that it appeared as if it might come apart.
The two horses were lathered and breathing hard as if they had raced all the way from the Bulworth estate. Roan leaped to the ground as Prudence scrambled down from her seat. “What are you doing?” he exclaimed. “What utterly mad, foolish, imprudent thing are you doing?”
Prudence was beaming. She was breathing as if she’d run alongside the team of horses, but she was beaming. “Weslay,” she said as she tried to drag breath into her. “Maybe I ought to see you to Weslay.”
Emotions Roan didn’t recognize rushed through him, and he grabbed her up in a rough embrace.
“Maybe you ought,” he muttered, and kissed her cheek. He put his arm around her and dragged her to the coach, yanked the door open and practically shoved her inside. “Make room, make room,” he commanded, and to Prudence he added, “I’ll get your things.”
He stalked to the wagon and took her trunk himself, carrying it to the coach and lashing it on. He grabbed her smaller bag, too. “There you are,” he said to the young driver, and handed him a banknote, the value of which he didn’t even notice. Whatever it was, it was not enough, it could never be enough. Roan was elated, his heart rushing with the thrill of knowing she’d come back to him.
He carried Prudence’s smaller bag to the coach’s interior.
“What of the cost of her passage?” the driver called down.
Roan handed him a few coins and stuck his head in the door of the coach. He could see by the expressions of the other passengers that his bulk was not welcome inside, but he came nonetheless, fitting himself in beside her and taking her hand in his, held it tightly.
Prudence was speaking to the man she was pressed against, her speech animated, her breath still ragged. “...thought perhaps I should take the morning coach, but my father he...he is particularly unwell and I shouldn’t like to go alone. So we raced ahead to catch the post coach and...and my cousin.”
She was explaining herself, he took it, and he knew a moment of consternation—she owed these people no explanation. But she beamed at Roan, clearly pleased with her story.
The man beside her, who was dressed in a coat of navy superfine, a brocade waistcoat and boots polished to a very high sheen, smiled as if particularly amused by her story. “My, all this way to travel with your cousin?”
Roan gave the man a look that conveyed fair warning.
“Yes, my cousin,” Prudence said, nodding with great enthusiasm. Too much enthusiasm, really—no one was that excited to see a cousin.
The gentleman noticed it, too, Roan could see, and smiled again, his knowing gaze meeting Roan’s over the top of her head.
Let him think what he wanted, Roan didn’t care.
Prudence smiled up at Roan. “You’re not cross with me, are you?” she asked gaily. He noticed her face and clothes bore a thin coat of dust from the road. But he saw only the color in her porcelain skin, the flash of happiness in her eyes. “It seemed the only possible solution.”
“I am very happy you heeded my advice. But how—”
“I don’t know!” she said with breathless enthusiasm, anticipating his question. “I thought we’d never reach you.”
“We are fortunate that these post teams plod along, aren’t we?” he said. He smiled, too, as if this were all a trifling thing, a silly thing for his young cousin to do. But he was acutely aware of the gentleman’s study of him and Prudence, of the way the mother made her children look away from Prudence. And still, he didn’t care, he didn’tcare. She washere, beside him, and he was astounded by how happy her race to catch him had made him. Imprudently so. Disturbingly, imprudently, ridiculously so.
Perhaps she understood him, for Prudence laughed lightly and her eyes shone at him. “I lost my bonnet,” she said.
“You lost your bonnet!” he repeated absurdly, and chortled with joy, so loudly that he drew the attention of the others in the coach.
The coach rolled on, through forests of chestnuts and oaks, past fields dotted with sheep and cattle. The land began to roll, the fields giving way to big hills that taxed the teams. They changed horses every ten miles now instead of fifteen, and on one of those stops the gentleman from the coach sidled over to Roan. “Your cousin is quite comely.”
Roan slowly turned his head and glared at him. “And?”
“She’s English, isn’t she? And you are...well, I don’t know what you are, but judging by your accent I’d say you’re an American.”
“What of it?”
