Chapter 10

CHAPTER10

“Let us leave the harpies to their squawking,” Silas whispered huskily, and led her out onto the sunbaked lawns.

Nora followed a short distance behind, while another figure followed her: a rather dashing gentleman with a lion’s mane of strawberry blonde hair, and cheerful brown eyes.

Although, the only thing Emma could focus on was the most scandalous piece of attire that he wore, wondering what it might look like upon Silas.

“Why is your… friend wearing a skirt?” Emma asked quietly.

Silas glanced back over his broad shoulder, a glint of mischief in his eyes. “It is a kilt. I have tried to civilize him, but he will not relinquish his Scottish ways. He claims it does a man good to feel the breeze.”

“Feel the breeze?” Emma frowned.

Silas gazed down at her, his teeth grazing his lower lip.

A second later, she understood, and immediately looked away, concentrating on anything but Silas or his acquaintance or that increasingly scandalous piece of clothing.

He is somewhat… coarse. A scale had appeared in her mind’s eye, weighing up the details of his character. Nor is he apologetic for it.

She remembered all of the worrisome things that Eliza had mentioned about his reputation, prior to his mysterious disappearance—a wretched rake of the worst kind. Maybe, wherever he had been, he had returned unchanged. Maybe, he was as wicked and wretched as Eliza deemed him to be.

But if that was true, why did she feel so compelled by him?

Eliza had tried to dissuade her from coming to Hudson Court at all, but she had insisted… and she still could not explain why. It had been a sort of madness, and she had known that she would never get a moment of peace from her own mind if she did not accept his invitation, to see how she truly felt about the situation after a week in his presence.

“Thank you for sending your carriage,” she blurted out, realizing she had been quiet for too long. “It was unnecessary, but it is a very fine carriage, and the horses are the most beautiful I have ever seen.”

“You deserve the very best,” Silas replied with a wink.

Not knowing what to make of that, Emma plowed on. “I have always adored horses. Ever since I was a child, I have been obsessed with them. For years, my father refused to allow me to ride, but eventually he bought me a pony. I called her Strawberry, and she still lives at my father’s estate, though she has not been ridden in a long time. I was given a mare when I was five-and-ten, you see, and I had grown too large to ride sweet Strawberry, but I visit her every morning and lavish her with affection, so she knows I have not forgotten her.”

I did, anyway. Her heart stung, thinking of poor Strawberry. She would not understand where her beloved mistress had gone, if she found herself banished from her father’s home. Her home.

“You babble when you are uneasy,” Silas said, his thumb gently brushing her fingertips, still clasped around his upper arm.

Emma chuckled awkwardly. “I suppose I do. Then again, how else are two people meant to become acquainted if they merely walk in silence?”

“A fair point.” He suddenly veered off to the left, cutting across the patchy lawns to a white gravel path that led around the side of the manor.

“Are you late for something?” Emma jested, her heart thumping wildly.

“No.”

“Then, where are we going? You seem to be leading us in a certain direction.”

“I am.”

Her confusion ebbed a few minutes later, when they passed underneath a stone archway carved into a gray stone wall and reappeared in a cobbled courtyard. Up ahead, a solitary apple tree stood guard over two rows of stalls, the musty, sweet scent of horses drifting toward Emma’s nostrils.

“The stables?” she said.

He glanced down at her. “You said you liked horses.”

“I do, but⁠—”

“Then have your fill,” he interrupted. “Lavish your affections on all of my beasts. I think I should like to see that.”

Her throat tightened, for though his expression gave so little away, his voice always seemed to accentuate the most… incendiary of words. At least, they were incendiary within her, igniting rushes and bursts of heat that she had no control over whatsoever.

I have not come here to give in so easily. She straightened up, willing her traitorous cheeks to cool.

“Do you know, the first time I ran away from my wedding, I did so on horseback,” she said, as he guided her around the bend, behind the nearby row of stalls. Out of sight of Nora and his acquaintance. “I do not even know whose horse it was. I stole it, rode to freedom, and I assume my father returned it to whomever it belonged considering I was never accused of theft. Unless you count the money that went toward that ill-fated wedding—my father never did get that back.”

She peered up at Silas, hoping to find him mortified at her frank honesty. Most gentlemen would have been… or should have been.

That sultry smirk appeared upon his lips, his eyes glimmering with a dark mischief that made her wish she had not said a word. “You stole a mount and rode it to freedom?” he purred. “How fascinating you are, Emma.”

She gasped as he dropped the honorifics.

“Running from your own wedding is not shocking, but not referring to you as ‘Lady’ is?” A rumble sounded in his throat, halfway toward a chuckle. “Again, fascinating.”

“I rode away from my wedding, as I just told you. I did not run,” she replied defiantly, though her voice had become breathy against her will, losing some of the strength she had been aiming for. “And the second time, I had a carriage waiting for⁠—”

He turned to face her, his body as close as it had been during their dizzying waltz, while his hand reached up to tease free that wayward lock of dark hair that Nancy had previously scolded him for touching. But Nora and Silas’s friend were still out of sight. There was no one to loudly clear their throat, this time.

Swallowing past the air that could not get into her lungs and could not leave either, she backed away from him for propriety’s sake. However, there was only so far she could go when her hand was still wrapped around his biceps, and he had her arm pinned against the defined indents of his ribs beneath his tailcoat.

He matched every retreating pace she took, until her back bumped into the wood of a stall door, the knock finally unleashing the breath lodged in her chest.

He braced his free hand against the top of the stall door, so near to her that his thumb almost skimmed the side of her neck, and leaned in. His body went with him, until there was no more than a finger’s width between them.

A judder of air escaped her lips as he brought his mouth close to her ear, and murmured, “I know what you are doing, Emma.” She could have sworn she felt him smile. “And it is not going to work. Whatever plan you may have to dissuade me, it is fruitless.”

“We shall see,” she whispered back, astonished that she could utter a single word with the heat and size and presence of him bearing down upon her. Even the scent of him left her speechless: he smelled of sandalwood and cinnamon, sweet, spicy, exotic, and unlike anything she had ever smelled before.

“Fascinating,” he growled, his breath tickling the skin of her neck, just below her ear. A spot she had not realized, until that moment, was so sensitive.

Just the touch of that breath sent a tremor branching through her, splintering to the nape of her neck, where it shivered deliciously down her spine and bolted across her stomach, tightening every muscle on the way.

She tilted her head up without realizing it, pulled by a force beyond her control, as if he were the one guiding her movements. And as she tried to catch her breath, his mouth stole away any hope of that, robbing her of sense and reason.

A fierce, bruising kiss that melted her insides, her legs wobbly as her hand fumbled for purchase on something, anything, to keep herself steady. She grasped a fistful of his lapel, and he smiled against her lips, as if waiting to see if she would shove him away or pull him closer.

Shock raced through her as he, too, grasped a fistful of her clothing, though she wore nothing with lapels. His hand twisted at her waist, gripping the fabric of her dress as if in frustration that he could not grab something beneath all those layers, while his mouth seared against hers, urging her to respond.

Her mouth moved subtly, her eyes closing instinctively, moments away from kissing him back in the same way that he was kissing her.

“Emma?” Nora’s worried voice snapped her out of the spell Silas had woven upon her. “Emma, where are you? Where did you go?”

“Children these days are so terribly impatient!” crowed another, unexpected voice. It seemed that Eliza and Augusta had deigned to chaperone, after all.

Oh goodness… what if we had been seen?

Panic dampened the excitement of earlier as Emma realized she was being rather too reckless with a reputation that was already beyond threadbare. She should have slapped Silas or pushed him away. She should not have simply stood there, secretly reveling in the burning bruise of his lips.

In an instant, Silas was no longer standing in front of her, but standing to the side of her, and at a polite distance, too. He took a cavalier stance against the stall door, leaning on his arm.

As discreetly as possible, Emma smoothed out the creases where he had gripped her dress, praying her face was not as red and glaringly guilty as it felt, just as Nora and Silas’s friend appeared around the blind spot at the end of the row. A moment later, Eliza and Augusta made their entrance, too.

“Lady Emma was just telling me how she adores to ride,” Silas called out, a sly grin upon his full lips. “I thought I might take her to the lake—if she can find a mount to her liking, of course.”

Augusta waved a hand in the general direction of the other stalls. “We have plenty to choose from, dear. My youngest son recently gifted me a beautiful chestnut mare, but I do not ride often anymore. You ought to take her. She will be relieved to have the exercise.”

“She is sturdy,” Silas said tightly, “but she is for novices. Are you a novice?”

Emma narrowed her eyes at him. “You know I am not.”

“I only have your word, not true evidence,” he replied, a half-smile revealing itself. “I suppose we shall find out soon enough. We shall leave in an hour. I trust that will be long enough to settle yourself in your chambers and to dress appropriately?” His gaze lingered on that creased spot, eyes simmering with a hunger that made her tingle afresh.

For the sake of stubbornness and not wanting to obey his every silky command, she said, “two hours.”

She waited, expecting annoyance. Indeed, she was already brimming with the satisfaction of it, when he merely replied.

“Two hours, then,” and walked away without another word.

The gentleman in the kilt followed after him, while Eliza and Augusta seemed oblivious to the entire thing, chattering about the time they stole an entire wheel of cheese from the pantry and ate it in the orchard until they were quite sick.

Only Nora appeared to notice the disappointment crinkling Emma’s face, as she took up the position that Silas had just vacated and whispered, “be very careful with this one, Emma. He might be more dangerous for you than running from a hundred weddings.”

And, as Emma stared after that exquisite man with his bulging arms, broad shoulders, athletic physique, powerful thighs, and buttery soft lips, she found she could not argue.