The Proposal

“Thank you,” she said with chilly hauteur—though she had the grace to look suddenly apologetic. “I thank you for coming to my assistance, sir. You could easily have avoided doing so. I had not seen you, as you must have realized. I am Lady Muir.”

Ah, definitely a lady. She probably expected him to bow and scrape and tug on his forelock.

She took one step back from him—and collapsed in an undignified heap on the ground.

He stood looking down at her and pursed his lips. She would not like that loss to her dignity.

She rose to her knees, set her hands flat on the ground, and … laughed. It was a merry sound of pure amusement, though it did end in a little hiccup of pain.

“Mr. Trentham,” she said, “you have my permission to say ‘I told you so.’ ”

“I told you so,” he said—one must not disoblige a lady. “And it is Lord Trentham.”

Silly of him to insist upon that detail, perhaps, but she irritated him.

She turned to sit on the ground. It was probably still damp from yesterday’s rain, he thought. Serve her right. He gazed down at her with hard eyes and set jaw.

She sighed as she looked up at him. Her face had turned pale again. He would wager that that ankle was throbbing like a thousand devils. Maybe five thousand after her attempt to put weight on it.

“You gave me a choice a short while ago,” she said, all the haughtiness gone from her voice, though a trace of her laughter remained. “And since I am not a silly woman, or at least do not wish to appear silly, I choose the second. If the option is still open to me, that is. You would be quite within your rights to withdraw it now, but I would be much obliged if you would carry me to Penderris, Lord Trentham, even though I find the thought of imposing my presence there deeply distressing. Perhaps you would be good enough to lend me a carriage when we get there so that I do not even have to enter the—”

He bent and scooped her up again. As humble pie went, she had eaten a fair portion.

He strode onward in the direction of the house. He did not try to make conversation. He could only imagine the sort of reception he was going to get, and the sort of teasing he was going to have to endure for the rest of his stay at Penderris.

“You are or have been a military gentleman, Lord Trentham,” she said, breaking the silence a couple of minutes later. “I am right, am I not?”

“What makes you say so?” he asked without looking down at her.

“You have the bearing of an officer,” she said, “and the hard-jawed, intense-eyed look of a man accustomed to command.”

He looked down briefly at her. He did not reply to her words.

“Oh, this is going to be horribly embarrassing,” she said a couple of minutes later as they approached the house.

“But better, I daresay,” he said curtly, “than lying out on the slope above the beach, exposed to the elements and waiting for the seagulls to come and peck out your eyes.”

Uncharitably, he wished that that was precisely where she was, though he would not wish the eye-pecking gulls on her.

“Oh,” she said with a grimace. “When you put it that way, I must confess you are right.”

“I sometimes am,” he said.

Lord! Today’s grand joke had been that he was to go down onto the beach to find a personable woman to marry. And here he was, right on cue, carrying a genuine lady back with him. A damnably pretty one too.

Perhaps she was not single, though. Indeed, she almost certainly was not. She had introduced herself as Lady Muir. That suggested that somewhere, perhaps in the village a mile away, there was a Lord Muir. Which fact would not save him from the teasing. It would merely enhance it, in fact. He would be accused of the most naive form of miscalculation.

It was going to take him a long time to live this one down.

Gwen would have been experiencing surely the worst embarrassment of her life if her mind had not been more preoccupied with pain. She felt embarrassed nevertheless.

Not only was she being taken to a strange house owned by a man of some notoriety who was not expecting her, but also she was being carried by a large, morose stranger who had done nothing to hide the fact that he despised her. And the trouble was that she could hardly blame him. She had behaved badly. She had made an idiot of herself.

She was pressed against all that muscled strength she had observed as he approached her across the pebbles, and he felt really quite disturbingly masculine. She could feel his body heat through his heavy clothing and her own. She could smell his cologne or his shaving soap, a faint, enticing, distinctively male scent. She could hear him breathing, though he was not panting from his exertions. Indeed, he made her feel as though she weighed nothing at all.

Her ankle was throbbing very badly indeed. There was no use in continuing to pretend that she would be able to walk back to Vera’s once she had shaken off the first twinges of pain.

Oh, dear, he really was a morose man. And a silent one. He had not even confirmed or denied being a military officer. And he had nothing else to offer by way of conversation, though to be fair, he probably needed all his breath to carry her.

Goodness, she would have nightmares about this for a long time to come.

He was making his way straight for the front doors of Penderris Hall, which looked like a very grand mansion indeed. He was, as she might have expected, totally ignoring her plea to be taken directly to the carriage house so that she might avoid the house altogether. She just hoped the duke was not going to be close by when she was carried inside. Perhaps one of his minions would summon a carriage to convey her back to Vera’s. Even a gig would do.

Lord Trentham climbed a short flight of steps and turned sideways in order to thump his elbow against one of the doors. It was opened almost immediately by a sober-looking man in black who resembled all butlers the world over. He stood aside without comment as Lord Trentham carried her into a large square hall tiled in black and white.

“We have a wounded soldier here, Lambert,” Lord Trentham said without any trace of humor in his voice. “I am going to carry her up to the drawing room.”

“Oh, no, please—”

“Shall I send for Dr. Jones, my lord?” the butler asked.

But before Lord Trentham could answer or Gwen voice a further protest, someone else arrived on the scene, a tall, slender, blond, extremely handsome gentleman with mocking green eyes and one elevated eyebrow. The Duke of Stanbrook, Gwen thought with a sinking heart. She could scarcely have imagined a scene more lowering than this if she had tried.

“Hugo, my dear chap,” the gentleman said, his voice a lazy drawl, “however did you do it? You are a marvel. You found the lady on the beach, did you, and swept her literally off her feet with your charm, not to mention your title and fortune? This makes for a very affecting scene, I must say. If I were an artist, I would be d-dashing for my canvas and brushes in order to record it for the delight of your descendants to the third and fourth generation.”

He had lowered his eyebrow and lifted a quizzing glass to his eye as he spoke.

Gwen glared at him. She spoke with as much chilly dignity as she could muster.

“I twisted my ankle,” she explained, “and Lord Trentham was obliging enough to carry me here. I do not intend to impose upon your hospitality any longer than necessary, Your Grace. All I ask is the loan of some conveyance to take me back to the village, where I am staying. You are the Duke of Stanbrook, I presume?”

The blond gentleman lowered his glass and raised one eyebrow again.

“You elevate me in rank, ma’am,” he said. “I am flattered. I am not, alas, Stanbrook. I daresay Lambert will call out a gig for you if you insist, however, though Hugo looks eager to impress you with his superior strength by d-dashing upstairs with you in his arms and arriving in the drawing room without any noticeable shortness of