LITMIR.BIZ

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feel more like kidskin? How would his weight be, over her? He was so much larger than she was that it must be a matter of technique, she supposed. How would it feel when he sheathed himself within her? Would it hurt? Probably, it had with Anthony. She was less clear what happened then in bed, when lovemaking was a leisurely matter of mutual pleasure giving—movement, obviously, with that hard, strong body and her own soft, lesser strength somehow finding a rhythm and a unity.

      She had seen Rhys naked as a child, swimming in the lake, but a man’s body was different. Did he have a hairy chest? Would that chafe against her breasts or tickle? They tingled at the thought. She would run her fingertips through—

      ‘Whoa!’ From behind, Tom Felling shouted at his team. The chaise juddered and skidded as the postilions reined back their horses and Thea jerked her attention to the window at the front and the view beyond the be-capped boys and their waving whips.

      A diligence, one of the lumbering French stagecoaches, had overturned, its bulk teetering over the deep ditch that bordered the road. In the road half a dozen passengers seemed stunned with shock and the driver and guard were struggling with the team as they thrashed in panic in the tangled traces.

      Thea pushed open the door and jumped down as Rhys dismounted, shouting at the postilions, ‘Hold our horses. Felling, go and help them free the team.’ He saw her. ‘Thea, get back in the chaise, this is no place for you.’

      ‘I will do no such thing. There are people hurt.’ She ran to help a stout woman to her feet, then pulled off the fichu around her neck to hold to the forehead of a slender young man who was slumped against the bank, blood pouring down his face. This is no time to have missish vapours about blood, she told herself firmly, swallowing hard.

      ‘It is just a cut,’ she began in English. ‘They always bleed dramatically from the head. Oh, pardon, c’est—’

      ‘I am English,’ he said faintly and lifted his hand to hold the pad in place. ‘Thank you, ma’am. I will do well enough. Please, see if anyone else is in need of your help.’

      A young woman was screaming, in shock more than pain, Thea thought as she ran to her. Then she saw the girl was pointing a trembling finger towards the wide ditch. ‘Mon fils, mon fils!’

      The diligence had been stopped from sliding down only by the spokes of one broken wheel and a scrubby thorn bush growing up from the side of the drain. It was slowly collapsing under the weight, the wheel making ominous cracking noises.

      For a moment Thea could not see what the girl was panicking about, then she heard a faint wail and saw movement from a bundle of white cloth in the mud, directly under the collapsing carriage.

      ‘Rhys! There is a baby!’

      ‘I see it.’ He slid down into the ditch, ducked under the edge of the coach and braced his back to it, his feet dug into the bank. The cracking stopped, but how much longer could he hold it? Thea scrambled down at the other end and crouched to look. The veins stood out of Rhys’s forehead, his hands were white where the load pressed down, his body was bent double like Atlas under the weight of the globe. She wriggled closer and grabbed for the baby in the narrow space.

      ‘Get out,’ Rhys hissed between gritted teeth. ‘I don’t know how long I can hold this.’

      ‘You can hold it,’ she said, utterly confident as she got onto her stomach and wormed closer. This was Rhys: in that moment she trusted him to hold the world up if lives depended on him. Her fingers touched, gripped, pulled. The baby howled as she dragged him towards her. The wheel slid down with a jerk, Rhys cursed, shifted and it stopped.

      There was movement at her feet, someone trod on her leg, apologised in English. ‘Sorry. Can you slide out under me?’ It was the injured Englishman, supporting the other end of the coach.

      Thea wormed her way back with all the speed she could muster.

      ‘She’s out!’ the Englishman shouted as hands reached down to haul her and her burden up the bank.

      ‘Then roll free, this is about to go,’ Rhys called, his voice strained to the point of being almost unrecognisable. ‘On my mark. One, two, three—’

      The young man landed in an ungainly heap in a patch of nettles as Thea thrust the baby into the arms of its sobbing mother and the diligence subsided into the ditch with the sound of splintering wood. ‘Rhys!’

      It seemed to take minutes, not seconds, to reach the side of the coach he had been supporting. Now he lay clear of it, on his back in the mud, eyes closed, hands bleeding, face white. Thea hurled herself down beside him and pressed her ear to his chest. Surely he hadn’t broken his neck?

      Under her hands she felt him drag air down to his diaphragm. Not dead, then. ‘Rhys! Rhys, wake up.’

      ‘Thea?’ He seemed to come to with a jolt and she scrambled to her knees as he reached for her, his eyes opening wide and dark in his pale face, his grip on her wrists painful. ‘You aren’t hurt?’

      ‘No, just terribly muddy. I thought you were under that when it fell.’ She collapsed back onto his chest and hugged as much as she could of him.

      ‘Mmm,’ Rhys murmured. ‘Much as I appreciate being cuddled, I prefer not to be sinking into the mire at the same time. I seem to be squashing a frog.’

      ‘Idiot! I thought… I feared…’

      ‘Don’t you dare cry on me,’ he said mildly. ‘How do you think I felt when I saw you wriggling into that death trap, you madcap creature?’

      Thea got to her feet, trying not to tread on him. He was battered enough without squashing what breath remained in him. ‘Well, who else did you think was going to go in?’ she said belligerently to cover her reaction. ‘The passengers were too shocked or too large. Are you hurt?’

      Rhys sat up, winced and uncoiled himself from the ditch. ‘Other than feeling as though our esteemed Prince Regent has been sitting on me, and kicking while he was at it, I am perfectly all right.’

      Thea repressed the urge to fuss. ‘I’ll see how the Englishman is, then. He had a nasty cut to the head before he joined us in the ditch.’

      She found him retrieving his baggage from the piles strewn along the road. ‘Sir? Should you be on your feet?’

      He had tied her fichu into a lopsided bandage which gave his pleasant, regular features an alarmingly piratical cast at odds with his severe pallor, and he was moving with great care as though all his joints hurt. Which, she supposed, they did.

      ‘Ma’am, I thank you for your concern. They tell me there is an inn a mile or so along the road. I will find myself a room there.’

      ‘At least allow us to carry you that far. Tom!’ She gestured to the coachman who hurried over. ‘Place this gentleman’s luggage up behind the chaise.’

      Rhys made his way towards them through the French passengers who were sorting themselves out amidst much weeping and waving of arms. No one appeared seriously injured.

      ‘My lord, this is the gentleman who supported the other end of the coach. He needs to get to an inn where he can rest.’

      ‘The lady is too kind, I trust I do not inconvenience you? My name is Giles Benton. I should have a card.’ He dug into his breast pocket and produced one.

      ‘The Reverend Benton,’ Rhys looked up from his study of the rectangle of pasteboard. ‘I am Palgrave.’

      ‘My lord. I recognise you, of course, from the House….’

      ‘Never mind the politics. And call me Denham,’ Rhys said, offering his hand. ‘May I present my cousin, Miss Smith.’ He blandly ignored Thea’s raised eyebrows, opened the door of the chaise for them then swung up on his horse, calling instructions to the postilions.

      Now she was closeted with an Englishman, one who was a gentleman and a vicar to boot. He was probably even now working his way mentally through the Peerage and coming to the conclusion

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