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“Then I’ll see to the horses,” the young man said as he absently unbuttoned the collar of his shirt, exposing his neck and some of his chest. Both were as tanned as his face.
Perhaps he was a doctor on a vessel.
The driver started to sit up. “Maybe I’d better—”
“No, you should rest,” the young man ordered. “Enjoy having such a charming and pretty nurse, Thompkins, and leave the horses to me. Tell her about the time I tried to drive your team and we wound up in the ditch.”
The driver grinned, then grimaced. “Aye, my lord.”
My lord? A noble physician? That was very interesting…except that she should be thinking about how they were going to get to Bath and what she should do when they got there.
“First, I need a few words with your nurse,” the nobleman said, taking her arm and drawing her a short distance away.
Concerned the driver was more seriously injured than he had implied, she ignored the impropriety of his action and tried to ignore the sensations it engendered, like little flames licking along her skin.
“Is the driver seriously hurt after all?” she asked anxiously.
“No, I don’t believe Thompkins has a serious concussion,” he said, to her relief. “However, I’m not a doctor.”
“You’re not?” she blurted in surprise. His examination had certainly looked like that of a medical man.
He gravely shook his head. “Unfortunately, no. I have a little medical training, so I know enough to be aware that he should be kept conscious, if at all possible, until we can fetch a physician. Can you do that while I see to the injured horse and ride to the next inn on one of the others?”
“Yes, I think I can keep him awake.”
The young gentleman’s lips flicked up into a pleased smile that again sent that unusual warmth thrumming through her body. As she returned to the driver and tried to soothe her nerves, he started toward the guard holding the horses.
She heard the nobleman ask the guard where the pistols were as she began wiping the blood that had slowed to a trickle.
“Under my seat,” the man nervously replied, glancing at the high backseat at the rear of the coach, for mail coach guards generally carried pistols as well as a blunderbuss, to fend off highwaymen.
“I’ll hold the horses while you put that poor beast out of its misery,” the young gentleman offered.
“What, you want me to shoot it? I couldn’t!” the guard protested. “I can’t be destroyin’ government property! It’d be my job. Besides, I’m to look after the mail, not the animals.”
“Surely an exception can be made if a horse has broken its leg,” the young man replied.
“I tell ya, I’m supposed to guard the mail, not take care o’ the horses!”
“I will not allow that poor animal to suffer.”
“You won’t? Who the devil are you?”
“Shut yer gob, Snicks,” the driver called out. “Let the viscount do what has to be done.”
He was a viscount? A viscount had kissed her?
“I’ll pay for the horse if need be,” the young nobleman said as he marched toward the overturned coach with such a fiercely determined look on his face, he hardly seemed like the same man.
The guard scowled but said no more as the viscount found the pistol which, like the blunderbuss, looked as if it had been made early in the previous century.
With the gun behind his back, murmuring something that sounded like an apology, the viscount approached the injured horse. Then, as the guard moved as far away as he could, the nobleman took his stance, aimed and shot the horse right between its big, brown, limpid eyes.
As the animal fell heavily to the ground, the viscount lowered his arm and bowed his head.
“Couldn’t be helped,” the driver muttered roughly. “Had to be done.”
Yes, it had to be done, Nell thought as she returned to dabbing the driver’s wound, but she felt sorry for the poor horse, as well as the man who had to shoot it.
The viscount tucked the pistol into the waist of his trousers before returning to Nell and the driver. Between the pistol, his sun-darkened skin, open shirt and disheveled hair, he looked like a very handsome, elegant pirate.
Pirate. The sea. A viscount who liked spiders who’d gone to sea…
Good heavens! He had to be Lord Bromwell, the naturalist whose book about his voyage around the world had made him the toast of London society and the subject of many articles in the popular press. Like so many others, Lady Sturmpole had bought his book and talked about his remarkable adventures, although she didn’t bother to actually read The Spider’s Web.
No wonder he could be calm in a crisis. Any man who’d survived a shipwreck and attacks by cannibals could surely take an overturned coach in stride. As for that kiss, he must often be the object of female attention and lust. He probably had women throwing themselves at him all the time and assumed she was another who was intrigued and infatuated by his looks and his fame.
And because he was famous, the press might take an even greater interest in a mail coach overturning, perhaps noting that Lord Bromwell had not been the only passenger and asking her name and her destination and why she was in the coach….
With a growing sense of impending doom, wishing she’d never caught the coach, never gone to London, never decided to go to Bath and, most of all, never met him, Nell watched as the handsome, renowned naturalist swung himself onto the back of one of the horses and galloped down the road.
Chapter Two
Fortunately, I have been blessed with a practical nature that allows me to take immediate action without the burden of emotion. Thus, I was quite calm as the ship was sinking and my concern was to help as many of my shipmates as possible. It was after the ship had gone down and the storm had abated, after we had managed to retrieve some items necessary to life and found ourselves on that tiny slip of sand seemingly lost in the vast ocean, that I laid my head on my knees, and wept.
—from The Spider’s Web, by Lord Bromwell
As Lord Bromwell—known as Buggy to his closest friends—had expected, the sight of a dishevelled, hatless, cloakless man mounted on a sweat-slicked coach horse charging into the yard of The Crown and Lion caused quite a stir.
A male servant carrying a bag of flour over his shoulder toward the kitchen stopped and stared, openmouthed. Two slovenly attired men lounging by the door straightened. The washerwoman, an enormous basket of wet linen in her arms, nearly dropped her burden, while a boy carrying boots paid no heed where he was going and nearly ran into one of the two idlers, earning the curious lad a cuff on the side of the head.
“There’s been an accident,” Bromwell called out to the hostler as the man ran out of the stables, followed by two grooms, a stable boy and a man in livery.
Bromwell slid off the exhausted horse and, after unwrapping the excess length of the reins from around his hands, gave them to the stable boy. Meanwhile, the grooms, liveried fellows, idlers, bootblack and washerwoman gathered around them. “The mail coach broke an axle about three miles back on the London road.”
“No!” the hostler cried, as if such a thing were completely impossible.
“Yes,” Bromwell replied as the inn’s proprietor, alerted by the hubbub, appeared in the door of the taproom. He wiped his hands on the soiled apron that covered his ample belly and hurried forward at a brisk trot that was impressive for a man of his girth.
“Gad,