Now that he wasn’t trying to prevent her from leaving, Clare found herself strangely reluctant to walk through the unguarded door. There was something about the set of his back that, in any other man, would have looked...almost defeated. Weary.
‘If you really did not know...’
His back stiffened.
‘Then I am sorry for thinking that you would deliberately taunt me with...with...well...’ She faltered. He’d never been cruel. Not deliberately cruel. Oh, he might have hurt her time after time, but he’d never been aware, not really, how much power he had to hurt her. He just thought she was funny. A joke. Because, although she tried her hardest to live up to the precepts set down in the gospels, her temper kept on overruling her better judgement. Time after time she fell into scrapes. And somehow he always heard about them and mocked her for them when next he crossed her path.
Unless he actually happened to be present when she was in one, when the chances were he was at the root of it, like today.
‘I suppose...’ she began, on a flood of remorse. But was prevented from making another apology by the return to the room of the landlord and a waiter. Between them they’d brought all the items Lord Rawcliffe had requested. Not that he acknowledged them. He just stood there, with his back to the room, in stony silence while the men set everything on the table.
While she stood by the door, shifting from one foot to the other.
Why were they taking so long to set out a few dishes? Why couldn’t they take the hint that both she and Lord Rawcliffe wanted them to go away?
Because, even though it was highly improper to remain in the room with only Lord Rawcliffe for company, she had too much pride to make her apology to him in front of witnesses.
And too highly developed a conscience to leave without making it.
‘You had better remove your gloves,’ he said, once the landlord and the waiter had bowed their way backward out of the room.
‘My gloves? Why? I am not staying. My coach is due in any moment and I—’
With an expression of impatience he strode across the room and seized her wrist. ‘You need to get some ice on your hand,’ he said, wrenching the buttons undone and tugging at her fingers.
Oh, good heavens. He was removing an item of her clothing. True, it was only a glove and he was doing it as though she were a naughty child, but still it was making her insides go all gooey.
Until something he said jolted her out of that pathetic state.
‘Ice?’ The bowl of ice he’d ordered, while he was standing there staunching the blood flowing from his nose, was for her hand? She’d assumed it was for his nose.
‘Yes, ice,’ he repeated, drawing her over to the table. ‘It is the best thing for injuries sustained when boxing,’ he said, thrusting her on to a chair. ‘I know how painful it must be.’ He took some chunks of ice and wrapped them in one of the cloths the waiter had brought. ‘It is just fortunate that your hand connected with my nose, rather than my jaw, at which,’ he said as he placed the cloth over her knuckles and held it there, ‘I believe you were aiming.’
‘Are you saying you deliberately moved your face so that it was your nose I struck, rather than your jaw?’
He shrugged one shoulder. ‘You don’t seriously think you could have landed a blow unless I permitted it, do you?’
‘Well, now you come to mention it, I was a bit surprised you didn’t try to block me.’
He gave her one of those withering looks that made people say he was insufferably arrogant.
‘There are a lot of little bones in the hand,’ he said, looking at hers as he dabbed at it with the napkin full of ice. ‘And not one of them, as you should know, as strong as the jawbone.’
‘What do you mean, as I should know?’ Did he think she went round punching people on a regular basis? And had he really, deliberately, put his nose in the way of her fist, rather than letting her injure herself on him?
‘Judges 15, of course,’ he replied scathingly. ‘How do you think Samuel managed to slay all those Philistines with the jawbone of an ass, if it wasn’t harder than all their skulls?’
Oh, that was more like him. To quote scripture at her in order to make her feel stupid. And yet...he was taking care of her. Tending so gently to her hand, which did hurt rather a lot. When never, as far back as she could recall, had anyone ever tended to any of her hurts.
She had always been the one tending to others. She’d started learning to care for her brothers, and her father, well before Mama had died and left the task of running the bustling vicarage entirely in her ten-year-old hands.
‘There,’ he said, giving her hand one last gentle pat. ‘Does that feel better?’
She nodded. Because she couldn’t have spoken even if she’d been able to think of the right words to describe how she felt. The ice did indeed feel soothing. But the fact that he’d sent for it, that he’d made it into a compress, that he was applying it...that was what was bringing a lump to her throat.
Oh, this was why Lord Rawcliffe was so dangerous. Why she’d always stayed well away from him. Because he made her want things she had no right to want. Feel things she had no right to feel.
Eventually she pulled herself together sufficiently to lift her chin and look straight into his face, and even give him a tremulous smile.
‘Thank you for tending to my hand. And accepting my apology. And...and even for dodging so that I got your nose rather than your jaw.’ She got to her feet. ‘But I really must be going now. My coach is due in any minute and—’
His face hardened.
‘I have not accepted your apology.’
‘What? But—’
‘Sit down,’ he said sternly. ‘You are not going anywhere until you have given me a full explanation. Besides, have you forgotten?’ He gave her a cold smile. ‘You are my fiancée. Do you really think I am going to permit you to go jauntering off all over the countryside, on your own?’
‘Don’t be ridiculous. I am not your fiancée. And I don’t need your permission to do anything or go anywhere!’
‘That’s better,’ he said, leaning back in his chair, an infuriatingly satisfied smile playing about the lips that had so recently kissed her. ‘You were beginning to droop. Now you are on fighting form again, we can have a proper discussion.’
‘I don’t want to have a discussion with you,’ she said, barely managing to prevent herself from stamping her foot. ‘Besides, oh, listen, can’t you hear it?’ It was the sound of a guard blowing on his horn to announce the arrival of the stage. The stage she needed to get on. ‘I have a seat booked on that coach.’
‘Nevertheless,’ he said, striding over to the door and blocking her exit once again, ‘you will not be getting on it.’
‘Don’t be absurd. Of course I am going to get on it.’
‘You are mistaken. And if you don’t acquiesce to your fate, quietly, then I am going to have to take desperate measures.’
‘Oh, yes? And just what sort of measures,’ she said, marching up to him and planting her hands on her hips, ‘do you intend to take?’
He smiled. That wicked, knowing smile of his. Took her face in both hands. And kissed her.
‘Mmph,’ she protested, raising her hands to his chest to ward him off. He paid no attention. He just wrapped his arms round her and kept right on kissing