‘Not even the most careful laundering will get the stain out of wool and it’s not as if I have dozens of them to be ruined,’ she twittered fussily.
‘Here, this ought to make him comfortable as the Sleeping Beauty,’ Hester said as she trudged back with an armful of leaves and moss and some bleached and dry grass harvested from the edge of the clearing.
Rowena bundled the driest of her sister’s offerings into her shawl, then wrapped it into a makeshift pillow. Keeping between her sister and harm, she thrust the neatly wrapped bundle at Hes, then knelt at Mr Winterley’s other side to frustrate his attacker.
‘The instant I lift his head you must put my shawl between his poor head and that nasty tree root,’ she ordered as if she and Hes were nearly as dimwitted as one another.
‘Yes, of course, sister dear. How you do fuss,’ Hes said with such a huge sigh of long-suffering patience Rowena frowned at her for overacting. Nothing stirred behind her, though, so maybe it was working.
‘Right pocket,’ Mr Winterley murmured when Rowena bent even closer. She felt almost as fluffy and distracted as she was pretending to be as she fought off the feeling of being too close to a sleek and magnificent predator. ‘Get your sister out of here,’ he added so softly she bent over him like a ministering angel to hear him and her hair tumbled out of the last of its pins and hid even more of him from prying eyes.
Close to he was lean and vital and ridiculously tempting as she breathed a little too heavily in his ear and heard him grunt with pain when she lifted his mistreated head. Hes pushed the improvised cushion under him and Rowena watched as fascinated by him as the silly debutante she was doing her best to ape. He smelt of clean woods and a faint, cool undercurrent of spice and lemon water and man. The scent pleased her somehow as Nate’s linen rarely had, even when she laboured hard to keep it clean herself when they were on the march and he said the laundresses were too rough with his precious shirts. How unfair of her to contrast a man intent on fighting his country’s mortal enemies with this idle fop. Cross with herself, she flinched away, then saw him frown as if in pain and called herself every sort of a fool under her breath.
James willed the ringing in his head to subside and pushed the darkness away. He distracted himself from feeling awful by wondering where a vicar’s daughter had learnt so many unladylike curses. He hoped the imp on his other side was too busy wondering if he was dead again to hear and resolved to have words with the woman when they were free of an audience. He knew from the warning tingle at the back of his neck the man who had shot at him was out there. The worm was probably puzzling about what to do next, but James couldn’t dismiss him as that shot was so true that, if not for this iron-hard tree root and the impulsive girl who felled him, he’d be dead. He’d be dead meat if he was standing where he was when the shooter aimed and no doubt the man had a second weapon and nerve enough to try again.
How the devil had his enemies tracked him down? He’d thought it safe to be James Winterley when he had to come home with his tail between his legs. Nobody took a useless society fribble seriously and it was a relief to saunter through life as if he hadn’t a care in the world. If he was being honest, and it might be as well if he was considering how close to God he might be, he took perverse pleasure in living down to James Winterley’s raffish reputation. He’d been very young when he gained it; a confused and angry boy at odds with himself and the world. Fifteen years on from his riotous start to adult life as the Winterley boy, the spare half-brother, he could almost pity his younger self. Or he could if he wasn’t saddled with the low standards the boy set him so many years on.
This wasn’t the best time for chewing over past mistakes, but even that cover had failed him if the skill of the stalker so close he could almost taste him was anything to go by. He lay still as a corpse behind the coward’s shield of Rowena Finch’s glorious hair and delightful body and did his best to plan a speedy exit from this open space without either Finch girl getting hurt. It was more of an effort to keep his face blank when he felt a slender hand insinuate itself into his coat pocket and heard the rustle of hot-pressed paper under the fair Rowena’s searching hand. Not that, he wanted to shout at her. Don’t touch Virginia’s letter.
He managed to crack open his eyelids by the smallest distance and saw her wrinkle her nose in distaste at having to search a gentleman’s pockets. The sight somehow calmed the worst of his fears and that was a beginner’s mistake. Between one breath and the next a woman as full of life and promise as this could be dead as mutton. Why had he thought that one certainty of a spy’s life less true here? Raigne had cast a spell over him, but he should never have stayed so long. But how could he have thought it would be easy to give up his unseemly profession and live near here in peaceful obscurity either?
‘Got it,’ Mrs Westhope murmured as she bent close to cover the movement of her lips with a front of fussing over his injuries as she slipped the lethal little pistol out of his pocket with the finesse of the finest pickpocket in the land.
‘Take your sister and run, then,’ he muttered as urgently as he dared.
‘No,’ she whispered emphatically.
‘This isn’t some rustic coney-catcher ready to shoot me for my boots.’
‘Who is he, then?’ she asked as if she had a right to know.
‘None of your business,’ he grumbled so faintly she pressed closer, as if shielding him with her body was all the answer she need make to that grumpy denial.
Somehow he must fight the blankness that blow on the head threatened every time he tried to move. She was risking so much and all he really wanted was to reach up and cup her chin, see a flush of consciousness across her fine-boned cheeks and a softening spark of desire in those extraordinary cornflower-blue eyes of hers. He wanted her to bend an iota of space closer still and kiss him as if she meant it. Had that blow on the head truly driven all the sense out of it? Until now he hadn’t thought he had enough masculine idiocy left in his pounding head to lust after this luscious mixture of a woman, but now it was sending messages to the rest of him he didn’t want to hear. He must make her go, before she got killed, or noticed the state his body would be in if she didn’t move further away.
‘Get her out of here,’ he risked demanding loudly as he dared.
‘And risk whoever is out there attacking us? Don’t be more of an idiot than that blow on the head made you.’
‘Is he coming awake at last, Row?’
Hearing the panic under that question, James hesitated and Rowena seemed caught between admitting it and laying them open to his enemy, or denying it and making her little sister more disturbed by the whole business.
‘Wha...?’ he moaned artistically and made the decision for her.
‘Do be still and stay quiet, sir,’ the fair Rowena ordered so sternly he suspected she would prefer to slap him.
‘Who...?’ He gasped, as if fighting unconsciousness, and now at least he could snatch a glance round the wide clearing and take in the slender options available.
‘You saved my little sister’s life,’ Rowena proclaimed dramatically. He frowned under cover of her tumbling hair as she bent over him again to act out her fantasy heroine.
‘Da...?’ he managed. Maybe the watcher would believe him addled by the blow any listener must have heard, since it sounded like the crack of doom inside his head.
‘I think our patient is asking if you are truly unscathed by your latest misadventure, Hes. Show yourself to the gentleman, dear, and prove you’re truly in one piece, although you don’t deserve to be after what you did.’
For a moment James dreaded the fearless girl being cowed by her lucky escape. Even if it might stop her being so reckless next time she wanted to defy gravity, he didn’t want that. Then he caught the little devil peering at him over her