The Black Sheep's Return (2 page)

‘Ah, but you ain’t as poor as me and the old man swears he’ll throw me out to starve if I don’t wed a golden dolly. I’ll marry her and tup her to get a brat or two, then my father can live with her while I take a ride with the fine fillies I can buy with her money. They might argue each other into an early grave, with any luck.’

So Freya had refused him and her halfbrother’s fury had been memorable, but it wasn’t as if she had grown up with the illusion that her wider family looked on her advent with unalloyed delight. She accepted she was unlovable, but lately being accepted by society as Lady Freya Buckle, daughter of an Earl of ancient bloodlines and old renown, hadn’t been enough to make her bend to her family’s wishes any longer. Now Bowland was favouring a political crony with even less charm than
Lord George and Freya decided it was time to make a new life, before she was bullied into marrying a man she loathed. The thought of sharing a bed with Mr Forland made her shudder at the thought of his flabby body, greedy hands, mean little eyes and all the unthinkable intimacies she had no wish to learn with him.

A trip to her maternal great-aunt had seemed a good place to start an independent life. They corresponded dutifully and she’d been invited to Miss Bradstock’s house, but Bowland would not hear of her accepting. As a first, wary step into the unknown her decision to go anyway had seemed safe enough, but now look where it had landed her. The shudder that shook her this time was so powerful it nearly left her in a shaking and hysterical heap on the forest floor. No, she was a Buckle, even if her old life was
over
, Freya reminded herself starkly, and Buckles didn’t buckle.

She swished the skirts of her gown away from an encroaching bramble with some of her old panache, glared at it as if it was her worst enemy and finally let herself consider the idea she could have been going round in circles in the watchful silence of these woodlands for hours. If only she had done as Mama always insisted and travelled with armed outriders,
who would have put off rag-tag scoundrels like the ones who had held up her hired carriage and threatened them with rape and murder. Freya clamped her hand over her mouth as she shook her head at the whimper on her lips and tried to hold back the terror threatening to turn her hysterical. She gulped in a huge gasp of cool, fresh air and reminded herself hysterics didn’t get a woman anywhere, unless she was the current Countess of Bowland, of course.

An audible snort of exasperation made her wonder if her mouth had an independent life this time, but her brother Bowland really was an idiot—unfortunately one with a dream of power and not enough sense to see he was being manipulated by his wife, who was a clever rogue. If Freya had known how dangerous it was to steal away and travel lesser-known roads, she would probably have risked the fat politician after all. No, she felt sick at the very idea and would rather be torn apart by wild beasts than wed Mr Forland, then she remembered how close she’d come to just that today and her empty stomach dry-retched painfully. Again she heard the betraying sob in her breath as dawning terror, then desperate flight, replayed in her mind and she trembled
so badly she had to bully herself not to simply give up.

Heaven send the coachman and guard had not been murdered by the brutes who’d attacked them, Freya prayed and shuddered again at their possible fate. She desperately hoped handing over the hefty purse she was carrying had allowed them to escape, but tales of unscrupulous men who banded together to prey on the unwary, such as Lady Freya Buckle, kept nudging at her as she wondered if she was a bigger fool than Bowland to believe paying the hired coachman extra to help her run away from home was as good an idea as it had seemed at the time.

She was alive and unmolested, thanks to her headlong flight, but the thorny underbrush was intent on destroying the very clothes she stood up in and robbing her of her last shreds of dignity. If only she’d sewn a few guineas into her petticoat, or stuffed one of Bowland’s new-fangled paper bank notes into her short corset before she set out. She had been too intent on escaping to worry about what might happen along the way. One mistake she would never make again, if she ever managed to reclaim her true position in life.

She stopped to listen for any sound over
the racing beat of her own heart. Breathing as deeply as she could, she sensed she was alone out here and suddenly she really didn’t want to be. If only she had been born in a different bed. A comfortable squirely one, perhaps, where she could have grown up as merely a passably pretty young miss. Then she might have made friends, gone on impromptu picnics and danced the night away at country balls with eager young gentlemen in search of a comfortable wife.

Dreaming wouldn’t get her out of this endless forest and now it was getting dark. It took all her resolution to face the endless isolation and strange twilight noises without giving in to her fears. Lucky it was summer, she told herself, and this was England so no wolves or bears were running about the forest hungry for a well-fed young aristocrat. Of course there were still human wolves, as she had found out earlier today, but best not to think of them.

Freya struggled to see further than a foot in front of her nose and came to the unwelcome conclusion that she would have to find a suitably dry tree and curl up under it for the night, before she fell flat on her face into some sharp and clinging bush that would snare her fast in the darkness, or cut her to ribbons when
she tried to escape. Failing anything better, it might be as well to stop before she did more damage.

Hesitating as she fought what felt like an ancient terror of being trapped in the forest by night, she snuffed the air like one of Bowland’s hunting dogs and caught an elusive flare of scent made up of wood-smoke and manure and perhaps even a garden that told her she wasn’t so far away from humanity after all. Unsure if that was good or bad, given the horrors of her day, she tried to creep closer as softly as she could. Shivering like a nervous racehorse as full darkness brought the threatening chill of night with it, she hesitated in mid-stride and tripped over a protruding root and fell awkwardly into a heap of felled logs waiting to be split by the forester she was trying not to disturb. She tried her best to get up as she flailed around to find a prop in the dark and grasped yet another bramble instead.

With hot pain from her new scratches bringing tears to her eyes she made herself splay her hands palms down to push herself up and discovered she couldn’t endure any weight on her ankle as agony shot through it and she couldn’t hold back a grunt of pain. At last tears
were streaming down her face unchecked at the misery of it all and she couldn’t seem to stop now she’d finally got started. Conscious of a huge and probably fearsome dog baying to be let out, so he could fight off the clumsy idiot come to attack him and his, she decided all she had left in her to do was to curl up as small as possible and hope she wasn’t about to be savaged.

Sure enough, the vast-sounding hound was unleashed by his probably terrified owner and she could hear him howling with eagerness. Now she heard the soft pound of huge paws on the echoing floor in this dry part of the forest and she let herself breathe in the surprisingly sweet scent of old leaves, lichen and earth in case it was the last thing she ever sensed. Almost wishing the rest of her senses hadn’t sprung into action now the darkness rendered her eyes useless, Freya heard the dog panting between growls and knew her fears were about to come true. Suppressing an irrational plea not to hurt her, she stiffened and waited as it bounded up to her and at least terror had stopped her crying. Almost resigned to feel its huge teeth close on her flesh, she heard a gentlemanly snuffle, then a puzzled whine as
the huge beast lay down beside her and sniffed politely at her wildly disordered curls where she had buried her face in her arms in instinctive defence.

D
aring to raise her head half an inch from her sheltering arms, Freya ventured a hesitant look in the direction of a vast sigh, as the large hound decided it didn’t understand humans at all and seemed about to go to sleep. She couldn’t actually see much, but it was enough to know the animal was as large as its bark indicated. Wishing she knew more about dogs and her mama hadn’t been so afraid of them that she wouldn’t have the smallest lapdog in the house, Freya wondered how you made friends with an animal the size of a small horse.

She hesitantly held out a still-shaking hand and he sniffed it obligingly before putting his head on his paws and sighing once again as
if all the cares of the world lay on his doggy shoulders. Biting back what she assumed would be a hysterical chuckle, she risked pushing herself up on to her knees before the shock of pain in her ankle made her collapse in an inelegant heap and wish she was brave enough to cuddle up to this apparently benign dog for comfort.

‘What have we got here then, Atlas old boy?’ a deep voice rumbled out of the darkness and nearly made Freya jump out of her skin.

‘Who the devil are you?’ she snapped, finally feeling anger burn away the tears and shock of these last horrible hours.

‘I think it’s the host’s prerogative to ask that question,’ he replied with lazy indifference to a lady’s plight and she wondered if that burst of fury had been such a good idea when her safety and possible future might lie in this man’s hands.

‘You can ask, but I’m not promising I’ll answer,’ she muttered, supposedly to herself, but from the deep chuckle it won from him, he had amazing hearing.

‘Let’s start with what you’re doing lying in the middle of my favourite coppice and work it out from there, shall we?’

‘No, I didn’t have the least idea it was yours
and you should keep it in better order if you don’t expect strangers to trip over things in the dark and do themselves an injury.’

‘Had I known you were coming, my lady, I would have made sure everything was shipshape and neat. As it is, you’ll have to excuse a working man for being just that.’

She almost leapt at that satirical ‘my lady’ and asked how he knew who she was, but stopped herself just in time when she realised her normal haughty manner had sparked his sarcasm and she should be more conciliatory, under the circumstances.

‘I’m sorry, it’s been a very long day,’ she managed more graciously.

‘Clearly, so let’s get you inside and at least fed and watered, even if comfortable is beyond hope for a lady such as you with my slender means. It’s far too dark to put you on the road to wherever you were going before you got lost now,’ he said gently, as if he could hear the fear and horror in her voice despite her best efforts.

‘I can’t walk,’ she explained blankly.

‘I hesitate to ask how you got so far from civilisation then,’ he teased as if it didn’t really matter how she got here, here she was and he would deal with her as best he could.

‘I fell over,’ she explained earnestly and
wondered why it felt so tempting to give up fighting at last and let him take over.

‘Better for you perhaps if you’d done so sooner,’ she thought she heard him mutter, but it was lost in the sensation of his touch, as if he was learning her by feel since he’d failed to bring a lantern with him.

‘Where does it hurt?’ he asked and she marvelled that the authority in his voice had her pointing to her ankle, feeling more foolish than ever when she realised he couldn’t see her in the dark.

‘My ankle,’ she said gruffly and yelped as he found out for himself which one.

Atlas whined his puzzlement that his master was hurting the surprise human he’d found him, then settled at a soothing word.

‘I hope you’re not heavy,’ the man said as he rose to his haunches beside her and it felt as if he was towering over her as he insinuated strong hands under her legs and shoulders and lifted her in his mighty arms.

‘Goodness!’ Freya managed weakly as she found herself airborne. ‘If you’d only let me lean on your shoulder, I’m sure I could manage to walk.’

‘It would take all night,’ he told her and
strode along the forest path with her in his arms as easily as if it was clear daylight.

‘It’s unladylike,’ she muttered as she listened for the almost silent pad of Atlas’s feet on the forest floor, surprised to find she already liked the huge animal and wanted his warmth and proximity as she didn’t dare covet that of his master.

‘Probably, but we don’t worry too much about such delicate notions out here in the wilds,’ he told her as if familiar with the dictates of polite society, which seemed unlikely.

Come to think of it, she’d taken him for one of her own kind when he first spoke and perhaps that accounted for this feeling she could finally relax and let a gentleman take care of her. It had been a very trying day, she assured herself, and she was probably wishing the world was how she wanted it to be. If she got through the night in one piece, no doubt it would lurch back to its proper order by morning. For now it felt oddly pleasant to be borne along in a strong man’s arms. She could feel powerful muscles and sinews few gentlemen of her acquaintance could boast as she settled against his broad shoulder with a contented sigh.

‘There,’ he said at last, as he rounded what
seemed a deliberately serpentine last twist in the path and the faint glow of a small curtained window made her open her eyes wider. ‘As well it was no further, perhaps, or you would have been fast asleep,’ he whispered as he shifted her to open his door.

‘What a cosy room,’ she managed sincerely as she took in the still-glowing fire and companionable-looking chairs on either side of the fire.

Clearly his wife had gone to bed and that was why he was murmuring, for fear of waking her after a long day of hard work. She admired his consideration and let herself envy his lady for a moment, surprised how appealing the notion of being cared for by a very masculine husband at the end of a tiring day seemed to someone who’d never done a hard day’s work in her life.

‘It could do with being a little larger. With myself and Atlas to accommodate, one of us always ends up a little too far from the fire for comfort,’ he said and gently set her down in the smaller chair before she could demand to get there on her own one foot and a stick.

‘It seems truly comfortable to me,’ she admitted as she shivered at the idea of all that
lay outside this warm room and how deeply uncomfortable her day had been so far.

‘We can argue about that when we try to decide how to find you a respectable place to sleep in such a confined space later,’ he told her as he sank to his knees in front of her and insisted on removing her stained shoe.

He gave her an impatient look when she batted his hand away from her torn stocking and insisted on undoing her own garter after he turned his back.

‘Done?’ he asked irritably and stared into the fire as if it annoyed him nearly as much as his uninvited guest.

‘Yes,’ she admitted, once she wasn’t biting her lip to conceal how much that small movement hurt her.

‘Good, now let me have a proper look at it,’ he said, as if mentally girding his loins for an unpleasant task. ‘This will probably hurt, but I would be grateful if you could manage not to scream, since my children are asleep upstairs. They would normally sleep through cannonfire, but I doubt a lady screeching at the top of her voice could fail to wake them and I don’t need more complications.’

So he had children, did he? He’d made no mention of his wife so it seemed likely he was
a widower and she went back to wondering if she was as safe after all. Yet there was no air of menace to this man such as she had felt so terrifyingly earlier today from the highwaymen and, once or twice, on the dance floors of Mayfair when a so-called gentleman insisted on brushing too close as they moved through the figures of the dance together. This man might not overtly threaten a young lady’s honour, but he had surprising presence for the rough woodsman his clothes, cottage and everything but his voice proclaimed him to be. He sank to his knees in front of her again and she was determined to show him not all ladies screeched and fainted at the slightest provocation, or even, she revised with a muffled gasp, quite a lot of provocation.

He had dark-gold hair, she catalogued desperately, as the sickening pain of having her injury even this gently prodded surged through her with an oily chill. There was a touch of auburn to it in the firelight and it made for a distinctive contrast with the darkness of his brows and the golden tan of an outdoorsman under his end-of-day stubble of whiskers. He had strong rather than patrician features and a bony nose, but there was a hint of humour
about his expressive mouth that saved his face seeming austere as a medieval monk’s.

Since she had avoided his gaze when they came into the mellow light of what smelt like a luxurious wax candle rather than the stink of tallow she expected, she had no idea of the colour of his eyes. Such faint light probably wouldn’t show it anyway, even if she somehow found the courage to meet his shrewdly assessing gaze, but he had the most amazingly long and thick dark lashes she had ever seen on a man. Meanwhile, the touch of his work-worn hand on her tender foot was surprisingly gentle and she let herself watch him prod and probe her poor battered feet to divert herself from the pain and noticed his fingers were long and sensitive, as well as clearly strong and very fit for whatever purpose he set them by day.

She took in the scent of him without the sort of indelicate snuffle she had allowed herself on smelling smoke from the blessed fire that was now thawing out her aching limbs when she was still in darkness and she decided he shared that oddly clean smell of wood-smoke and deep woodland she had appreciated with what she thought might be her last breath. Add to that a touch of soap and clean man and she concluded he washed of a night, perhaps at
the same time as he bathed his children, so he could leap into action of a morning with only an early morning shave.

Only just restraining herself from adding touch to her exploration of him, she pulled her hand back in time not to explore his overlong thatch of curly hair and see if it felt as alive and wilful as she thought it must be under her probing fingers. Perhaps that was why he lived out here in the middle of nowhere, because the family who had made sure he was educated and taught the manners and speech of a gentleman then found they couldn’t control him either. He looked like a man who went his own way, so why would that way bring him to a humble woodsman’s cottage in the heart of the most remote forest he could find?

Everything about the man was a puzzle and when he met her eyes with cool resignation, she could see that he knew it. Whatever shade his eyes were there was no cruel, hot greed in them as there had been in the eyes of the men who attacked her coach today and those of her parliamentary suitor. She had been desperately frightened and on the verge of a very un-Freya-like attack of the vapours all day, but suddenly the world seemed to rock back on to its proper axis.

‘You’re probably wishing you’d never found me lying out there now,’ she said as he knelt at her feet like a subject king.

‘Shall we say you could prove a mixed blessing, Perdita, and leave it at that?’ he said as he rose to his feet and moved into what she presumed was a scullery from the cool air that wafted in and reminded her how much night there was out there to be terrified of.

‘Isn’t she the heroine of
A Winter’s Tale?’
she questioned and caught herself presuming cottage dwellers didn’t read Shakespeare. ‘I’m sorry to sound so astonished,’ she added as he reappeared with a bowl and some rags. ‘Out here in the midst of nowhere, I dare say you read to pass the long winter hours when you cannot work.’

‘I dare say I do,’ he said uninformatively and she began to realise there were areas of his odd way of life he refused to lay open for her to read and became even more intrigued.

‘Pray, what is your name?’ she asked with some of Lady Freya’s haughty assurance.

He raised his eyebrows and went on soaking rags in the icy water as if only the slight wind getting up outside had disturbed the peace of the night, other than Atlas’s lusty snores.

‘It will seem odd if I address you as “sir” or
“you”, will it not?’ she said in this new Perdita’s softer tone and found she liked it better as well.

‘You can call me Orlando,’ he said at last, kneeling at her feet again and startling a gasp out of her as he bound the ice-cold wet rags about her flinching foot.

‘Oh, so we’re galloping through
As You Like It
now, are we?’ she ventured when the initial shock had passed and she felt every muscle and bone in her misused foot sigh in relief.

‘We are wherever we choose to be,’ he said quizzically, then got to his feet and looked down at her as if he could read her life history in her eyes.

‘Thank you,’ she said quietly, fervently hoping he couldn’t.

‘For giving you the liberty not to be yourself, or doing all I can to relieve the pain?’

‘Perhaps for both?’

‘You’re very welcome, lady,’ he told her with a courtly bow that seemed as sharply at odds with his humble circumstances as his educated accent.

‘Thank you, kind sir,’ she said with a regal gesture and a wry smile in return.

‘Now there’s only the problem of where you can bed down for the night to deal with,’ Rich
said, turning away from the temptation of this suddenly enchanting lost lady.

Left to his own wayward devices, he might linger half the night talking with her if he wasn’t careful. She intrigued him with the odd contrast of dowager queen and lonely hoyden she seemed to switch between as her moods changed, or he got a little too close to the truth of who she might be for her comfort. He’d seen such mischief in her extraordinary amber eyes just now that he knew she was far more complex a person than either role allowed. He wished now that he hadn’t plonked the candle so close to her that he could see the true glory of her unusual eyes when he rose from attending to her foot by its flaring light and felt as if he might fall headlong into them if he wasn’t very careful indeed.