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Chapter Two

Bree thrust the whip into the groom’s hands and used both hers on the reins. Behind her the passengers were screaming, the inner wheels were bucking along the rough rim of the ditch and branches were lashing both coach and horses.

Thank God she had never followed the practice of so many companies and used broken-down animals for the night runs, she thought fleetingly, as the leaders got their hocks under them and powered the heavy vehicle back on to the highway. The lurking menace of a milestone, glinting white in the moonlight, flashed past an inch from the wheels.

The coach rocked violently, throwing her off balance. Her right wrist struck the metal rail at the side of the box with a sickening thud. Bree bit down the gasp of pain and gathered the reins back into her left hand again, stuffing the throbbing right into the space between her greatcoat buttons.

Hell, hell and damnation. Ten miles gone, another forty to go. Her arms already felt as though she had been stretched on the rack, her back ached and now she had a badly bruised wrist. I must have been mad to start, but I’m going to do this if it kills me. It probably will.

The team steadied, then settled into a hard, steady rhythm. ‘Slow down, Miss Bree,’ Jem the groom gasped as she took the crown of the road again. ‘You can’t spring them here!’

‘I can and I will. I’m going to horsewhip that maniac the length of Hounslow High Street, and we’ve lost time as it is,’ she shouted, as the sound of another horn in the distance behind them had the groom staring back anxiously. ‘If they can catch us up before the inn, they can wait,’ Bree added grimly. And if they didn’t like it, they had one very angry coaching proprietor to deal with.

‘You won. Congratulations.’ Max fetched Nevill a hard buffet on his back as the young man climbed stiffly down from the box.

‘I … Max, I’m sorry. I nearly crashed it.’ He stumbled and Max caught him up, pushing him back against the coach wheel. The others would be here in a moment; he wasn’t having Nevill showing them anything but a confident face. ‘If you hadn’t told me when to go, shouted at me … I was going too fast on a blind bend. I’ll understand if you never let me drive your horses again.’

‘Are you ever going to do anything that stupid again?’ Max demanded, ignoring the bustle of ostlers running to unharness his team. ‘No?’ His cousin shook his head. ‘Well, then, lesson learned. I once had the York mail off the road, although I don’t choose to talk about it. I was about your age, and probably as green. Now, get the team put up and looked over and then get us a chamber. I’m going to save your bacon by doing my best with the coachman.’

‘But I should—’

‘Just do as I ask, Nevill, and pray I don’t look at the damage to my paintwork before I’ve had at least one glass of brandy.’

The average stagecoachman would have the boy’s guts for garters—their temper and their arrogance were legendary. Max heard the sound of the horn and the stage swept into the yard: at least he wasn’t going to have to organise its rescue from the ditch. He scanned the roof passengers as they clambered down, protesting loudly about their terrible experience. No young woman—he must have been dreaming. His heart sank and he grimaced wryly; he was acting like a heartsick youth after a glimpse of some beauty at a window.

The groom swung down beside the grumbling passengers. ‘Brandy on the company,’ he said, urging them towards the door of the Bell and the waiting landlord.

He swung round as Max strode up. ‘You driving that rig just now, guv’nor?’ he demanded belligerently.

‘No, my young cousin was, but I am responsible. Allow me to make our apologies to the driver, and to you, of course.’ He slipped a coin into the man’s hand and stepped to one side to confront the other who was slowly climbing down, his back to the yard. The groom shifted as though to protect his driver’s back. Max dodged—and found himself face to face with the smallest, strangest, and certainly most belligerent stagecoach driver he had ever met.

‘You oaf!’ It was his young woman. In the better light of the inn yard she was even more striking than he recalled from that startling glimpse, her looks heightened by shimmering fury. No classical beauty, although a low-crowned beaver jammed down almost to her eyebrows so that not a lock of hair showed, did not help. And goodness knows what her figure was like under the bulk of the caped greatcoat. But her face was a pure oval, her skin clear, her eyes deep blue and her mouth flooded his mind with explicit, arousing images

‘What are you staring at, sir?’ she demanded, giving him the opportunity to admire the way those lovely lips looked in motion, glimpsing a flash of white teeth. ‘Haven’t you ever seen a woman driving before?’ She grounded the butt of her whip with one hand and glowered at him. Tall, she’s tall for a woman, he thought irrelevantly as she tipped her head, just a little, to look at him.

‘Not one driving a stagecoach,’ he admitted. Somewhere behind him the increase in noise heralded the arrival of the two rival drags. Max moved instinctively to shield her from sight. ‘Madam, I must apologise for that incident. Naturally I will meet any damages to the coach, and you must allow me to pay for whatever drinks the passengers are taking in there.’

‘Certainly. Your card for the bill?’ That was businesslike with a vengeance. Max dug into the breast pocket of his coat and produced his card case. ‘Send me a round sum, I am not concerned with detail—it was our fault.’

‘It most certainly was, and I am concerned with detail. You will get a full accounting. Now, if you please, I must see to having my next team put to.’

‘Wait. You surely do not want to be seen by the other drivers.’ She did not appear in the least discommoded by being found, dressed as a man, in the midst of a group of boisterous gentlemen.

‘Really, Mr …’ She glanced at the card, tilting it to catch the lantern light and her eyebrows rose. ‘Lord Penrith, I am in a hurry.’ If it had been a young man with that accent and that attitude he would have assumed it was some young sprig of fashion out for a thrill. But women did not drive stages, and ladies most certainly did not drive anything on public highways outside the centre of town.

‘Damn it, Dysart, if it wasn’t for that damnable stagecoach I’d have had you in that last straight.’ Latymer.

Max swung round, the flaring skirts of his greatcoat effectively screening the willowy figure of the woman. ‘Go and argue the toss with Nevill,’ he suggested. ‘But I say you lost it on the pull past Syon House. How far behind was Lansdowne?’

‘One minute, but I still maintain—’

‘I’ll be with you inside in a moment. I’ve just got to argue this blockhead down from claiming half the cost of his damn coach,’ he added, low-voiced, taking Latymer by the arm and turning him away. ‘I told Nevill to get the brandy in.’

As he suspected, that was enough to turn the grumbling man back to the warmth of the inn parlour. As usual, whenever Latymer lost something, he would insist on a prolonged post mortem, the aim of which would be to prove he had failed for reasons entirely outside his control.

When he turned back, the young woman, far from taking advantage of his efforts to shield her, was engaged in spirited discussions with the head ostler about the team he was proposing to put to. ‘And not that black one either. It’s half-blind,’ she called after him as he stomped back to the stables to fetch another horse.

‘I will not run with those broken-down wrecks they try and fob one off with at night,’ she pronounced as he came up to her.

‘Madam—’

‘Miss Mallory. Bree Mallory.’

‘Miss Mallory, you cannot be intending to continue driving?’

‘As far as Newbury.’ She turned an impatient shoulder on him, watching the team being put to. It would take only a few minutes, now the horses had been agreed. ‘Jem, get the passengers.’

‘But wait, you’ve had a nasty shock.’ Max put out his hand and caught her by the right wrist, then dropped it as she went white and gasped in pain.

For a sickening moment the yard spun and Bree found herself caught up hard against Lord Penrith’s chest.

‘Let me go!’ The effect of being held by a strange man—no, by this strange man—was making her as dizzy as the pain. Reluctantly, it seemed, he opened his arms.

‘You are hurt. Let me see.’ What a nice voice he has, she thought irrelevantly. Deep, and gentle and compelling. She had no intention of doing as he asked, and yet, somehow, her hand was in his again and he was peeling back the cuff of the gauntlet to examine her wrist. ‘Has that just happened?’ She nodded. ‘Can you move your fingers?’

‘Yes. It isn’t broken,’ she added impatiently. His concern was weakening her; she had to tell herself it was nothing, that she could drive despite it.

‘Well, you aren’t driving a stage with that. You had best go inside and get it bound up.’

‘Yes, I am driving! I cannot abandon a coach full of passengers here, let alone the parcels we’re carrying. The Challenge Coach Company does not cancel coaches.’

‘There are entirely too many cs in that sentence,’ Lord Penrith remarked, ‘but it does at least prove that you haven’t been drinking if you can declaim it. The coach won’t be cancelled. I’ll drive it. Wait here.’

‘You … I … you’ll do no such thing!’ She found herself talking to his retreating back. He was already striding off towards the inn door to where the youth who had been driving the drag was waiting. There was a short conversation—more an issuing of orders, she decided, going by her short experience of his lordship’s manner, then he was coming back.

‘Right. Is there room for you inside, Miss Mallory?’

‘Certainly not. I am staying on the box.’ Bother the man, now he had tricked her into accepting that he was going to drive! ‘Are you any good, my lord?’

She knew who he was, of course—one glance at his card, and the cut of his own drag and team, told her that. But she was not going to give Max Dysart, Earl of Penrith, the satisfaction of acknowledging that he was one of the finest whips in the land. Piers would be mad with jealousy when he found out with whom she had virtually collided.

He turned, pausing in the act of climbing on to the box, one hand still resting on the wheel. ‘Any good? At driving?’ One eyebrow arched.

‘Yes, at driving,’ she snapped. If only he didn’t keep looking at me like that. As though he knew me, as though he owned me …

‘Certainly. Much better than my young cousin, I assure you, Miss Mallory. Then … I am quite good at most things.’

Furious at what she suspected was an innuendo that she didn’t understand, Bree marched round and got Jem to help her up on the other side of the box. She could have made it on her own, she told herself resentfully, but she wasn’t such an idiot as to strain her hurt wrist just to prove a point. Without thinking about it she flicked the tails of her coat into a makeshift cushion under her, and settled back. Jem swung up behind.

Lord Penrith already had the reins in hand. He certainly looked the part. ‘Have you ever driven a stage before?’ she demanded. It would not be surprising if he had—it was a craze amongst young bucks to bribe a coachman to let them take the ribbons. More often than not, the entire rig ended up in a ditch.

‘Let them go!’ He turned his head and grinned at her as the wheelers took the strain and began to move. ‘Now I am wounded. You think I’m the sort of fellow who gets drunk and overturns stages for kicks? No, I drive a drag and my own horses when I want a four in hand. This lot aren’t too bad.’

‘Stick to ten miles an hour,’ Bree cautioned. ‘No springing them.’

‘Yes, ma’am,’ he said meekly as they got back on to the road and the leaders settled into their collars. ‘There’s a clean handkerchief in my left-hand pocket if you want to tie up your wrist.’

Gingerly Bree fished in the pocket and pulled out the square of white linen. She wrapped the makeshift bandage round her wrist, then tucked her hand back into the front of her coat. Just the knowledge that she did not have to drive another forty miles was bliss. Surreptitiously she rolled her aching shoulders.

‘Thank you, my lord.’

‘Max,’ he said absently, his eyes on the road ahead. ‘What sort of name is Bree?’

‘My sort. It was my father’s mother’s name.’

There was a flash of white as he grinned. ‘Tell me, Miss Mallory, how does a lady, who speaks with an accent that would not be out of place administering set-downs in Almack’s, come to be driving a stagecoach?’

‘I had an excellent education.’ Bother. She had been so shaken she had let her guard down. Both she and Piers were perfectly capable of switching their accents to suit their company, whether it was disputing the price of oats with the corn chandler or holding a stilted conversation with their half-brother. If she had been thinking, she would have let a strong overtone of London City creep into her vowels.

It was entirely possible that this man knew James, and if he discovered she was driving on the open road, and in men’s clothes, then the fat really would be in the fire. One more of James’s ponderous and endless lectures on propriety and she would probably say something entirely regrettable and cause a permanent family rift.

She shot an anxious glance over her shoulder, but the roof passengers were huddled up, scarves and mufflers round their ears, hunched in the misery of open-air, night-time travel. She could confess to robbing the Bank of England and they would not hear.

‘My parents were perfectly well to do. Just because we’re in trade does not mean elocution was neglected,’ she added starchily.

‘So how is it that you are driving?’ he persisted.

‘Because the driver broke his leg and there was no one else to send out, and the Challenge—’

‘Coach Company does not cancel coaches,’ he parroted. ‘Yes, I know. Do you drive often?’

‘I haven’t driven a stage for three years,’ Bree admitted. ‘And I’ve never driven one in service or at night. But Piers—my younger brother—is recovering from pneumonia. I couldn’t let him drive. It’s his company, his and my uncle’s. And I drive four in hand all the time.’ She didn’t add that she liked to drive the hay wagon up from the family farm near Aylesbury, or that she’d driven the dung cart before now when the need arose. Let him think she bowled round Hyde Park in a phaeton.

‘Your driving is superb. I don’t know how you held the stage out of the ditch when we overtook,’ he said.

Neither do I! Terror and desperation, probably. The compliment from such a master warmed her. ‘Why, thank you, my lord.’

‘Max.’

‘Max. It was sheer necessity. I doubt I could do it again. I was using both hands by that point, and I had abandoned my whip,’ Bree confessed. ‘The old coachmen in our yard would be shocked to the core.’

There was a chuckle from her companion, then he fell silent, intent on navigating the moonlit road.

It was curiously companionable, riding through the chilly darkness on the jolting, hard box beside this stranger. The team were trotting out strongly, then gathering themselves to canter when Max gave them the office on the better stretches. Her wrist throbbed painfully and her shoulders ached, but Bree realised she was enjoying herself. The man was a superlative whip.

‘You had better blow for the gate,’ Max remarked, jerking her out of her reverie. ‘The next toll bar’s coming up.’

‘I can’t. I’ve tried and tried to master the horn, but I can’t do it.’

‘Fine guard you are,’ Max grumbled. ‘Here, take the reins.’

He held his left hand towards her and she slid her own into it, fingers slipping down his wrist and over his palm until the ribbons lay between the correct fingers and he could pull his own free. The team pecked a little at the strange position, then settled.

Max lifted the horn and blew, the long notes echoing through the clear night. ‘Just in time,’ Bree said as the toll gate keeper stumbled out in his nightgown to drag open the wide gate.

‘We’re going to have to do this for every gate, you realise,’ Max commented, his big hand sliding into hers as he took back the reins. It brought them close together again and the fleeting memory of his arms around her in the inn yard made Bree catch her breath.

‘We could stop a moment and pass the horn back to Jem,’ Bree suggested reluctantly. It was the sensible thing to do, of course, but that had been rather fun.

‘And lose more time?’ Max flicked the whip close to the ear of the offside wheeler that seemed to have decided it didn’t want to share the work. ‘I’m sure the Challenge Coach Company is always punctual. Hmm, not enough cs. I shall have to think of a slogan.’ Bree chuckled. ‘Besides,’ he added, echoing her own thoughts, ‘it was rather fun.’

‘In what way, exactly?’ she enquired repressively. It might be very stimulating to be sitting here enjoying a master class in four-in-hand driving, but one had to recall that she was also alone, unchaperoned, with a man she was certain James would stigmatise as a rake. On the other hand, if James would disapprove, it made it all much more pleasurable.

‘It’s a form of trick driving in its way. And, of course, there’s the opportunity to hold hands with a pretty girl. Now, what have I said to make you snort?’

‘I do not snort. And if you find any female dressed as I am pretty, my lord, there is something wrong with you.’

‘I have exceptionally good eyesight.’

‘And a vivid imagination,’ she muttered. He probably was a rake, and flirting with anything female under the age of ninety was doubtless a prerequisite.

Max smiled, but all he said was, ‘We shall see.’

By the time they reached the last toll gate before Newbury Bree thought she had never been so stiff, nor so exhilarated, in her life. She seemed to have passed through some barrier of exhaustion and now, at almost four in the morning, she felt wide awake.

Probably because my bottom-bones are bruised black and blue, she concluded ruefully. The old coachman’s trick of making a cushion with her coat tails was not as effective as she had been led to believe, or perhaps she simply had less natural padding than they did.

It was time to sound the horn again. They had the rhythm of it now. Bree felt the warmth of Max’s large hand slide over hers, then she had the reins and he was blowing for the gate. But when they were through and he reached for her in his turn he did not slip his fingers across her palm; instead, he closed his hand around hers and held it lightly.

‘We’ll drive the last bit together,’ he said simply, and she wondered at the warm rush of pleasure the words and the action brought her.

I’m getting light-headed, Bree thought, flexing her fingers within Max’s grip and fighting the urge to lean into his body. It was deliciously like being drunk.

The sensation lasted as long as it took William Huggins, otherwise known as Bonebreaker Bill, to come striding out into the yard of the Plume of Feathers and see who was driving his coach through the arch.

‘Miss Bree! What do you think you are doing?’ He glowered up at the box of the coach, meaty fists on his bulky hips, booted feet apart.

‘We didn’t have a driver to send out, Bill,’ she said placatingly. Bill had known her since she was six and had proved a far stricter guardian than either of her parents ever had.

‘Who’s this flash cove, then?’ he demanded, swivelling his bloodshot eyes to Max. ‘Some break-o’day boy who’s cozened you into letting him take the ribbons for a thrill?’

‘This is Lord Penrith, Bill. My lord, allow me to introduce William Huggins, the finest coachman on this, or any other, road.’

Bill brushed aside the compliment, taking it as his due, but his eyes narrowed. ‘Penrith? From the Nonesuch Whips?’

‘For my sins.’ Sensibly, Max was staying on the box where he had the advantage of height. But the coachman had lost all his hostility.

‘Well, I’ll be damned! If half they say about you is true, my lord, then it’s a privilege to have you drive my coach, that it is! Why, you can take it all the way to Bath if you be so wishful.’

‘Thank you, but no, Mr Huggins.’ Max began to climb down. ‘This was a long enough stage for me—I had no idea those box seats were so hard.’

‘Hah! You should fold your coat tails under you, my lord. That’s the way to save your bum bones.’

‘It doesn’t work, Bill,’ Bree said, causing him to go scarlet. ‘I tried. Now, come and lift me down, please. I’m as stiff as a board.’

The ostlers, spurred on by the presence of their severest critic, completed the change in under two minutes and Bill took the coach out on to the highway with a roar of farewell and a flourish of his hat. Poor Jem, expected like all guards to work the whole distance, was back up on the box beside him.

‘There you are,’ Max said, fishing his pocket watch out. ‘Dead on time. The Challenge Coach Company never compromises with the clock,’ he added with satisfaction. ‘You may have it engraved on your stationery with my compliments.’

‘Thank you so much.’ Bree turned to him, tipping her head back to smile up into his face. It was one part of him, she realised, that she hadn’t been able to study during the last four hours. She knew the feel of his hands on hers, the range of his voice, and the height and breadth of his body had bulwarked hers like a rock all night.

It was difficult to make out colours in the lamplight, but his eyes were dark under dark brows, his cheekbones pronounced, his chin rather too decided for her taste, and his mouth—which was within a fraction of a smile as he watched her—was generous. It was a good face, she decided. A tough face, but in a good way. He made her feel safe.

‘Thank you,’ she said again. ‘Goodbye, my lord.’

‘And just where do you think you are going now, Miss Mallory?’

‘To bespeak a room, of course.’

‘With no maid, no luggage and at four in the morning?’

‘They will know who I am when I introduce myself.’

‘It is not the inn staff I am concerned about. Really, Miss Mallory, you cannot stay here—goodness knows who you might encounter. Think of your reputation.’

‘I do not have one!’ Really, he was as bad as James. ‘Not that sort of reputation. I am not in society, I am not in the marriage mart. I am in trade, my lord. Besides, what alternative do I have, other than to wait for the next stage back and be jolted for another five sleepless hours? I have, I regret to say, no convenient maiden aunt in Newbury.’

His mouth twitched. She could not tell, in this light, whether he was annoyed that she was arguing with him, or amused by the maiden aunt. ‘I was going to take a private parlour for you to rest in for a while and I will hire a chaise to take us back to London.’

‘A chaise? A closed carriage? For the two of us? All the way back to London? And just what will that do for my reputation, pray?’

‘Ruin it, I imagine,’ Max said amiably.