To Rescue or Ravish?. Barbara Monajem

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      * * *

      “Of course I recognised you. How could I not?”

      “You might have said something to that effect.” He mimicked her proud voice. “‘Good evening, Matthew. How do you do?’ Friendly-like,” he added, lapsing into the role of jarvey.

      “After I’d almost been abducted and then called a whore?” Her voice shook.

      In spite of himself he took pity. “Sorry, but that was before I realized who you were. Respectable women don’t wander about by themselves at night.”

      She opened her mouth as if to say something cutting, but shut it again, flapping a hand as if he were irrelevant. Which he was, in the ordinary course of Arabella’s exalted life, but she was stuck with him for the moment. He’d been contemplating whether to stop and question her when she’d banged on the coach roof. “Who lives in Bunbury Place? Your…” He got his mouth around the word. “Fiancé?”

      “No, my trustee lives there. My supposed fiancé is the man who tried to abduct me.”

      “What the deuce?” He opened the door and was about to climb inside—perishing cold out tonight—when he caught the sound of hooves. “Hold on a jiff. Stay there.” He slipped behind the hack and ducked back to the street. Sure enough, that same coach—her fiancé’s coach?moved quickly past.

      Supposed fiancé, she’d said. So she wasn’t really engaged? Absurdly, relief bourgeoned inside him. He returned, bumping into her as she rounded the hackney, and grasped her arm to steady her. A big mistake, for even in the chilly air her unique aroma reached out to him, lured him to the edge of lunacy. “Didn’t I tell you to stay put?”

      She put her nose in the air. “Where did you go?” Peremptory as ever, and yet no woman had ever fired his blood as she did.

      “Looks like your, er, supposed fiancé hasn’t given up,” he said. “That was his coach, headed for Bunbury Place.”

      He heard her sharp intake of breath, felt her fear. “I was afraid of that,” she muttered. “That’s why I had you stop. I daren’t go home. Oh, God, what am I to do?”

      It was madness to spend another minute with her, but what choice did he have? “Obvious, isn’t it? You’ll have to come with me.”

      * * *

      Go with him? How she wished she could go with him, away from here forever. She shut that impossible dream into the coffin in her mind where she kept her memories of Matthew Worcester. There were so many; they’d been friends throughout childhood in their village in Surrey. Such good friends, but then they’d grown up, and the last memory overwhelmed all the rest, turned pleasure into pain, so she’d shut them all away. She’d never learned how to nail the coffin tight, but it stayed closed most of the time.

      It wouldn’t after tonight. She envisioned months of repeating soliloquies from Shakespeare’s tragedies and passages from the Bible—but not the Song of Solomon—over and over every time she thought of him. Replacing those thoughts with words and more words; banishing those memories, the old and now the new.

      “You needn’t look so appalled,” he said. “I’ll take you to stay with my mother.”

      “You can’t possibly see the expression on my face in this pitchy darkness,” she retorted. “Does your mother live nearby?” Arabella hadn’t seen Mrs. Worcester for a number of years—not since her husband had died and she’d left Surrey to live with a relative.

      “Not too terribly far. It’s not a tonnish address, but entirely respectable. Your reputation will be safe.”

      She should be relieved, but on the contrary, she had to bite her lip hard to avoid bursting into tears. She’d assumed that someday she would have to meet Matt and speak to him again. A few years earlier, she’d seen him on a London street, but she’d been so unprepared that she’d cravenly ignored him. After that, she’d pictured how they might eventually encounter one another, thought out what she would say, planned how calm and composed she would be. After all, he was a thing of the past.

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