“Probably not.”

“Just so.”

Wyn watched her move toward the door where the dog sat. As she approached it, the little mongrel’s tail whipped back and forth. She paused and looked back.

“It likes you,” she said.

“Rather, it likes you.” As everyone did. Her smile, her sparkling eyes, and her warmth conveyed affection to every passenger aboard the coach, the coachman, even the surly posting house master at their previous stop. And aside from his desire to have his hands on her again, Wyn liked her too. He would not allow this new danger to threaten her. The man in brown that he’d seen twice now was a curiosity. If the man appeared again, he would discover his purpose.

But today’s threat was a much greater concern. An old acquaintance, Duncan Eads, had appeared earlier on the road behind the coach. He had maintained his distance, but he was not a man to be discounted. Months back Wyn had caused him trouble, stealing a girl out from under the nose of Eads’s employer, a man named Myles who owned a quarter of London’s underworld. Drunk as an emperor at the time—a rather long episode of that—Wyn had made Eads look like a fool and angered Myles.

Eads had no doubt been sent here to finally make him pay. Wyn was of a mind to tell him to get in line.

“We should give it a name.” She bent to stroke the dog’s brow, pulling the fabric of her cloak tight around her behind. Wyn held his breath, entirely unable to remove his gaze from that generous curve of femininity that he’d briefly had in his hand.

“As you wish.”

She offered him a quick smile and went into the pub.

He walked his horses to a grassy spot and loosened their leads to allow them to graze. The village’s high street was peculiarly active; farmers’ wagons laden with children and other adults, a cart, then a carriage of modest quality all passed by within minutes, and a number of people on foot. Eads did not appear, but Wyn suspected he would see him again when the time was least convenient. Perhaps on the road ahead. Eads might now be going around a long route while the coach was halted here, planning an ambush.

The coachman ambled from the pub, tipped his cap to Wyn, and the other passengers followed. Miss Lucas burst out the door.

“Mr. Yale, I have heard the most wonderful news.” Her cheeks were flushed with life. She lowered her voice and pulled Mrs. Polley along. “Today the local squire has opened up his estate to all the surrounding countryside. Apparently this squire, Sir Henry, is quite well-to-do and he likes to throw enormous parties.” She glanced about the street with an expectant air.

“I must be glad for Sir Henry and his guests.” It explained the traffic. “But I am not entirely certain what his magnanimity has to do with you.”

“Oh, not so much me, or only incidentally, but rather you. And the man following you.”

He glanced at Mrs. Polley. Her lips were a line. He returned his regard to the girl whose blue eyes shone with excitement.

“Miss Lucas, may I suggest that you reboard the—”

“No. Don’t you see? This is the ideal diversion.” She grasped his arm, effectively grounding him in total, tongue-tied silence. He’d not forgotten the shape of her body or the heat of her touch from the night before, though he had spent the morning’s ride trying to. Ten years as a secret agent of the crown, yet when confronted with Miss Diantha Lucas, he was, it seemed, all youthful lust all over again. She had a fine figure. Not merely fine. She had perfect breasts, round and high and modestly concealed by her traveling gown, which did not however discourage him from imagining them naked.

“Diversion?” he managed.

“We must hide in plain sight.” Her eyes danced, her berry lips curving into a smile of delight that Wyn wanted to taste. “There will be hundreds of people there, and if your . . . friend is not here now”—her gaze darted to the street—“he will not know you have gone off in another direction. We can hire a carriage and take another route. Don’t you see? It is perfect.”

“No.” He did not see the perfection of her plan, but he was beginning to see the perfect idiocy of his own desires.

“Yes.”

He turned to her companion. “Mrs. Polley, I suspect you disapprove of this proposed program.”

“Well, I don’t see how it might not be the trick. If your nasty fellow might give this sweet lady grief, well then you’ve got to find a solution. And I don’t see how my mistress’s plan here is any worse than what you might come up with.”

“If you do not board that coach and a carriage cannot be hired, Miss Lucas, we will be well stranded here when my ‘friend’ arrives.”

She scanned his face. “You do not believe he will arrive here. Not here. You think he has gone ahead to accost you by surprise somewhere down the highway.”

She was remarkable. So he laughed.

Her lips curved into a smile, like the breeze in spring. She was fresh and clear and direct, except of course with this entire escapade to find her mother. But her eyes twinkled up at him, satisfaction and excitement making the lapis glimmer in the inconstant rays of sun, and he could not deny her. Rule #1: If a lady is kind of heart, generous and virtuous, a gentleman should acquiesce to her every request; he should deny her nothing. That, and, if a carriage could in fact be gotten here, her plan actually sounded better than anything he’d yet devised.

Her gaze shifted over his shoulder. “There! We mayn’t have to hire a carriage after all.” She hailed a vehicle crawling along at a snail’s pace, an ancient barouche as long as it was cavernous within, with a wizened coachman in a faded coat and pulled by a pair of horses as old as their driver. Tucked inside were two ladies wrapped in gauze at least a half century out of date, with hats and parasols from another era.

Miss Lucas hurried to it. Wyn could not hear her words, only her voice, clean and bright as always. The ladies responded to her with smiles. A frail hand gloved in old lace stretched out and took the girl’s. Then another lifted, waving him and Mrs. Polley toward the carriage.

That was the moment Wyn first suspected that finally—after many more than nine girls—he had met his match.

Chapter 6

“I told the Miss Blevinses that we are newlyweds.”

“I gathered that.”

“Well, I couldn’t very well tell them we are an old married couple. I’m barely nineteen.”

“You might have been a child bride.”

She chuckled. Errant rays of sunshine played in the strands of chestnut hair escaping her bonnet and in her blue eyes, and for a moment she did appear quite young. Nearly guileless, he had believed.

Now he knew better.

“But of course we have no children, and I was not really prepared to invent them on the spot.” She picked morsels of meat from the platter on the table and deposited them alternately with the dog at her feet and between her tempting lips. “Although I suppose I could have if pressed, but they might not have believed it. We are not well enough known to each other to do the sorts of things that old married couples do, like—”

“Finish each other’s sentences?”

Her dimples flashed, propelling Wyn’s hand back to the punch bowl ladle. Sir Henry’s butler mixed a potent, but palatable, concoction.

It wouldn’t have mattered if he served white gin straight from the barrel. After sitting for two hours on chairs decorating the lawn, sipping tea while she invented story after story of charming childhood escapades—both hers and his—with which she regaled the Miss Blevinses, Sir Henry, and a half dozen other septuagenarians who hadn’t seen a London drawing room since George II and therefore had no idea that the newly wedded Mr. and Mrs. Dyer were a complete sham—Wyn had nearly stood and declared his intention to annul her instantly. Instead he begged their host and the kind ladies who had conveyed them hither to excuse them while he and his bride strolled through the gardens.

He’d taken her directly to the refreshments.

About the lawn sloping to the sheep fields below, children played ball and tennis, their parents—farmers, villagers, and a smattering of exceedingly modest gentry—enjoying the produce of the harvest. All were happy with the break in the rain and Sir Henry’s annual generosity. A fiddle buzzed a tune, and two dozen or so lads and lasses danced upon the turf, laughter mingling with shy glances—the awkward flirtations of youths and the innocent coquetry of maidens.

Wyn had no remembrances of a time like that in his life. He’d gone from boy to man in months. Weeks. He did not regret it; he had seen the world in all its marvels. Still, he turned away from the scene now and swallowed the contents of his glass.

Miss Lucas’s gaze lingered on the dancers. “I don’t think Mrs. Polley approves of the story I have invented.”

“I suspect, rather, that she does not approve of the husband you have chosen.”

“But you are a perfectly unexceptionable gentleman.”

“A gentleman who has agreed to escort you across England without benefit of a proper chaperone, family, or actual marriage license, recent or otherwise.”

“Hm. But otherwise she is an ideal companion. Except for that abrupt sleeping habit, of course.” She glanced across the lawn to where Mrs. Polley was sprawled upon a divan in the shade of a draping willow. Her brow creased. “I hope she is not ill.”

“I have seen it before.” In the East Indies years ago. “The body simply closes down, as though in sleep although it is not. She cannot control it, but it does not harm her.”

Miss Lucas looked at him with her seeking eyes and took the side of her lower lip between her teeth. This time Wyn did not look away.