The taproom was still crowded, the inn the favorite local haunt of townsfolk and farm laborers celebrating the end of the harvest. Too much festivity for his tastes at present. Pushing the last of the brandy away, he pressed to his feet and wove his way through tables of boisterous men to the door to the mews. The horses must be checked. Bedding must be dry. The stall must be mucked—even by him, if need be. He’d done it plenty of times before he’d even had a horse of his own.

The night without was black, a single lamp illuminating the entrance to the stable. He crossed the pebbly drive, boots splashing, and slid open the door. He stepped inside and closed the panel, shutting out the muffled sounds of merriment in the inn and the light from the drive.

Not a yard away, a breath hitched in the darkness. A light sound, and high.

And then she cast herself at him.

She was perfectly curved where his hands met and clasped her waist, and quivering. Her breaths came fast against his chin.

Then he did what he would not have done if he had not consumed an inch shy of the contents of a bottle of brandy in the course of three hours, or if he had employed all his senses at that moment, not only his starved sense of touch—for instance, his sense of smell, which would have told him that he did not hold a barmaid in his hands: He pulled her against him. What else did a wench intend of a man deep in his cups when she threw herself at him in the dark so close upon midnight?

She gasped and stiffened. Then she pressed her cheek to his jaw and breathed, “Help me.”

If not for the lurching crash that sounded down the row of stalls, and the rough curse from that direction, Wyn would have behaved quite differently at this moment as well, even deep in his cups.

He did not release Miss Lucas, though every corner of his muddled mind shouted at him to do so. Instead he turned to shield her with his body, pressed her back against the wall, and whispered into her ear, “Put your arms about me and be still.”

She obeyed. It took no effort to hold her and ready his stance at once. She was soft, and now that he had engaged all his senses—God she smelled good—and he was more accustomed to being at a ready stance than not. He drew up the hood of her cloak and his hand brushed curls silky as butter.

Heavy footsteps advanced.

“Where are you, my pretty poppy?” a thick voice slurred. “Come out like a good girl, or I’ll be none too happy when I find you.”

Miss Lucas’s body gave a little shudder. Wyn bent his head, hiding her more fully in case the man’s vision should be accustomed to the dark. He could confront him, but the tread suggested a large fellow, and Wyn was admittedly not at his best with a quart of brandy beneath his belt and no food for days.

The footsteps shuffled on the straw and came to a halt.

“What’s this?” A pause. “Oh, beg pardon, old chap. Just looking for my own bit of skirt, don’t you know.”

“Sod off, ‘old chap.’ ” Wyn had no trouble roughening his voice. The caress of her tender earlobe across his lips had rendered his throat a desert.

The man muttered and clomped to the door, slid it open, then threw it shut behind him.

She ejected a relieved sigh and her fingers loosened their grip on his back. But Wyn did not release his captive. The brandy in his veins would not allow it. Her soft breasts pressed into his chest and her scent tangled in his murky head. With the danger passed, now he felt the woman in his arms, her warm, slight body that yielded so easily to his, so naturally. He shifted his hands, slipping them down her back, the long, graceful sweep of her spine beneath his fingertips like the rounded rocks upon the floor of a brook, and he felt woman. Woman, young and soft and beautiful and alive, her pulse thrumming through her trembling body.

She sucked in breath again and shifted in his hold to push him away. But he was not finished. He held her firmly, the blood rushing in his ears like wind as he curved his palm over the arc of a perfect, feminine buttock.

“Mr. Yale,” she whispered upon a gasp. “You must stop.”

Because even a bottle of brandy could not topple what years of training had built, he put her off and stepped back. It was no less dim in the stable, but his eyes had accommodated the dark, and he saw her. He smelled her and heard her, her light, quick breaths amidst the shiftings and snorts of the animals.

It had become something of a challenge to stand; he leaned against a stall door.

“What, pray tell, Miss Lucas”—he formed the words carefully—“are you doing in this stable?”

“Hiding from him. But he found me. Just—Just as you did.” Her voice was thinner than earlier, and rushed.

“Forgive my ill manners, ma’am. At present I am somewhat—”

“Foxed.”

“—indisposed.”

“Teresa said men in their cups can be amorous even when they do not intend it.”

He had intended it. And he wished it still. Her warmth clung to the palms of his hands and his chest, the memory of her softness upon his lips tightening his breeches.

“That beastly man was too.” Her voice dipped. “He called me a poppy. Have you ever heard such an imbecilic thing? He looked like a gentleman, but he turned out to be not heroic in the least.”

Wyn shook his head, jarring a fragment of clarity into it. “Miss Lucas, return to your bedchamber, lock the door, and go to sleep.”

“Don’t you even want to know why I am not there now?”

“I may be foxed, but I am far from stupid. I know why you are not there now.”

“You know I went looking for another gentleman to assist me because you refused?”

“I know you even better, perhaps, than you know yourself.” Nine girls. In ten years he had found and rescued nine runaway girls. Also two infants, one amnesiac, a pair of children sold to the mines by a twisted guardian, one former solider who’d gone a bit mad and hadn’t realized he had abandoned his family, and one Scottish rebel who turned out not to be a rebel after all. But nine girls. They always assigned to him the girls. They even chuckled when they said he had a particularly good rapport with girls, as though they shared a marvelous joke. “Now go.” He pulled back the door.

She went, neither defiantly nor meekly. She simply went, cutting a silhouette in the glow of lamplight from the inn that Wyn consumed with his fogged gaze, the gentle swell of her hips, the graceful taper of her shoulders. He was drunk. Too drunk not to stare and not drunk enough to be unmoved by the sight of her.

In the morning he would offer her a proper apology for his wandering hands. But now he could not. He could never lie convincingly while under the influence of brandy, and Diantha Lucas was not a girl to be lied to. Even drunk he realized that.

A sliver of sunlight sliced across Wyn’s vision. Someone was scratching at the door, dragging him out of thick sleep.

He rubbed the slumber from his face and went to the door. The stable hand stood in the corridor, his brow a highway of ruts. He tugged his cap.

“Mornin’, sir.” His voice was far too agitated for Wyn’s unsteady nerves. A bottle would cure those. But he never drank before noon. Ever. The single rule he lived by. The single rule among the many others his great aunt had bequeathed him, one of which in a thoroughly unprecedented moment of weakness he had broken the night before, and for which he would have to make amends today. Miss Lucas did not strike him as the missish short, but she was a lady, a young one at that; she might be skittish. Curiously, he could not imagine her offended. But wary now—yes.

He pressed a hand to his brow. “What is the time?”

“Near eight o’clock, sir.”

Wyn’s stomach tightened over the perpetual pain. Eight o’clock was far too early to feel this unsettling instability in his limbs, especially given that he’d finished a bottle of brandy only nine hours earlier.

“Is something amiss with my horses?”

“I thought you’d be wantin’ to know, sir, the constable from over Winsford’s been around this mornin’.”

“Winsford?” His hedonistic host’s country. This was not good.

“Yessir.” The man nodded rapidly, his hat brim bobbing up and down. “He’s been askin’ after that bay filly of yours.”

Exceedingly not good. “Has he?”

“He wanted to go right in that stall with her and take a look at her. But I said as the black would take a hunk out of his behind if he tried.”

Despite circumstances, Wyn grinned. “He won’t, you know. Galahad is as placid as a plow horse.”

The fellow returned the grin. “I figured since the Lord gave me a tongue to say what I see fit, I use it as I might.”

“And what do you expect to gain from this particular use of it? I don’t suppose the constable is waiting at the bottom of the front stair and you will now be glad to show me the back stair for a price?”

The man’s back went poker straight. “Now, see here, sir. I wasn’t thinkin’ to hold out my palm. I only thought as if you was goin’ after the lady quick like so you can catch her, you’d better not find trouble with any nosey old constable from clean over five parishes. Why, after the way she took up that little spaniel that got its paw near chewed off at the smithy’s and limpin’ along like it does and she wouldn’t hear no from the coachman about takin’ it aboard, sayin’ all the time that she’d care for it till it got well, why I figure she’s the sort that needs a little carin’ for herself.” A flush spread across his cheeks and he pulled his cap lower. “I’ve a girl like that, likes to take care of everybody else and ain’t got no one takin’ care of her. ’Cept me now, sir, you see.”