She Gave a Lost Stranger a Ride Home—Hours Later, the Duke Knocked on Her Door

Chapter 1

The rain came down in sheets with no seams in them, and the shape at the edge of the ditch did not belong to the road.

Nell Farrow saw it first as a wrongness. A smear of black laid over black, too long, too still. She had driven the Mireside Road three hundred times in eight years and knew every rut of it, every stone that came loose after a frost, every place where the drainage gave up and let the water have the road for itself. Nothing like that shape lived on the Mireside Road.

She pulled Bramble up. The old cart horse stopped with the relieved obedience of an animal that had spent twenty years being asked to do unreasonable things in unreasonable weather, and stood with her head down while the rain ran off her rump in ropes.

Twenty yards further on, a grey horse stood with its reins trailing. Hip-shot. Patient. Wearing the expression of a creature profoundly insulted by recent events.

Nell climbed down into the mud.

She did not think about it. That was the whole of her character, if anyone had ever bothered to write it down: she did not think about it, she simply got down and did the thing that stood in front of her. Later, when people who had not been there told the story back to her, they called it courage, and she let them, because correcting them would have taken longer than the correction was worth. It was not courage. Fear cost fuel, and she had never had fuel to spare.

She knelt. Rain hammered her shoulders. She put two fingers to the side of his neck, under the jaw, where the pulse ran shallow and stubborn — and found it. Fast. Unsteady. There.

He was not small. He was the largest person she had ever been this close to: shoulders like a plough-horse’s, a long frame, far too much of him for the ditch he had fallen into. His greatcoat had gone black with water and something darker. Against the mud, his face was the only pale thing in the world.

“Sir,” she said.

Her voice was not gentle. She had no use for the particular gentleness that people performed when they wanted to be seen being good.

“You need to stand up. There is four inches of water in that ditch and it is still rising.”

Something came out of him that was neither a curse nor a word. He got one arm under himself. Then the other. Then he discovered that his right leg was not going to help him, and went down again, and the sound he made at that was worse than the first.

Nell got her shoulder under his arm.

She was stronger than she looked, and had known it since she was nineteen and carrying coal scuttles up four flights of stairs at Thornbury House because the under-housemaid was ill and there was nobody else. She braced her boots in the mud, took his weight, and hauled.

He came up. He swayed against her for a moment — all of him, wet wool and cold leather and blood — and she took it without remarking on it. Then he found his footing, and hissed. A sharp, involuntary sound, torn out of him before he could catch it.

The cart’s lantern swung on its hook. In its light she saw the source of the hiss. A gash along his left temple, running up into the hairline. Not deep enough to kill. Deep enough to bleed like a stuck pig, which it was doing, steadily, down the side of a face with three days of dark stubble on it and a jaw that looked as though it had been cut by somebody who did not believe in wasting material.

His eyes, when they finally found her, were grey. Not a soft grey. The grey of a moor sky in February. Intelligent. At this particular moment, entirely mortified.

“Horse threw you,” she said.

“Rock in the road.” His voice was a low, rough baritone with the polish sanded off it. “I did not see it in the dark.”

“Your horse is fine. She is up the road, looking insulted.”

“Good.”

She studied the wound with the flat assessment of a woman who had been dealing with other people’s injuries since she was nineteen.

“Can you walk?”

“Yes.”

“Do not lie to me about that. I cannot get you into the cart if you go down halfway.”

A pause. She watched him take an honest inventory of his own body, which was more than most men in his condition would have done.

“Marginally,” he said.

“Then marginally will do.”

Getting him into the cart was a graceless business, involving a great deal of mud and one swallowed sound of agony when he lifted his right leg over the sill. Neither of them mentioned it. Nell climbed up, gathered the reins, clicked her tongue, and Bramble moved off into the rain.

The lantern swung. The road unwound ahead of them, rutted and treacherous, running north between walls of wet stone and black heather toward nothing at all.

And Nell sat with her back to him and her hands on the reins, and did the arithmetic she had been refusing to do since she first saw the shape in the ditch. The coat. The horse standing patient in the rain instead of bolting for a warm stable — a horse worth more than she would earn in four years. The boots, which had been made for a foot and not for a job. The hands.

She had spent eight years learning to read what a room cost. She looked at the coat, and the hands, and the boots, and understood — very clearly, and with no particular pleasure — that she had just put a gentleman in the back of the provisions cart.