Miss Benwick Reforms a Rogue

by Maggie Fenton

  She did not do well with heights.

  Hirst caught her before she could pitch herself over the side of the basket and set her back on her feet. He kept his arms securely around her, but if his intention was to fortify her, he was miles from succeeding. Any hope she had of regaining her equilibrium was completely dashed by his proximity, the warmth of his embrace, and the sandalwood scent of his skin. His bright eyes were no less potent, she soon discovered, even in a moonlit sky.

  “Don’t worry. We won’t float away to the moon,” he said in that half teasing, half patronizing way he had of addressing her when he thought she was being absurd.

  Ha! As if she’d thought that was a real possibility. They’d be dead from the altitude long before they reached that destination.

  “And we aren’t going to die,” he added, correctly reading the drift of her thoughts. Another annoying habit he had. “The gas shall run down eventually, and we shall drift to the ground.”

  “Let’s hope it’s the ground,” she muttered, trying to look anywhere but his lips, which were entirely too close to hers at the moment. “And not the middle of the North Sea.”

  “We are moving west,” he pointed out, though how he could tell this when it felt to Davina like the entire world was spinning was beyond her comprehension. “There’s more danger of landing on some peak in the Lake District.”

  Her exasperation overrode her nerves, and she managed to pull away from him and prop herself up against the basket. “Are you trying to be reassuring? Because you’re failing miserably.”

  He gave her a smirk that was entirely inappropriate, given their predicament. As if he was enjoying this misadventure. As if someone hadn’t just tried to kill them both. “Don’t fret, Fawkes. I doubt we’ll get much farther than Rylestone Green.”

  Well. This did nothing to reassure her. That would be the last thing she needed: crashing the charlière in her village, dressed like her cousin, and in the company of a strange man.

  She slid down the side of the basket and buried her face in her hands. “I hope we do land in the Lake District.”

  Hours later—or what felt like hours, anyway, but was probably only minutes—Davina was finally able to look over the side of the basket and see that they were drifting lower. Hirst had been right after all. They’d not floated to the moon. She could only pray they’d missed Rylestone Green entirely.

  It was another few minutes before they finally alighted upon the ground—or rather, before they finally found themselves hopelessly entangled in the top of an ancient, solitary tree standing sentinel in the middle of an open field. Davina’s luck had been plummeting lower and lower ever since she’d been dumped into the basket, but even she was flabbergasted by this latest travesty.

  “The only tree for miles around, and we managed to land in it, ” she lamented, dodging around a limb that had nearly managed to skewer them both, and bracing herself against the basket as the charlière came to its final, ignominious repose.

  Hirst immediately hopped over the side of the basket and began to climb down the tree with a competency Davina could not hope to match. When he reached the bottom, he turned his head up into the drizzle and gestured for her to do the same. She threw her legs over the side and started her descent. The sole of both boots immediately slipped, and she found herself clutching the tree trunk, her legs dangling in the air.

  The sound of Hirst’s laughter drifted up to her ears, and she glared down at him, repositioning her feet on a nearby branch. She slowly started to inch her way down, and when she’d finally reached the lowest branch possible, she felt Hirst’s hand on her backside, then his other hand around her waist, pulling her from the branch.

  She yelped, instinct making her wriggle away and flail her legs. Her foot connected with something hard, and she heard a muttered oath. Hirst’s hands abruptly released her, and she lost her balance and fell the remaining six feet to the ground. She landed on her arse in the mud, the impact knocking the air from her lungs.

  “Damn and blast, Fawkes!” Hirst roared, looming over her, clutching his eye. “What the devil was that about?”

  She shot to her feet, straightened her jacket, and glared at him. “Your hands were on my person.”

  He looked incredulous. “Forgive me for offending your modesty, my lady! Jesus, you’re worse than a woman.”

  Davina was offended on behalf of all of her sex. She didn’t know what she saw in him. She really didn’t. “I did not need your assistance. I was perfectly capable of alighting on my own. You were in my way.”

  “You blackened my eye!”

  “It was in my way,” she repeated firmly.

  For a moment, she was afraid Hirst would explode and attempt to throttle her, but he just glared at her with an inscrutable expression. He finally turned away and glanced at their surroundings through his one good eye.

  “Where in blazes are we?” he asked, as if she should know.

  “Still in England, I hope,” she muttered. “We are bound to reach a road eventually.”

  “Eventually,” he repeated. “Then what?”

  “A road will take us to a village. Eventually.”

  “Eventually. God, I hate the country.”

  She was inclined to agree with him at the present moment, and she definitely did after about an hour of walking in the drizzle. Davina was soaked completely through and colder than she’d ever been in her life, her teeth chattering, the tips of her fingers gone numb.

  Hirst had to be even more miserable, for he wasn’t even wearing a jacket, merely a loose lawn shirt and a ruined silk waistcoat that hadn’t survived his descent from the charlière. But just when she thought it couldn’t get any worse, the heavens opened up, and the drizzle became a downpour.

  After another half hour of slogging through the storm, however, they finally came to a ridge overlooking a village—or what passed for one. The small strip of thatched-roof businesses and outbuildings materialized out of the twilit deluge, a well-traveled road cutting through the middle. Davina recognized this particular stretch of the King’s Highway.

  The good news was they hadn’t even made it anywhere near Rylestone Green. The bad news was that they were in Hebden. Instead of sheep grazing on the high street, however, a rough-looking crowd was spilling out of the dimly illuminated coaching inn, loitering in the drizzle and guzzling their tankards.

  “Thank Christ, civilization,” Hirst said. He paused. “Sort of,” he amended, and began down the incline. Davina followed reluctantly. He seemed to find nothing in the least odd about showing up, penniless and bedraggled, after midnight, at a coaching inn called The Drunken Sheep that looked straight out of a highwayman’s tale. She certainly did, but what did she know?

  They reached the high street, littered with a handful of surly drunkards who regarded them with suspicion, and entered the inn. If Davina had worried about them standing out in their mud-soaked attire, she needn’t have bothered, for everyone they encountered seemed in a state of equal disrepair.

  The interior of the Drunken Sheep, which housed a dimly lit tavern, was as filthy as the street outside, reeking of stale alcohol, unwashed bodies, and tobacco smoke. A few rustic tables were scattered about the taproom, occupied by a handful of men one wouldn’t want to encounter in a dark alley.

  The innkeeper recognized Hirst, for his face paled and his expression tensed with fear as he caught sight of them—the usual reaction Hirst seemed to evoke in most ordinary mortals.

  When he learned that Hirst wanted two rooms for the rest of the night, the man visibly quaked, sweat breaking out on his forehead. After he stuttered his way through a long-winded explanation of how he had only one room left, he cringed and tensed, as if he expected Hirst to cosh him over the head.

  Hirst ignored the man’s dramatics and took the room, looking entirely unbothered by the prospect of sharing it. Davina, however, was not so sanguine. But she was too cold to argue the matter, so she followed behind Hirst as a slatternly-looking maid led
them up a flight of rickety stairs to a hallway lined with doors. She opened one and ushered them inside.

  The room was small and smelled of damp and old ashes. The floor creaked, and the rug at the base of the bed looked as if it had been trod upon by half of the nation. But compared to traipsing across the countryside in a deluge at an ungodly hour of the night, the room seemed like heaven.

  Hirst immediately fell on top of the bed with a groan, his face buried in a pillow, his hair a wet mop of dark curls pouring over the bedclothes. He was so still that for a moment she thought he’d passed out. But then he turned on his side and propped his head on his arm, studying her in the candlelight.

  Davina judiciously avoided looking at him. She was wet and miserable and so exhausted her eyes were crossing, so she sat down on a stool next to the fire and started to remove her boots. Scuffed, caked in mud, and hopelessly waterlogged, they were never going to recover from the indignity she’d put them through. But they deserved it, considering the amount of blisters they’d given her. She propped her feet before the flames, and felt a feeble but blessed heat touch her soles and wind its way up her body, thawing her blood.

  Hirst finally sat up and began removing his boots as well. And his waistcoat. And his shirt. When he stood up and reached for the fall of his buckskins, she jerked her head back to the fire, the tips of her ears burning. This was precisely what she’d feared the moment she’d learned they were to share a room.

  “Aren’t you going to get out of your wet things?” he asked, the rustle of fabric behind her conjuring all sorts of possibilities in her head.

  She didn’t know how to answer that question. He would think it suspicious if she didn’t remove anything. Only an idiot—or someone with something to hide—would remain in clothes that were completely soaked through.

  “Er, yes…” she finally answered, reluctantly stripping off her jacket and spreading it over the back of a chair. She did the same with her waistcoat, but she didn’t dare remove any more.

  She risked another look at Hirst over her shoulder and found him in much the same state as she had on their first meeting, clothed in nothing but his smallclothes, and completely unashamed about it. The heat in her ears spread down to her cheeks, and she feared the danger of her spontaneously combusting grew with every second she gazed upon his naked torso.

  He stared at her waterlogged form as if she’d sprouted horns. “Is that all you’re taking off?” he asked in disbelief, hands on his hips—his lean, shapely, and completely exposed hips.

  She cleared her throat. “The rest is just a bit damp,” she said.

  He looked unconvinced of this claim, but shrugged and turned back to the bed, muttering something about prudish fribbles. He stripped back the counterpane and climbed between the dingy sheets, pulling the covers loosely over his chest. He sighed in apparent contentment and closed his eyes.

  She sighed too, in relief that she’d managed to keep from losing her head. Uncertain how to proceed, she tried to stifle a yawn as she stoked the fire in the grate.

  She heard Hirst shift behind her. “Are you going to hover all night?” he rumbled.

  “I haven’t decided,” she snapped. If her mother could only see her now, she’d probably send her to a nunnery, even though Lady Benwick hated papists nearly as much as she did poetry.

  “Fawkes,” he said, more gently now.

  She turned back to find him shifted to one side of the bed. He indicated the empty portion with a wave of his hand. When she comprehended his meaning, her heart skidded in alarm. She seriously doubted that she should go anywhere near that man in a horizontal position.

  “I…I should keep awake.”

  Hirst rolled his eyes at this. “What do you think I’m going to do to you, Fawkes?”

  It was more of a case of what she might do to him during the night, with her defenses down and the man she was positively lusting after lying inches away from her, nearly naked. But she couldn’t tell him that.

  She decided to ignore the question.

  He sighed heavily. “You look like a block of ice. If you don’t get under these blankets immediately, I will not hesitate to put you there myself. I won’t have any fribbles dropping dead from the elements on my watch.”

  Hirst’s return to his gentle bullying made some of the tension release from her body. He obviously thought nothing of sharing with her, since it would have hardly been unusual for two men to bunk up when beds were scarce. She was the one who was making everything awkward, and if she pushed the issue any further, he was liable to grow suspicious. It was all this night needed: Hirst discovering she wasn’t a man while they were trapped together in this dingy inn.

  Davina eyed the bedclothes longingly, her resolve slipping. He’d made a good point about her health, anyway. She did rather feel like a block of ice. It was only practical that she make use of the blankets. And if she just so happened to be forced to lie inches away from the most gorgeous man she’d ever seen in her life, then that was just the price she’d have to pay for her health.

  A voice in the back of her head that sounded suspiciously like her mother was screaming in absolute horror at her weak attempts to justify her behavior.

  She ignored it.

  “Well, maybe for a few moments,” she finally conceded. “Until I warm up.” Before she could rethink her decision, she blew out the meager bedside candle and climbed into the bed beside Hirst, careful not to let any part of her body touch his. It hardly mattered, though, since he was producing so much body heat it felt as if he was draped all over her anyway.

  As the warmth seeped into her veins, her limbs began to unfreeze themselves, and the chattering of her teeth slowly slackened off. She’d not realized how cold she truly was until that moment, and she barely resisted the urge to sidle even closer to his warmth. She settled for tucking the covers up under her chin and staring up at the ceiling, her heart racing in her chest.

  “Damp my arse,” Hirst muttered.

  She turned her head to find Hirst staring directly at her from inches away. She nearly squeaked in surprise, but just managed to restrain herself. He was scrutinizing her much too closely.

  “What?” she finally demanded.

  His brow furrowed slightly, and he reached out and gently touched the edge of her fading black eye. She wasn’t expecting the gesture, and she caught her breath in her throat.

  “What really happened?” he murmured.

  “I told you. An earl and I had a disagreement about astronomy.”

  He didn’t look as if he believed her at all. He dropped his fingers away from the bruise, and she felt the loss keenly—too keenly. “There’s surely more to it than that.”

  “I’d be happy to tell you,” she said, “if you could tell me why a marquess wants to kill you.”

  He hadn’t been expecting that response. His look of surprise was quickly replaced with a wry grin. “Touché, Fawkes.” He turned on his back. “I suppose we’ll be a matched pair, now,” he said, prodding at his own eye, which had already started to swell.

  She would have felt guiltier about it, since she knew very well how painful a black eye could be. But it was his fault they were in this absurd situation, so she bit her tongue before she could do something absurd like apologize.

  It was not long until Hirst was asleep, and she was finally able to relax enough to follow suit. She resolved to rest just until the sun came up, not sleep, but her good intentions were soon for naught. Just minutes after Hirst succumbed to his exhaustion, her traitorous eyes slipped closed, and she too was soon lost to the world.

  Chapter Thirteen

  The Temptation of Miss Benwick

  Davina started awake, heart pounding and sweat beading her skin. She didn’t remember her dream, only that it had been unpleasant, and filled with giant balloons and sinister, faceless men. Terror still gripped her, but it wasn’t for herself. It was for someone else. She had a feeling that something dreadful was going to happen, and she was too late to stop
it.

  She breathed through her nose and focused on the dim ceiling above her until her heart returned to its normal pace. Finally, her mind cleared enough for her to realize that she was not in her bed at the castle. As she took in the unfamiliar, shadowy surroundings revealed in the sparse light of the dying fire in the grate, she remembered the previous evening’s misadventure.

  She was in the coaching inn at Hebden. She didn’t know how long she’d been asleep, but the moon had shifted lower, the rain had slackened off into a drizzle, and the raucous customers downstairs were no longer quite so raucous.

  The next thing she noticed was that her body was toasty warm despite the chill of the room. Something heavy and hot draped around her back like an animal skin, and whatever it was smelled wonderful, like pine forests and sandalwood. She moved her hand to pull the warmth more firmly around her and encountered something hard and smooth and very much alive. A man’s naked, muscled arm.

  Then she felt the puff of breath against her neck, and the slow, sinuous slide of a giant hand over the curve of one of her hips. It dawned on her then that the warm, heavy thing encircling her was, in fact, a slumbering Hirst. He had her wrapped up in his arms like a cocoon around a caterpillar, and it was fragrant and intoxicating and…he was caressing her leg.

  He was caressing her leg. And breathing in her ear. And, good God, what was that poking into her lower back?

  Davina came fully awake and sat up, only just restraining herself from leaping out of the bed. The last thing she needed was for Hirst to wake up at that moment and realize what he’d been doing. She’d be exposed for sure.

  Hirst stirred restlessly on the mattress at the disturbance, his long arm searching the spot she had vacated. She held her breath until finally he rolled over onto his back, muttering something and nuzzling the side of his face into the pillow.

  She released her breath in relief, but hesitated over what to do next. The small voice of reason in her head told her to get out of the bed. But every other part of her didn’t want to move. Because the truth of the matter was that she’d liked waking up in Hirst’s strong, warm arms. She’d liked pretending, just for a moment, that she wasn’t Leon, that she was…well, Davina for once.