Slightly Scandalous
Page 35
It would be churlish, of course, to ride on by without stopping merely because he could not offer any practical assistance. He drew rein when he was close to the group and grinned when almost everyone tried to talk to him at once. He held up a staying hand and asked if anyone had been seriously hurt. No one, it seemed, had been.
“The best I can do for you all, then,” he said when the hubbub had subsided again, “is ride on with all the speed I can muster and send help back from the nearest village or town.”
“There is a market town no more than three miles ahead, sir,” the coachman told him, pointing off along the road.
One of the passengers—a woman—had not joined the others in greeting him. She was bent over a muddy gentleman seated on a wooden crate, pressing some sort of makeshift bandage to his cheek. He took it from her even as Rannulf watched, and the woman straightened up and turned to look at him.
She was young and tall. She was wearing a green cloak, slightly damp, even muddied at the hem. It fell open down the front to reveal a light muslin dress and a bosom that immediately increased Rannulf's body heat by at least a couple of degrees. She was bareheaded. Her hair was disheveled and half down over her shoulders. It was a glorious shade of bright red-gold such as he had never before seen on a human head. The face beneath it was oval and flushed and bright-eyed—the eyes were green, he believed—and quite startlingly lovely. She returned his stare with apparent disdain. What did she expect him to do? Vault down into the mud and play hero?
He grinned lazily and spoke without looking away from her.
“I could, I suppose,” he said, “take one person up with me. One lady? Ma'am? How about you?”
The redhead smiled at Rannulf then, an expression that grew slowly even as the color deepened in her cheeks.
“It would be my pleasure, sir,” she said in a voice that was warm and husky and crawled up his spine like a velvet-gloved hand.
He rode over to the side of the road, toward her.
SLIGHTLY SCANDALOUS
A Dell Book / June 2003
Published by Bantam Dell
A Division of Random House, Inc.
New York, New York
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Copyright © 2003 by Mary Balogh
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eISBN: 978-0-440-33401-9
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