“so mount up, if you please.” He pointed the crop at the spare horse.
She eyed the beast. It was the size of a small house and looked nervous; besides, she would not go back with him had he shown up in a plush four-in-hand.
“I will reach Hawthorne in an hour, Your Grace.”
“You won’t,” he said, “but it will be dark, and you will be ill.” Said with a certainty as if he weren’t just foreseeing but steering the course of nature. “You might also lose a few toes,” he added for good measure.
Her feet curled in her boots at his mentioning of toes; botheration, she hardly felt them.
“I appreciate your concern—”
“I will not have a woman come to harm on my land,” he said. “Concern plays no part in it.”
Of course not. “I have no desire to come to harm, merely to get to Hawthorne.”
He gave her a cold, cold look. “You are putting pride above your safety, miss.”
Well, there was no arguing with that. She gritted her teeth, struggling to control the unfamiliar urge to snarl.
“Get onto the horse,” Montgomery ordered.
“I prefer not to, Your Grace. It’s huge.”
He slapped his riding crop against his boot, and she had a feeling that he’d quite like to slap something else instead.
“There’s an inn in Hawthorne where I plan to stay,” she said quickly, “and—”
“And then word gets around that I cast my guests out into the cold?” Montgomery snapped. “Certainly not. You are not even wearing a proper coat.”
She looked down at herself. “It’s a most regular coat.”
“And utterly useless for an eight-mile march in these conditions,” he shot back; ridiculous woman were the unspoken words. He’d never say it out loud, of course, and he didn’t have to. He inflicted enough damage with the contempt coloring his cultured voice.
She considered his wide-shouldered form, clearly superior to hers in weight and strength, and wondered what he would do if she tried to walk around him.
“Very well,” he said, and then he did something unexpected. He took off his hat.
“It is not the appropriate setting,” he said, “but it appears that we will be here a while.”
He tucked the hat under his arm and met her eyes. “Miss, I apologize for handling our last encounter in an overly high-handed manner. Please do me the honor of staying at Claremont until the party concludes tomorrow.”
It was very quiet on this windless hill in Wiltshire. She heard the sound of her own breath flowing in and out of her lungs, and the slow thump of her heart as she stared back at him, with his hat so formally held under his arm. His breath, like hers, was a white cloud.
No man had ever given her an apology.
Now that she had one, she found she was uncertain what to do with it.
Montgomery’s brow lifted impatiently.
Well. He was a duke, after all, and probably not in the habit of apologizing. Ever.
“Why?” she asked softly. “Why would you invite a woman like me into your home?”
The look he gave her was inscrutable. “I won’t have any woman come to harm on my estate. And our earlier conversation was based on a misunderstanding. It is clear that my brother is quite safe from you.”
She cringed. Had he questioned Peregrin about the nature of their relationship? Or worse, Hattie and Catriona? The questions that would cause—
“No one told me,” he said. He wore a new expression, and it took her a moment to class it as mildly amused.
“That’s reassuring,” she said, not sounding assured at all.
His lips twitched. “It was plain deductive reasoning, logic, if you will.”
“That’s a sound method,” she acknowledged, wondering where in Hades he was going now.
“You made it perfectly clear that you weren’t in the market for a duke,” he said. “It follows that my younger brother would be rather out of the question for you.”
She blinked. Was he trying to . . . jest with her?
His face gave away nothing, and so, carefully, she said: “But wouldn’t that be inductive reasoning, Your Grace?”
He stilled. A glint struck up in the depths of his eyes. “Deductive, I’m sure,” he said smoothly.
Deductive, I’m sure. So the premise that a woman would always prefer a duke over any other man was a natural law to him, like the fact that all men were mortal. His arrogance was truly staggering.
“Of course,” she muttered.
He smiled at that, just with the corners of his eyes, but it still drew her attention to his mouth. It was an intriguing mouth, upon