warm that made someone realize how cold she might be.
Ignoring the silly thought, Hattie moved her fingers down the column of his neck, to the place where it disappeared beneath the collar of his shirt, where the ridge of his shoulder and the slope of . . . the rest of him . . . met in a fascinating indentation.
“Anything now?”
“Quiet.” Hattie held her breath. Nothing. She shook her head.
“Christ.” It wasn’t a prayer.
Hattie couldn’t have agreed more. But then . . .
There. A small flutter. She pressed a touch more firmly. The flutter became steady. Slow. Even. “I feel it,” she said. “He’s alive.” She repeated herself. “He’s alive.” She exhaled, long and relieved. “He’s not dead.”
“Excellent. But it doesn’t change the fact that he’s unconscious in the carriage, and you have somewhere to be.” Nora paused. “We should leave him and take the curricle.”
Hattie had been planning for this particular excursion on this particular night for a full three months. This was the night that would begin her twenty-ninth year. The year her life would become her own. The year she would become her own. And she had a very specific plan for a very specific location at a very specific hour, for which she had donned a very specific frock. And yet, as she stared at the man in her carriage, specifics seemed not at all important.
What seemed important was seeing his face.
Clinging to the handle at the edge of the door, Hattie collected the lantern from the upper rear corner of the carriage before swinging back out to face Nora, whose gaze flickered immediately to the unlit container.
Nora tilted her head. “Hattie. Leave him. We’ll take the curricle.”
“Just a peek,” Hattie replied.
The tilt became a slow shake. “If you peek, you’ll regret it.”
“I have to peek,” Hattie insisted, casting about for a decent reason—ignoring the odd fact that she was unable to tell her friend the truth. “I have to untie him.”
“Not necessarily,” Nora pointed out. “Someone thought he was best left tied up, and who are we to disagree?” Hattie was already reaching into the pocket of the carriage door for a flint. “What of your plans?”
There was plenty of time for her plans. “Just a peek,” she repeated, the oil in the lantern catching fire. She closed the door and turned to face the carriage, lifting the light high, casting a lovely golden glow over—
“Oh, my.”
Nora choked back a laugh. “Not such a bad gift after all, it seems.”
The man had the most beautiful face Hattie had ever seen. The most beautiful face anyone had ever seen. She leaned closer, taking in his warm, bronze skin, the high cheekbones, the long, straight nose, the dark slashes of his brows, and the impossibly long lashes that lay like sin against his cheeks.
“What kind of man . . .” She trailed off. Shook her head.
What kind of man looked like this?
What kind of man looked like this and somehow landed in the carriage of Hattie Sedley—a woman who was very unused to being in the vicinity of men who looked like this.
“You’re embarrassing yourself,” Nora said. “You’re staring and your jaw has gone fully slack.”
Hattie closed her mouth, but did not stop staring.
“Hattie. We have to go.” A pause. Then, “Unless you’ve changed your mind?”
The casual question brought Hattie back to the moment. To her plan. She shook her head. Lowered the lantern. “I haven’t.”
Nora sighed and placed her hands on her hips, staring past Hattie into the carriage. “You get his bottom, and I’ll take his top, then?” She looked to a shadowed alcove behind her. “He can resume consciousness there.”
Hattie’s heart pounded. “We can’t leave him here.”
“We can’t?”
“No.”
Nora slid her a look. “Hattie. We can’t take him with us just because he looks like a Roman statue.”
Hattie blushed in the darkness. “I hadn’t noticed.”
“You lost the power of speech.”
She cleared her throat. “We can’t take him because Augie left him here.”
Nora’s lips flattened into a perfect, straight line. “You don’t know that.”
“I know,” Hattie said, holding the lantern near the rope at the man’s wrists, and sweeping it down to the place where he was bound at the ankles, “because August Sedley can’t tie a Carrick bend worth a damn, and I fear that if we leave this man here, he’ll find his way loose and head straight for my useless brother.”
That, and if the stranger didn’t find his way loose, who knew what Augie would do to him. Her brother was as cabbageheaded