carriage to Brook Vale so that he might leave Violet with her own, but such an arrangement had been made with thoughts of her needing to visit her modiste, or the circulating library—not Kent.
Penvale stumbled to a halt behind James.
“What is it? Audley?”
“Unless the fall has got me more out of sorts than I suspected,” James said, more calmly than he felt, “that is my carriage standing there. And unless it has been stolen—in which case this is a piece of very good fortune indeed—that would mean that my wife is here somewhere.”
Rather than the swift intake of breath or the surprised exclamation that James might have expected, Penvale swore: “Bloody buggering Christ. I shouldn’t have sent that damn letter.”
James turned to fully face his friend, his eyebrows raised. “I beg your pardon?”
Penvale looked unusually shifty as he stood before James. Penvale usually had an air of lazy, lethal calm—one that his sister shared—but at the moment he looked like nothing so much as a nervous schoolboy, his hazel eyes apologetic as they met James’s green ones. “I might have . . . sent your wife a note when you had your accident yesterday.”
James strove to keep his voice even. “Oh?”
“And, well . . .” Penvale ran a hand through his hair, looking desperately around the inn yard as though hoping to find someone to rescue him. “You woke up nearly as soon as I’d sent it. And I might have forgotten to send her a second letter informing her that you weren’t dying.”
James opened his mouth to respond, but before he could get a word out, Jeremy’s voice rang out from where he was standing by their carriage, having just emerged. “Darling Lady James! What on earth are you doing here?”
With a sinking feeling of dread, James turned to see—of course it was Violet. She was standing in the doorway of the inn, dressed in a plain frock for traveling, her hair in slight disorder, as though she had dressed in a great hurry that morning. No doubt she had, he reminded himself, given that she had received a letter informing her—well, James didn’t know what precisely Penvale had written in that blasted letter, but he had no doubt that whatever it was had been sufficient to cause concern.
Her face was very pale as she stood there, staring at him, her brown eyes wide, dark tendrils of hair framing her face in a way that he found enticing rather than unkempt. It made him, entirely inappropriately, wish to kiss her.
But then, James always wished to kiss her. The kissing had never been the problem. It was the talking that seemed to give them trouble.
He took a step forward, dimly registering that she was likely in a state of shock at seeing him so suddenly standing before her, healthy and well, when Penvale’s missive had doubtless made it sound as though he were knocking at death’s door.
“Violet,” he said, and as he heard his own voice, he registered that the note of hesitation it contained made him sound stiff.
“You . . . Penvale’s note . . .” She seemed to struggle for words, unusual for a woman who loved to talk as much as Violet did. Never mind that she didn’t share most of her words with James anymore; he still heard her sometimes, as he passed by the drawing room while she had her friends to tea, chattering away much as she ever had. He was always torn, on those occasions, between the desire to smile at the familiar sound of her voice and the desire to punch something.
The course of true love ne’er did run smooth, naturally, but James rather thought that his path had been unnecessarily choppy. When sitting through a particularly icily silent meal, he thought of another set of famous words more applicable to his life.
Marry in haste, repent at leisure.
These thoughts—or fragmented versions of them—flitted through his mind in an instant as he watched Violet make a valiant effort to regain her composure. She looked weary and shocked and travel-mussed, a far cry from the oh-so-elegant young miss he had met on that balcony five years ago, and yet she was still the most beautiful thing he had ever seen. He tried to hate her for it, but couldn’t quite get there.
A moment later, however, hating her seemed to require considerably less effort, given that she recovered enough to take several rapid steps forward, raise her hand, and slap him across the face with