about to get herself hurt. He stood up, his useless eyes scanning the night.
He couldn’t see a thing.
It was the sound of her scream that led him to her.
Chapter 2
Jostling.
Like being in a wagon or on a hayride.
Jax opened her eyes and saw the moon racing across the sky, the stars a blur. Hot breath landed in rough pants across her cheek. Not a wagon. Someone’s arms. She was in someone’s arms and he was running.
“Where am—?”
Her words were like a gong crashing around in her skull, loud and angry. She gasped in surprise and winced, reaching up to touch her temple. Her fingers landed in something warm and sticky. When she drew back her hand and looked at her fingers in the darkness; they were shiny and black.
“Hold tight,” he rasped. “We’ll be there in a minute.”
There? She risked a question, despite the pain, grimacing as the word left her mouth. “Where?”
“Gardener’s cottage.”
The gardener’s cottage. At Le Chateau? Or…no. At Haverford Park. It’s a moonlight garden. Right. The new gardener.
“You can…” She winced. “…put me down.”
“Not a chance, Duchess,” he said, though he slowed down a little. He still walked purposefully, however, his long legs eating the ground between them and the cottage.
She looked over his shoulder as they passed the glowing white garden where he’d been working. Right. He’d been working in the garden and she’d bumped into him. They’d talked for a few minutes. Then she’d left him to go back to the party, and—
Tripp.
Tripp had stopped her during her walk back across Westerly, holding her arm too hard to keep her from continuing. She’d told him to let go and he’d refused, pulling her against his body. As he tried to kiss her, she’d bitten his lip and he’d shoved her away roughly. She fell to the grass and hit her head on something hard. Then? Darkness.
“Was it a rock?” she asked, reaching for her temple again.
“Corner of the patio over at Westerly. Comin’ back to you now?”
“A…little.”
His voice was terse when he said, “If you hadn’t screamed, Lord only knows what might have happen—”
“I screamed?”
“Luckily,” he muttered.
Still holding her securely with one arm, he reached for the doorknob and opened it, stepping into a dim, cool room and leaving the door to the outside open. Gently, he lowered her to a couch, then stood over her, giant and disapproving in the light of a reading lamp that cast the room in a soft glow.
He took his gloves off, placing them on the coffee table between them, then shrugged out of his flannel shirt and draped it next to the gloves. Pulling one wrist over his head, he bent his arm and stretched it, grunting softly with pleasure as the joint cracked, and she suddenly realized exactly how far he’d had to carry her.
“Don’t move,” he muttered. “I need to check your head.”
From where she lay on the couch, Jax watched him turn away and step through a white-painted door at the far side of the room. When he flicked on the wall light, she could see a white toilet and sink. Clean and tidy.
It was the first time she’d had a chance to check him out in any sort of reliable light. With his back to her, she ogled him freely as he squatted down in front of the cabinets under the sink, his long legs compressing and his jeans slipping down a little to show a strip of his lower back between his waistband and T-shirt. Pronounced tan line. Mmm.
His dark-blond hair was a little too long and curled at the ends, covering the back of his neck and brushing the neckline of his T-shirt. It was thick and wavy and her fingers itched to know what it would feel like threaded between them.
She sighed, leaning back and staring up at the ceiling as she tried to figure out exactly where she was. There must be a studio apartment attached to the back of Felix Edwards’ garden cottage, she decided, closing her eyes. And Eleanora English had certainly outfitted it with a very comfortable couch…
A light smacking on her cheek made her eyes fly open. “No closin’ those emeralds, Duchess.”
He was kneeling on the floor beside her, his face close—very close, almost too close—as he inspected the wound on her temple. His eyes were dark brown, and his eyelashes, almost black, were long, straight, and unreasonably thick (or unfairly so, at least, for a man). His nose was long and patrician and his lips,