Free How a Lady Weds a Rogue by Katharine Ashe

door.
    “Mr. Yale, I have heard the most wonderful news.” Her cheeks were flushed with life. She lowered her voice and pulled Mrs. Polley along. “Today the local squire has opened up his estate to all the surrounding countryside. Apparently this squire, Sir Henry, is quite well-to-do and he likes to throw enormous parties.” She glanced about the street with an expectant air.
    “I must be glad for Sir Henry and his guests.” It explained the traffic. “But I am not entirely certain what his magnanimity has to do with you.”
    “Oh, not so much me, or only incidentally, but rather you. And the man following you.”
    He glanced at Mrs. Polley. Her lips were a line. He returned his regard to the girl whose blue eyes shone with excitement.
    “Miss Lucas, may I suggest that you reboard the—”
    “No. Don’t you see? This is the ideal diversion.” She grasped his arm, effectively grounding him in total, tongue-tied silence. He’d not forgotten the shape of her body or the heat of her touch from the night before, though he had spent the morning’s ride trying to. Ten years as a secret agent of the crown, yet when confronted with Miss Diantha Lucas, he was, it seemed, all youthful lust all over again. She had a fine figure. Not merely fine. She had perfect breasts, round and high and modestly concealed by her traveling gown, which did not however discourage him from imagining them naked.
    “Diversion?” he managed.
    “We must hide in plain sight.” Her eyes danced, her berry lips curving into a smile of delight that Wyn wanted to taste. “There will be hundreds of people there, and if your . . . friend is not here now”—her gaze darted to the street—“he will not know you have gone off in another direction. We can hire a carriage and take another route. Don’t you see? It is perfect.”
    “No.” He did not see the perfection of her plan, but he was beginning to see the perfect idiocy of his own desires.
    “Yes.”
    He turned to her companion. “Mrs. Polley, I suspect you disapprove of this proposed program.”
    “Well, I don’t see how it might not be the trick. If your nasty fellow might give this sweet lady grief, well then you’ve got to find a solution. And I don’t see how my mistress’s plan here is any worse than what you might come up with.”
    “If you do not board that coach and a carriage cannot be hired, Miss Lucas, we will be well stranded here when my ‘friend’ arrives.”
    She scanned his face. “You do not believe he will arrive here. Not here. You think he has gone ahead to accost you by surprise somewhere down the highway.”
    She was remarkable. So he laughed.
    Her lips curved into a smile, like the breeze in spring. She was fresh and clear and direct, except of course with this entire escapade to find her mother. But her eyes twinkled up at him, satisfaction and excitement making the lapis glimmer in the inconstant rays of sun, and he could not deny her. Rule #1: If a lady is kind of heart, generous and virtuous, a gentleman should acquiesce to her every request; he should deny her nothing . That, and, if a carriage could in fact be gotten here, her plan actually sounded better than anything he’d yet devised.
    Her gaze shifted over his shoulder. “There! We mayn’t have to hire a carriage after all.” She hailed a vehicle crawling along at a snail’s pace, an ancient barouche as long as it was cavernous within, with a wizened coachman in a faded coat and pulled by a pair of horses as old as their driver. Tucked inside were two ladies wrapped in gauze at least a half century out of date, with hats and parasols from another era.
    Miss Lucas hurried to it. Wyn could not hear her words, only her voice, clean and bright as always. The ladies responded to her with smiles. A frail hand gloved in old lace stretched out and took the girl’s. Then another lifted, waving him and Mrs. Polley toward the carriage.
    That was the moment Wyn first suspected that finally—after