Free My Seduction by Connie Brockway Page A

beyond what even she would have imagined herself capable of doing. And the notion that she might not survive this error in judgment was occurring to her with increasing regularity as the minutes ticked by and MacNeill, his cold eyes narrowed against the horizon and his jaw limned with the red-gold stubble of a two-day-old beard, drove on in complete silence.
    She looked around, gaining no comfort from her bleak surroundings. She had never been in a place so… empty. Yesterday she had traveled cocooned within the snug confines of a closed carriage, only rarely drawing back the heavy curtain to view the scenery. But the phaeton afforded no distinct separation between passenger and environs, and she found the immediacy of her surroundings breathtaking. And unsettling. Like her proximity to the taciturn MacNeill.
    Near noon, MacNeill pulled the phaeton into a small copse of aspen growing by the side of the track and leapt to the ground. Kate followed on legs grown numb from hours on the hard seat and, after attending to certain necessities, returned to find MacNeill already back on the seat, stolidly chewing the bread the tavern girl had supplied. Wordlessly, he held out his hand to help her back into the carriage. When she obliged, he unceremoniously hauled her up, handed her a napkin with a portion of bread in it, and commanded her to eat. He didn’t wait before snapping the traces and setting out again.
    They traveled into mountains that thrust through the earth’s crust like Atlas’s shoulders, hunched and muscular, cloaked by thin blankets of pine. Gorse and fern, dark gold and russet, crowded the roadside, shivering in a brisk breeze. The vastness, the immense emptiness, surpassed anything in Kate’s experience. It seemed to her the wind was the sound of the mountain breathing, that the road, having no proper beginning would never arrive at an end, that they would be marooned here forever, caught on a Sisyphean journey.
    She had spent her life in comfortable claustrophobia, the sound of horse and harness, the muttering of street vendors and the shouts of laborers filling her ears, a potage of coal smoke and factory fumes, fresh starch and beeswax filling her nostrils. Her eye was attuned to the textures and colors of city life, the regularity of cobblestone and iron rail, the geometry of urban architecture and streets. Here there was no such imposed symmetry. The road dipped and coiled, the mountains bunched and thrust, the sky churned and bloomed.
    Kate looked over at MacNeill. His profile looked carved from the same rock as the mountains. His jaw jutted in a bold block, and his deeply carved nostrils flared. Only the gilt-tipped fringe of eyelashes and the glint of red-gold in the hair that brushed his cape’s collar held any warmth. He looked every bit a part of this hard, obdurate landscape. Just as tough, just as unyielding, and just as isolated and aloof.
    He hadn’t said a word since luncheon, and Kate told herself she ought to be happy for his complete indifference. Rather than worrying about what was now too late to remedy, she should be fanning the spark of satisfaction she’d felt upon leaving the White Rose.
    Despite all odds, she was going to make it to Castle Parnell. She was going to petition the marquis for aid. The chance of her and her sisters returning to some semblance of their former lives, the chance that had so long eluded them, was finally within reach. Not only would she and Helena and Charlotte survive, but they might actually win freedom from this fear-laden state called poverty. The idea of sitting in a warm, comfortable room sipping well-sugared coffee without having to wonder how they would pay for it brought a smile to her lips.
    “You have the look of a cream-sotted tabby, Mrs. Blackburn.”
    MacNeill’s deep burr startled Kate from her reverie. She hadn’t thought he’d been paying a speck of attention to her. The realization that he had not only remarked on her expression but had