Free A Christmas Gone Perfectly Wrong: A Blackshear Family novella (B 0.5) by Cecilia Grant Page A

three more hours, and grimly started back the way he’d come. Never mind the logic of her argument that an unchaperoned trip in one direction would be no more proper than an unchaperoned trip in the other. He’d capitulated not to logic, but out of expediency: he wanted to be at home, the sooner, the better.
    “Do you suppose we’ll have snow?” The air had grown decidedly colder since they’d left Mosscroft, though of course he hadn’t noticed it much during that leg of the journey when he’d ridden inside. Now Miss Sharp had the padded seat and the snug interior all to herself, almost as a perverse reward for her wrongdoing, because though he might lack principle and be swayed by expediency, he was not so bereft of propriety as to sit alone in that carriage with her.
    “Could be snow, by and by. It’s cold enough.” John Coachman frowned at the thick banks of cloud high above, but was apparently unable to divine anything certain from their shape.
    A snowfall would be pleasant on this, the last Christmastide before Kitty’s wedding started the Blackshears all going their separate ways. The memories they carried off with them would be… gilded wasn’t the right image because there was no gold, but something in that general—
    A sudden loud crack sounded, and the left front corner of the carriage dropped hard. He barely had time to know that something had gone terribly wrong before the entire conveyance veered leftward, and both wheels on that side went down into the ditch.
    He seized at the handholds, bouncing out of his seat on the box and coming back down with a jolt he felt all the way up his spine. The world began to list—they were going over—from the corner of his eye he could see John Coachman throw down the reins and launch himself clear, but Andrew stayed where he was, gripping so tightly to the handholds it seemed he might split the knuckles of his gloves.
    Miss Sharp, he thought, the one coherent thought in a haze of rapid impressions. Miss Sharp was trapped; there was no way for her to jump free, and he would not save himself and leave her to meet her fate alone.
    He flattened himself against the seat as the horizon tilted, bracing his boot on the footboard and taking a new handhold. Another thought came, tardily: it would be better to have jumped, and preserved himself as best he could. He’d be of no use to her or anyone if he was badly hurt.
    Too late now. The ground came rushing up, the vehicle’s weight asserting itself ever more adamantly, and then came a jar, and a shuddering bounce as the carriage’s left side met with the roadside hedge. His hat went flying; he lost his handhold and grabbed another. He could hear hedge-branches snapping, but the fall had been arrested. The carriage stopped at an angle to the earth, its left wheels in the ditch and its right wheels up off the road, turning in midair as though they thought they still had somewhere to go.
    Panic, dammed up for the several seconds of the crisis, burst its banks and flooded his whole body. “Miss Sharp!” He scrambled over the carriage, shinnying on his belly to the upended right side, and pounded on the skyward-facing window. “Miss Sharp, are you hurt?” God. Her father. Please, please let him not have to go and tell her father she’d broken a bone or worse.
    “I’m not. What happened?” Her voice sounded small and shaken, distant through the pane of glass, but she answered him, thank God, and answered without any delay.
    He closed his eyes and exhaled, his breath shuddering with relief. “I don’t know. I think a wheel may have broken, and then we went in the ditch. Are you sure you’re not hurt? Did you hit your head at all?”
    “No. I curled up and covered my head. Papa taught me how.” She was indeed curled up, he could see, small as she could make herself down on the carriage floor, at the far end against the door. She twisted to look up at him. “Is the falcon hurt?”
    Hang the blasted falcon; it was