Free Anita Mills by Miss Gordon's Mistake

fire, the brimstone, the smell—all of it. There are no terrors left for me.”
    And in that moment, her heart went out to him. “How awful for you,” she whispered, swallowing the ache that rose in her throat.
    “It makes what passes for fashionable life utterly frivolous.”
    “Yes.” She sighed heavily. “I would that Rollo knew it, but he is only sorry the war ended ere he was old enough to go.”
    “Rollo?”
    “Roland, actually—my cousin, Roland Merriman.”
    “The young fool.”
    “Does it pain you very much—the leg, I mean?” she asked him.
    “Only when it rains—I have said it until it does not bear repeating, you know, but ’tis the truth.” He looked at the drizzle that streaked the carriage windows. “ ’Twould be a jest if the infernal rain ever stopped.”
    “I am sorry for it.”
    He leaned forward, and his eyes seemed to warm. “I like it much better, Miss Gordon, when you show your spirits. I’ve had a surfeit of sympathy—’tis company I need.”
    “I am not an entertaining sort of female, I fear. My conversation always seems to be of the wrong sort for fashion over here.”
    “But you are, Miss Gordon—you are,” he said quite definitely.
    She’d been wrong—his eyes were gold. “Spanish coin, sir, but at this point in my existence, I shall take it.”

Chapter 7
7
    I T WAS HIS WEAKNESS , she supposed, but the baron slept much of the remainder of the trip, leaving Kitty to worry about her reception at home. If they disowned her, it would make leaving easier, she told herself. She could return to America unencumbered. No, ’twas not the truth—for despite her homesickness, she had to own that her aunt and cousins had been more than kind to her. She looked across to where Haverhill’s head rested in the corner between the seat back and the side panel of the coach. If only a way could be found to keep the matter hushed—then they could forgive her ere she left.
    A wheel hit a deep, water-covered rut, and for a moment, she thought they would turn over. Above, she could hear Jem swear at the horses. The carriage teetered, then righted itself to continue on the road.
    Haverhill’s head snapped back as the wheel found the pavement again, and he came reluctantly awake. Passing a hand over the stubble of his face, he sat up. His other hand touched the bandage as though to make certain it was still in place.
    “The road is in sad need of repair,” she observed.
    “If you believe that, you ought to try the Spanish ones.”
    “Does your head still pain you?”
    “Only when I think, so probably not overmuch. ’Tis the thirst that plagues me.”
    “You ought to have brought some water.”
    “As I recall the matter, there did not appear to be any time.
    I could not know that while my stomach grumbled, Old ’Swell was feeding you.”
    “I collect you know him then?”
    “A passing acquaintance at best, but I think he would have remembered me,” he answered in modest understatement. “Where are we, by the by?”
    She looked out the window. “Not above another two or three miles from Rose Farm, I should think.”
    “Rose Farm?”
    She nodded. “An ancestor of Aunt Isabella’s husband named the place for his wife—’twas in the seventeenth century, I think. He bought it from a Catholic who went to Maryland, or so the story is told.”
    It occurred to him then that he knew next to nothing about the girl across from him. Nothing except that she had been born in America. “Your family over here is of the gentry?”
    “Yes.”
    “Have you been here long?”
    “No.” Realizing how uncivil she must sound, she unbent to explain, “I came but last year, delayed by the troubled situation between England and the United States. My papa had died the year before, you see, and although it was his express wish that I come to live with my relatives, ’twas not practical until the hostilities ended.”
    “And they have not discovered a husband for you yet? My dear, over here a