He was actually going to enjoy this.

“Thank you,” she said with chilly hauteur—though she had the grace to look suddenly apologetic. “I thank you for coming to my assistance, sir. You could easily have avoided doing so. I had not seen you, as you must have realized. I am Lady Muir.”

Ah, definitely a lady. She probably expected him to bow and scrape and tug on his forelock.

She took one step back from him—and collapsed in an undignified heap on the ground.

He stood looking down at her and pursed his lips. She would not like that loss to her dignity.

She rose to her knees, set her hands flat on the ground, and … laughed. It was a merry sound of pure amusement, though it did end in a little hiccup of pain.

“Mr. Trentham,” she said, “you have my permission to say ‘I told you so.’ ”

“I told you so,” he said—one must not disoblige a lady. “And it is Lord Trentham.”

Silly of him to insist upon that detail, perhaps, but she irritated him.

She turned to sit on the ground. It was probably still damp from yesterday’s rain, he thought. Serve her right. He gazed down at her with hard eyes and set jaw.

She sighed as she looked up at him. Her face had turned pale again. He would wager that that ankle was throbbing like a thousand devils. Maybe five thousand after her attempt to put weight on it.

“You gave me a choice a short while ago,” she said, all the haughtiness gone from her voice, though a trace of her laughter remained. “And since I am not a silly woman, or at least do not wish to appear silly, I choose the second. If the option is still open to me, that is. You would be quite within your rights to withdraw it now, but I would be much obliged if you would carry me to Penderris, Lord Trentham, even though I find the thought of imposing my presence there deeply distressing. Perhaps you would be good enough to lend me a carriage when we get there so that I do not even have to enter the—”

He bent and scooped her up again. As humble pie went, she had eaten a fair portion.

He strode onward in the direction of the house. He did not try to make conversation. He could only imagine the sort of reception he was going to get, and the sort of teasing he was going to have to endure for the rest of his stay at Penderris.

“You are or have been a military gentleman, Lord Trentham,” she said, breaking the silence a couple of minutes later. “I am right, am I not?”

“What makes you say so?” he asked without looking down at her.

“You have the bearing of an officer,” she said, “and the hard-jawed, intense-eyed look of a man accustomed to command.”

He looked down briefly at her. He did not reply to her words.

“Oh, this is going to be horribly embarrassing,” she said a couple of minutes later as they approached the house.

“But better, I daresay,” he said curtly, “than lying out on the slope above the beach, exposed to the elements and waiting for the seagulls to come and peck out your eyes.”

Uncharitably, he wished that that was precisely where she was, though he would not wish the eye-pecking gulls on her.

“Oh,” she said with a grimace. “When you put it that way, I must confess you are right.”

“I sometimes am,” he said.

Lord! Today’s grand joke had been that he was to go down onto the beach to find a personable woman to marry. And here he was, right on cue, carrying a genuine lady back with him. A damnably pretty one too.

Perhaps she was not single, though. Indeed, she almost certainly was not. She had introduced herself as Lady Muir. That suggested that somewhere, perhaps in the village a mile away, there was a Lord Muir. Which fact would not save him from the teasing. It would merely enhance it, in fact. He would be accused of the most naïve form of miscalculation.

It was going to take him a long time to live this one down.

Gwen would have been experiencing surely the worst embarrassment of her life if her mind had not been more preoccupied with pain. She felt embarrassed nevertheless.

Not only was she being taken to a strange house owned by a man of some notoriety who was not expecting her, but also she was being carried by a large, morose stranger who had done nothing to hide the fact that he despised her. And the trouble was that she could hardly blame him. She had behaved badly. She had made an idiot of herself.

She was pressed against all that muscled strength she had observed as he approached her across the pebbles, and he felt really quite disturbingly masculine. She could feel his body heat through his heavy clothing and her own. She could smell his cologne or his shaving soap, a faint, enticing, distinctively male scent. She could hear him breathing, though he was not panting from his exertions. Indeed, he made her feel as though she weighed nothing at all.

Her ankle was throbbing very badly indeed. There was no use in continuing to pretend that she would be able to walk back to Vera’s once she had shaken off the first twinges of pain.

Oh, dear, he really was a morose man. And a silent one. He had not even confirmed or denied being a military officer. And he had nothing else to offer by way of conversation, though to be fair, he probably needed all his breath to carry her.

Goodness, she would have nightmares about this for a long time to come.

He was making his way straight for the front doors of Penderris Hall, which looked like a very grand mansion indeed. He was, as she might have expected, totally ignoring her plea to be taken directly to the carriage house so that she might avoid the house altogether. She just hoped the duke was not going to be close by when she was carried inside. Perhaps one of his minions would summon a carriage to convey her back to Vera’s. Even a gig would do.

Lord Trentham climbed a short flight of steps and turned sideways in order to thump his elbow against one of the doors. It was opened almost immediately by a sober-looking man in black who resembled all butlers the world over. He stood aside without comment as Lord Trentham carried her into a large square hall tiled in black and white.

“We have a wounded soldier here, Lambert,” Lord Trentham said without any trace of humor in his voice. “I am going to carry her up to the drawing room.”

“Oh, no, please—”

“Shall I send for Dr. Jones, my lord?” the butler asked.

But before Lord Trentham could answer or Gwen voice a further protest, someone else arrived on the scene, a tall, slender, blond, extremely handsome gentleman with mocking green eyes and one elevated eyebrow. The Duke of Stanbrook, Gwen thought with a sinking heart. She could scarcely have imagined a scene more lowering than this if she had tried.

“Hugo, my dear chap,” the gentleman said, his voice a lazy drawl, “however did you do it? You are a marvel. You found the lady on the beach, did you, and swept her literally off her feet with your charm, not to mention your title and fortune? This makes for a very affecting scene, I must say. If I were an artist, I would be d-dashing for my canvas and brushes in order to record it for the delight of your descendants to the third and fourth generation.”

He had lowered his eyebrow and lifted a quizzing glass to his eye as he spoke.

Gwen glared at him. She spoke with as much chilly dignity as she could muster.

“I twisted my ankle,” she explained, “and Lord Trentham was obliging enough to carry me here. I do not intend to impose upon your hospitality any longer than necessary, Your Grace. All I ask is the loan of some conveyance to take me back to the village, where I am staying. You are the Duke of Stanbrook, I presume?”

The blond gentleman lowered his glass and raised one eyebrow again.

“You elevate me in rank, ma’am,” he said. “I am flattered. I am not, alas, Stanbrook. I daresay Lambert will call out a gig for you if you insist, however, though Hugo looks eager to impress you with his superior strength by d-dashing upstairs with you in his arms and arriving in the drawing room without any noticeable shortness of breath.”

“It is a good thing you are not me, Flavian,” another, older gentleman said as he approached from the back of the hall. “You appear not to know the first thing about hospitality. Ma’am, I fully agree with both Hugo and my good butler. You must be taken up to the drawing room to rest your foot on a sofa while I send for the doctor to assess the damage. I am Stanbrook, by the way, and entirely at your service. You must tell me whom I may summon to offer you some comfort. Your husband, perhaps?”

Oh, dear, this was getting worse and worse. If there were just a dark hole in the middle of the hall, Gwen thought, she would be happy to have Lord Trentham drop her into it. The duke was much as she had originally pictured him—tall, slender, and elegant, with handsome, finely chiseled features and dark hair silvering at the temples. His manner was courtly, yet his gray eyes were contrastingly cold and his voice chilly. He spoke of hospitality but made her feel like the worst kind of intruder.

“I am the widow of the late Viscount Muir,” Gwen told the duke. “I am a guest in the home of Mrs. Parkinson in the village.”

“Ah,” the duke said. “She lost her husband recently, I recall, after he had suffered a lingering illness. But off you go on your way upstairs, Hugo. I will hope to have the pleasure of some conversation with you later, Lady Muir, after your ankle has been tended to.”

He made it sound as if it would be anything but a pleasure. Or perhaps her extreme discomfort was causing her to do him an injustice. He was offering hospitality and the services of a physician, after all.

How could one sprained ankle cause such pain? Or perhaps it was broken.

Lord Trentham turned to stride toward a broad staircase that wound upward in an elegant curve. She could hear the Duke of Stanbrook giving orders for both the doctor and Vera to be sent for without further delay. The gentleman with the quizzing glass, the one who spoke with an affected sigh in his voice and a slight stammer, appeared to be offering to perform the errand himself.

The drawing room was empty. That was one mercy, at least. It was a large, square room with wine-colored brocaded walls hung with portraits in heavy gilded frames, and an ornately sculpted marble fireplace directly opposite the door. The coved ceiling was painted with scenes from mythology, the frieze beneath it heavily gilded. The furnishings were both elegant and sumptuous. Long windows looked out upon lawns enclosed by hedges, but they nevertheless afforded a distant view of cliffs and the sea beyond. A fire crackled in the hearth, and the warmth of the room prevented the outdoors from looking too starkly bleak.

Gwen took in room and view at a glance and felt all the humiliation of being an uninvited—and unwelcome—guest in such a home. But for the moment at least there seemed no point in making a fuss and demanding yet again the loan of a carriage to take her back to Vera’s.

Lord Trentham lowered her to a brocaded sofa and reached for a cushion to put under her injured ankle.

“Oh,” she cried, “my boots are going to get the sofa dirty.”

That would be the very last straw.

But he would not let her swing her legs to the floor. Neither would he allow her to bend forward to remove her own boots. He insisted upon doing it for her. Not that he uttered a word of command, but it was difficult to bat aside such large hands and such massive arms or to prevail against such deaf ears.

He had done her a kindness, she admitted grudgingly, but did he have to be so unpleasant about it?

He undid the laces of her left boot and removed it without any trouble at all before placing it on the floor. He went far more slowly with the other boot. Gwen untied the ribbons of her bonnet, pulled it off her head, and dropped it over the side of the sofa so that she could rest her head back against the cushioned arm. She closed her eyes—and then pressed her head back harder and clenched her eyes more tightly as she was engulfed in a fresh wave of agony. He had surprisingly gentle hands, but it was not easy for him to ease off her boot, and once it was off, there was nothing left to support her foot or hold it firm against the swelling. She felt him lift it onto the cushion.

But pain sometimes dulled sensibility, she thought a few moments later as she felt his hands reach under her skirt, first to remove the handkerchief he had wrapped about her knee earlier, and then to roll down her torn stocking and ease it off over her foot.