been wrapped on the hay at her side, ‘I might have found strawberries growing by the stream.’
‘Strawberries don’t grow by streams,’ she retorted as he flicked open a penknife and cut both the cheese and the crust precisely in half. ‘They only grow in carefully tended beds. Where they have to be protected from frosts over winter with heaps of straw. Which is why they’re called strawberries.’
He raised his head and gave her a level look. ‘Blackberries, then. You cannot deny that blackberries thrive in the wild.’ He picked up the sheet of brown paper and its neatly divided contents and placed them on her lap.
From which he’d have to pluck his own meal. One morsel at a time.
She felt her cheeks heating at the prospect of his hand straying over her lap. Felt very conscious that her legs were totally bare beneath her skirts.
She picked up her slice of cheese and nibbled at it. What had they been talking about? Oh, yes...blackberries.
‘Some form of fruit would certainly be welcome with this cheese.’
‘And with the bread,’ he added. ‘It’s very dry.’
‘Stale, I think is the word for which you are searching,’ she said, having tried it. ‘But then, what can you expect for what we paid?’
No wonder the baker had let them have so much for so little. She’d been so proud of her skills at haggling. But they weren’t so great, were they? This bread was clearly left over from the day before.
‘I had a drink at the stream,’ he said, after swallowing the last of his share of their supper. ‘So I am not too thirsty. But what about you?’
‘I think I can just about manage to get the bread down. Though what we really need is a pat of butter to put on it. And then about a gallon of tea to wash it down.’
‘This will not do,’ he growled. And then, before she had any inkling of what he meant to do, he’d swept the brown paper to one side, hauled her up into his arms and was carrying her across the barn.
‘What are you doing?’
And what was she doing? She should by rights be struggling. Or at least demanding that he put her down. Not sort of sagging into him and marvelling at the strength of his muscular arms.
‘I’m taking you down to the stream so that you can have a drink. And dip your feet into the water. I don’t know why I didn’t think of it before,’ he said crossly. ‘I must be all about in my head. Dipping a handkerchief in the stream and then dabbing at your blisters...’ he sneered.
‘I daresay you were attempting to observe the proprieties,’ she said kindly. ‘For this isn’t at all proper, is it? Carting me about like a sack of grain?’
‘Proper? There has been nothing “proper” about our relationship from the moment I stretched my foot out in bed this morning and found you at the other end of it.’
Naked, at that, he could have added.
In the gathering dusk he strode down the field in the direction of the water she could hear babbling along its channel. Without giving the slightest indication that he was doing anything out of the ordinary. He wasn’t even getting out of breath.
Whereas her own lungs were behaving most erratically. As was her heart.
‘And what we’re about to do is highly improper, Prudence, in case you need reminding.’
She looked at his face, and then at the stream, in bewilderment.
‘Watching me bathe my feet in the stream? You think that is improper conduct?’
‘No,’ he said abruptly, and then set her down on a low part of the bank, from where she could dangle her feet into the water with ease. ‘It’s not the bathing that’s improper. It’s what is going to happen after I carry you back to the barn.’
‘What?’ she asked, breathless with excitement.
No, not excitement. At least it shouldn’t be excitement. It should be maidenly modesty. Outraged virtue. Anything but excitement.
‘What is going to happen after you carry me back to the barn?’
‘We are going to have to spend the night together,’ he bit out. He rubbed his hand over the crown of his head. ‘All night. And, since it promises to be a cold one, probably clinging to each other for warmth.’
‘We don’t need to cling,’ she pointed out, since the prospect appeared to be disturbing him so much. ‘Hay is very good at keeping a body warm. I can remember sleeping in a barn a couple of times when I was very little and we were on the march. Papa made me a sort of little nest of it.’
He gave her a hard look. ‘If you were still a little girl that might work. But you are a full-grown woman. And there isn’t all that much hay, Prudence. It is more than likely we will end up seeking each other’s warmth. And, unlike last night, which neither of us can remember, I have a feeling we are going to recall every single minute of tonight. You will know you have slept with a man. You will never be able to look anyone in the eye and claim to be innocent. Tonight, Prudence, is the night that your reputation really will be well and truly ruined.’
‘Oh, my goodness!’ said Prudence as her feet slid into the ice-cold water. She didn’t know whether it was the shock of it, or something else, but suddenly everything had become clear. ‘That was what they were after.’
‘What who was after? What was it they were after?’
‘You know,’ she said, shuddering at the sting of the water on her raw feet. ‘My aunt and that man she married.’
‘I don’t follow,’ he said, sitting down on the bank beside her.
‘No, well...’ she said wearily. ‘That’s because I haven’t told you everything.’ But there wasn’t any point in keeping her revelation to herself. He was in it with her now—or would be after tonight—up to his neck.
‘I told you I was due to come into an inheritance?’
‘Yes.’
‘Well, it is not totally without stipulations. The money comes from my grandfather, you see, and he was livid, apparently, when Mama ran off with Papa. He’d already refused consent to their marriage—not only because they hadn’t known each other for five minutes, but also because Papa was a soldier. A man who saw nothing wrong with drinking alcohol, or gambling, or any number of things that Grandpapa regarded as dreadful sins.
‘Not that Papa was a dreadful sinner—I won’t have you thinking that,’ she explained hastily. ‘It was just Grandpapa was so terribly rigid in his views. Anyway, he cut Mama out of his will. But then when I was born, and Mama wrote to inform him of the event, he put me in it instead. She was still disinherited, but he said that it wasn’t right to visit the sins of the fathers on the children. And just in case I turned out to be as great a sinner as either of them, there was this...stipulation.
‘The
