The things one does to soothe one’s conscience.
With that rueful thought, Benedict Tawny led his horse stealthily along the grassy verge of the drive curving through a pretty wood to Dornton Manor, early-morning October sunlight just beginning to dapple the few leaves overhead. A gust of wind tugged loose his hat and he jumped to catch it.
If his fellow Hellions could see him now! he thought with a grin, jamming the cap back on his head. Not that he was the delight of his tailor, but in his worn jacket, serviceable breeches and scuffed boots, he hardly looked like a respectable Member of Parliament, one of the leaders of the Reform movement and a rising force in government. Surprising how easily he’d fallen back into the role of intelligence-gatherer he’d performed for the army in India.
All to safeguard the virtue of a female he’d never even met.
But with the Parliamentary session over until Grey could convene a new one later in the year and the other Hellions out of London, he had time on his hands.
He might as well use it to perform a good deed.
A flicker of light in the woods up ahead caught his eye. Through the slender tree trunks, he could just make out the figure of a young female. Shifting his position to get a better view, he saw that she was short, her dark hair thrust up under a sadly out-of-date straw bonnet—and that her entire attention was focused on the sketch pad balanced on her knee.
Though the gown was as outdated as the bonnet, the cut and cloth were of good quality—the garment too unfashionable a cast-off to tempt a lady’s maid and too fine to be passed on to a housemaid—so she must be Quality. And only a lady of quality passionate about her art would be out sketching this early in the morning.
Petite, unfashionable, avid artist—the description fit to perfection the lady he sought. Delighted to have been handed the solution to the problem of how an unrelated male would find a way to speak alone with a gently bred virgin, Ben approached quietly, not wanting to alarm her.
But even as he reached the clearing where she sat on a felled log, she remained so absorbed in her drawing that she didn’t seem to notice him. Finally, clearing his throat loudly, he said, ‘Lady Alyssa Lambornne, I presume?’
Gasping, the maiden nearly dropped her sketchbook and the box containing her pastels did go flying. Ben jumped to nip them up before they fell to the forest floor. ‘Sorry, I didn’t mean to startle you,’ he said.
Straightening, he reached out to hand back the box, met the gaze she’d focused on him—and froze. Shock zinged through him, as if he’d walked across the library carpet on a crisp winter day and touched the metal latch.
Her eyes were magnificent—large, fawn-brown, with an intelligence in their golden depths that drew him in and invited him to linger. There was a fierceness and intensity there, too. Not just in her eyes, he thought dazedly, but in the whole set of her body, as if she were poised to flee—or attack.
Indeed, in her drab gown, a wisp of dark hair escaping from under the shabby bonnet, the shawl slipping off her shoulders, she seemed almost...feral, as if she were as untamed as the woodland she sketched.
Something primal and passionate and powerfully female about her called to everything male in him. Desire thickened his tongue, thrummed in his blood, sent arousal rushing to every part of his body.
Drawn to capture those lips, he reached out
