Page 11 of Better Off Wed

The owner of the dingy little pub hustled out from behind the bar and made a servile bow. “My lord. To what do I owe the honor?”

The man sent an accusatory glare around the room. “Who is responsible for leaving that wreckage strewn across the roadway? My horses were nearly tangled up in it! As it is, I fear the paint on one of my wheels was scraped.”

Despite her discomfort, Laura sat up a little straighter. When his cold eyes found her near the fire, she realized she knew the man—not just his type: the callous indifference, the supercilious air—but the man himself.

Lord Thornton.

Her instincts warred with one another. Drop her gaze, as he so obviously expected? But he had never even glimpsed Lady Sterling. He had no reason to recognize Laura, and thus she had no reason to fear him.

To meet him with a defiant stare might attract undue attention, however. So she compromised by reaching into her reticule, which lay nestled on her lap, and withdrawing the heavy gold watch, as if to check the time. She let that object absorb her attention until she felt Lord Thornton’s gaze move on.

“But you are unharmed, my lord,” the pub owner ventured to observe, a gentle reminder that others might not have been so fortunate.

“No thanks to the driver of that ramshackle coach,” Thornton spat out. “I suppose he was drunk. Where is he?”

Laura gripped the watch harder and squeezed her eyelids shut. Lady Sterling’s previous efforts to call the man to account for his selfishness and cruelty had failed. She flicked her thumb across the watch’s cover, but her hands were too numb with cold to feel the engraving. Instead she turned it this way and that, letting the firelight catch the ornate L and set it aglow. How could she possibly ensure that the third time would be any different? What valuable secrets did he keep? Why, she might never even have the opportunity to—

Her musings were interrupted by the sound of the second man clearing his throat. When she looked up, she found him studying her, his expression not exactly unreadable, but something for which she had no single word. Surprise, fascination, even disapproval, all bound together by sheer exhaustion.

When the two men had entered the pub, she had assumed they were traveling together, but now she saw her error. Lord Thornton’s coat and hat had been marred by no more than a few drops of rain, barely dampened on his dash from the door of his carriage to the door of the pub.

The second man was wet through, head to toe, hardly less bedraggled than she. He had obviously been traveling on horseback, and from the mud spattered over his boots, riding at speed despite the storm, eager to reach his destination, or—or—

The slightest frown notched between his dark brows as he studied her, the blue of his eyes evident even from across the room.

Or perhaps in pursuit of someone?

In pursuit of her?

She tried to shake off the very idea. What could this stranger have to do with her? She did not recognize him, and she never forgot a face. Particularly not one like his, all sculpted angles, rain dripping from his perfect Grecian nose. Beneath his piercing gaze, her pulse danced nervously. Unable to hide, she did the next best thing and busied herself with tucking the watch away.

Or trying to.

It slipped from her grasp and went skittering down the length of wood that divided her from the stranger. At the far end of the table, he stopped the watch with one gloved hand, picked it up, and looked from it to her with the same surprising intentness. A breath shuddered from him.

“My God,” he murmured. “Lady Sterling.”

The name knifed through her, cold, sharp, and deadly. How did he know her? Had she somehow forgotten a past target?

But he didn’t look angry. In fact, he was doing a remarkable impression of someone who had just smacked his forehead against a low-hanging beam. Stunned, and more than a little pained.

Everyone in the room swiveled to look at her, and their gawking faces were all the proof she needed that the London gossip had made its way into the provincial broadsheets. These people knew Lady Sterling, or imagined they did, and by their expressions, she could only hope that the ones who regarded her as a sort of folk hero would prevent the rest from stringing her up.

“What did you say?”

She had been so arrested by the stranger’s words, so conscious of the curious disapproval radiating from the local villagers, she had momentarily forgotten the greatest source of danger in the room: the man with friends to whom the name Lady Sterling was far more than a mention in the papers.

The silkiness of Thornton’s voice belied the coldness in his eyes as he turned and sized up the stranger. “Did I hear you aright, sir?”

“Indeed you did,” replied the stranger. “This lady is—is—”

That slight stammer of hesitation gave her hope. Whoever he was, however he knew her, he evidently had not meant to blurt out her identity to Lord Thornton.

But she did not dare wait to discover how he intended to finish that sentence. She needed to take control of the situation, and now.

Praying the stranger would be willing to play his part at least until the earl went on his way, anything to get her out of the bind he’d put her in, she spoke first.

“His wife.”