Page 9 of How Not to Marry a Duke

By dawn, he had given up the pretence of rest. He dressed without summoning his valet—a habit from the war that had never quite left him—and made his way to the stables. A ride would clear his head. A ride would exhaust his body into compliance.

The road between Carthedge and Ashbourne was familiar ground. He had ridden it a thousand times as a boy, racing Jon Ashbourne to the boundary stone and back. He had ridden it as a young man, calling on the family with the thin excuse of visiting his friend whilst stealing glances at Jon's youngest sister.

He had not ridden it since the war.

The estates shared a border—a fact he had been trying very hard not to think about when he agreed to host his engagement party at Carthedge rather than London. Ashbourne House would be empty. The family had scattered years ago: Jon to America, the sisters to marriages and court positions. No one remained to remind him of stable kisses and scientific experiments and one hundred and seven reasons that had not been sufficient.

The morning mist clung to the fields as he urged his horse into a canter. The air was cool, damp, green with spring growth and turned earth.

The riderless horse appeared around the next bend.

Frederick reined in hard, his mount dancing beneath him as his mind registered what he was seeing. A bay mare, saddled but without a rider, cropping grass at the edge of the road. Her reins dragged in the mud. A scrape along her flank suggested a fall.

He was off his horse before he could think, scanning the roadside, the ditches, the stretch of path disappearing around the curve. A rider thrown. A rider injured. A rider who might be⁠—

He saw the blue of her riding habit before he saw her face.

She lay crumpled at the base of a stone wall, one arm flung out as though she had tried to catch herself. Her golden hair had come loose from its pins, spilling across the grass in a wild mass of mud and morning dew. She was not moving.

Florinda.

He ran.

Later, he would not remember crossing the ground between them. He would remember only the sick lurch of terror, the prayer that was not quite a prayer repeating in his skull—not her, not her, please God not her—and then he was on his knees beside her, his hands hovering over her body, afraid to touch, afraid not to.

"Lady Florinda." His voice came out rough, cracked. "Florinda. Can you hear me?"

No response. Her face was pale—not merely pale but grey, the colour of ash, of old snow. Her lips had gone bloodless. Her chest rose and fell in shallow, uneven breaths. Alive. She was alive.

Then he saw her leg.

The angle was wrong. The angle was horrifyingly, impossibly wrong—bent where no leg should bend, the fabric of her riding habit taut over a shape that made his stomach revolt. A compound fracture, or near enough. She needed a surgeon. She needed one now.

Carthedge Hall was a mile and a half distant. The nearest farmhouse was farther. He could ride for help, but that would mean leaving her here—unconscious, injured, alone on a road where anyone might find her or no one might for hours.

He could not leave her.

The decision was not a decision at all. He stripped off his coat, wrapped it around her as gently as he could manage, and gathered her into his arms.

She screamed.

The sound tore through the quiet morning—raw, animal, a noise he had heard on battlefields from men whose bodies had been shattered by cannon fire. Her eyes flew open, wild and unseeing, and her hands clawed at his chest as her broken leg shifted.

"I know." He kept his voice steady through sheer force of will. "I know it hurts. I have to move you. I'm sorry. I'm so sorry."

Her scream dissolved into a moan, then into ragged, gasping breaths. Her fingers dug into his waistcoat hard enough to tear the fabric. She was shaking—great, convulsive tremors that had nothing to do with cold and everything to do with the body's desperate response to catastrophic injury.

Shock. She was going into shock.

Frederick stood, adjusting his hold to support her leg as best he could, and began to walk.

He did not count his steps. He could not afford the distraction. Every fragment of his attention was fixed on the path ahead, on the woman in his arms, on the terrible mathematics of distance and time and blood loss.

She whimpered with each jarring motion, small sounds of agony that she could not quite suppress. Twice she cried out when his boot caught on a rut and the movement jolted her leg. Each sound carved itself into his memory, another debt he owed the universe for putting her on this road at this hour on this particular morning.

"Stay with me," he said, though he was not certain she could hear him. "Florinda. Stay with me."

Her head lolled against his shoulder. Her breathing had gone shallow, too fast, the desperate panting of a body trying to outrun its own collapse. The shaking had not stopped.