Page 77 of Unmasking the Earl

“She is, though,” pronounced Ned, infuriatingly.

Hands on hips, she spun to face him. “Please, Ned. Let me deal with this.”

“You’d do well to accept me,” Julian warned. “Stranraer is far too high in the instep for you. I, however, can be forgiving. I don’t mind marrying you, even though Stranraer has obviously severely compromised your reputation. It doesn’t matter to me one iota if you have let him—”

“What?”

Cassie couldn’t believe she was hearing this. Her heart seemed to shrivel up inside her, while her mind blazed with fury. She turned on Ned.

“You told him?”

“I most certainly did not! He obviously witnessed you in my arms, and our kiss, but I never said there was anything more than that between us.”

She clamped her jaw, grinding her teeth. Lord. If Julian hadn’t known before that she and Ned had been intimate, he surely knew now, after she’d blurted out her accusation.

She was heartsick. Those precious, stolen moments in the wheat field, that wonderful feeling of being one with a man, being one with Nature, had all been intensely private…and should have stayed so.

And now Julian knew. Who else would he tell, should she refuse his proposal? This was as dainty a morsel of gossip as the ton had enjoyed in many a day. It was all too humiliating.

She drew herself up, using anger to stop her from collapsing in a heap of abject misery. “You are despicable. Both of you. I don’t want to see either of you, ever again.”

“I say!”

“Cassandra!”

Ignoring their protests, she grabbed up her basket, avoided Ned as he surged to his feet to stop her, and thundered with her fist on the dusty wooden panels of the door.

It was opened with alacrity by a surprised Achilles Marsh, who stepped in and placed a warning hand against the earl’s chest.

She turned round, glaring at Ned and Julian in utter fury, and snapped, “I wouldn’t marry either of you, not if you begged me. In fact, I don’t think I want to marry anyone. Ever.”

Chapter Thirty-Four

Nothing on God’s earth was going to take Cassie away from him. Having—after a lengthy and heated discussion—bribed the constable for his freedom, Ned ran straight to Mrs. Fiennes cottage, only to discover that Cassie had boarded the last coach of the day and left Aston.

He threw himself onto Maxim’s back and rode harder than he ever had in his life, fortunately catching up with the mail coach just as it reached Devizes.

Was Cassie inside? She had to be. It would be ill-luck, indeed, if he’d chased halfway across Wiltshire after the wrong equipage.

Yes, there! He’d know her figure anywhere, the bronze curls that caressed her neck beneath the shade of her bonnet, that purposeful but sensuous way she walked…

Thankfully, she wasn’t going into the Pelican Inn for refreshments. She was walking away from it, in the direction of Caen Hill. Good. He didn’t want their conversation to be in public.

He leaped down from Maxim’s back, threw the reins to a stable boy, and ran down the hill in pursuit. Cassie had just settled herself on a quaint wooden bench beneath a willow tree a few feet away from the canal when he caught up with her.

Slowing to a halt, he gave himself a moment to drink in the sight of her. Thank God he’d found her. He couldn’t let her walk out of his life. Especially over a complete misunderstanding. He cared too much. More, perhaps, than he was prepared to admit to himself. But whatever this feeling was that had held his heart in a grip of ice ever since she’d left the inn at Aston, it was too painful to be allowed to continue.

“Cassie,” he said softly, every nerve on edge.

“Ned!” She dropped her reticule in astonishment, but he was there in an instant, handing it back and settling himself on the bench beside her.

Was she pleased to see him? Was the sparkle in her eyes, the pink in her cheeks, due to anger or pleasure?

He hoped the latter.

“Whatever are you doing here?” she asked, somewhat breathlessly.

“When Mrs. Fiennes told me you’d taken the next stage back to Oxford, I knew I couldn’t let you go. There was too much that remained unsaid.”