Elisabeth Fairchild by Captian Cupid

suggestion that he would not care to offer marriage.
    He laughed. “The ankle pains me.”
    “You would make me an offer, then?”
    He laughed again, as she had intended he should, his chest moving against her ribcage. Then he looked at her, his cheek very close, mischief in his eyes. “I would know more of you if we are to be bound to one another in any way more intimate than we already are.”
    Again the suggestion that it was not marriage he considered. She kept her eyes on the path, her voice steady, and yet the words came out thickly. “What would you know?”
    “Everything.” The heat of his breath at her ear left her knees weak.
    Dear Lady Anne.
    She stopped and adjusted her hold on his waist before setting off again. “Surely you jest. A man cannot know everything of any woman.”
    “True, he can but attempt to unveil the mystery. Care to uncover something of yourself, Penny?”
    That he called her by her given name added even more intimacy to a moment already unsettling in its closeness. She could not look at him, did not dare. “There is little to tell,” she said, watching the movement of his legs, so close to her skirts, lost in them when the wind blew. “I live a very mundane life. Not full of danger and adventure as yours must have been.”
    “A life I choose to forget for now. I would be pleased to hear of the mundane.”
    “It is painful, then?”
    “The foot? Not too bad.”
    “No.” She turned her head, daring a glance despite their close proximity. “Remembering.”
    He said nothing for several strides, his turn to look away, and in the silence she tried to imagine him, gun in hand, shooting.
    “I was lucky,” he murmured at last. “I survived. Now I would hear of the living. Is she Val’s?”
    Penny caught her breath, injured again by his low opinion of her. She drew on the strength of Lady Anne, as she always did in such moments. “And if I said she was,” she said bitterly. “Would you tell him?”

    He did not want to imagine the two of them together, Val and this young woman, locked in carnal knowledge, swept away by passion, and yet the image rose unbidden.
    “If he is the father should he not know?” He pulled away so that his hip and thigh no longer pressed hers. A foolish move. It left him suddenly unsteady on his pins, bereft of her support, though he still depended upon her shoulder.
    “I am afraid,” she said, words so soft he leaned closer to hear. settling once more against her hip.
    “Why? He is not all bad. Assuming the responsibilities of fatherhood might be the making of Val.”
    “He would take her from me,” she whispered.
    A peregrine falcon floated on the wind above, keening. A lonely sound. The bird’s shadow drifted over them, over the rock strewn path they navigated with care.
    Would Val take the child? He wondered. Would he even want her?
    “It must be difficult for you,” he said gently. “Living with that fer.”
    Her head snapped in his direction.
    “In battle I found it best to face your fear head on. Perhaps it is time you told him.”
    Her eyes smoldered with angry intensity. For the first time he regretted how closely she was bound to him.
    “You’ve no idea what you’re talking about,” she snapped.

Chapter Fourteen

    She said nothing more, but her whole body spoke stiffly of angry rejection.
    “Might we take a moment’s rest?” he asked.
    She nodded, even seemed glad to shed him. He sat where she led him, raised his foot on a slab of rock, that it might throb less, and said, “I regret my presumption.”
    She stood silently staring back the way they had come, wind spreading the folds of her cloak about her like dark, velvet wings, the edge of her bonnet guarding her expression.
    He tried again. “You are quite right. I’ve no idea what you . . . your life is like, what might happen if you did tell Val.”
    She sighed, raised her hand to her neck, rubbed the nape of it. His weight on her shoulders had taken its toll.
    “I am