A Warriner to Rescue Her
Autore
Virginia Heath
Letto da
15,5K
Capitoli
18
Chapter One
May 1814
The blood-curdling female scream shook him out of his daze instantly. Jamie pulled up his horse and glanced frantically around to see if he could locate the source. All he saw was familiar meadow and trees, and for a moment he thought he might have imagined it. With the warm sun on his face and the leisurely motion of his mount ambling aimlessly beneath him, it was quite feasible he had nodded off. He was exhausted, after all.
Constantly exhausted from his brain’s inability to stop whirring when darkness fell, conjuring up memories from his past which haunted him even though he knew both men responsible for the pain were undeniably dead and therefore no longer a threat. Yet the ghost of them lingered in his mind, forcing him to stay vigilant and preventing him from snatching more than a few hours here and there, usually as the sun began to banish the darkness away. Or perhaps it was simply the darkness which frightened him as it had as a child? After so many months, he was no longer sure. Just irritated with his own inability to move past it.
The second scream, no less curdling or high-pitched, raised all of his hackles, putting him on instant alert. With his soldier’s instinct, Jamie raced his horse in the direction of the shriek, which happened to be towards the orchard near the huge wall which surrounded Markham Manor. The orderly trees were arranged in parallel lines with person-width paths of grass in between; aside from the gentle swish of leaves blowing in the summer breeze, silence reigned.
He cast his eyes methodically up and down the rows until he saw something—a dainty skewbald pony casually munching on the tiny, unripe apples that littered the ground around its hooves. As it was wearing both halter and a side-saddle, yet there was no sign of the rider, Jamie carefully lowered himself to the ground and wrapped his own reins loosely about a branch. At the best of times his temperamental black stallion was foul tempered; around other horses he was prone to be a brute. The pretty cream-and-dun pony, with her long fluffy mane and even longer eyelashes, would not stand a chance.
Jamie limped towards the abandoned animal slowly, conscious any sudden movement might spook the strange pony and send it galloping off to who knew where. ‘Easy, girl...’ At least he assumed it was a girl. If it were a boy the other horses would tease him mercilessly for that effeminate mane.
‘Hello!’ A slightly panicked woman’s voice came from above. ‘Is somebody there?’
‘Hello?’ He hadn’t been expecting to address the sky. The sun pierced Jamie’s eyes to such an extent he could not see a thing except blinding yellow light. The woman’s exact location remained a mystery. Unless she was an angel sent to fetch him and drag him off to heaven, which he sincerely doubted. They had had their chance and failed miserably and if he was bound for anywhere it was probably hell. ‘I can’t see you!’
‘I am in the tree... I wonder if you would be so good as to assist me, sir. I appear to be stuck.’
Surreal words, again unexpected. How did a woman come to be stuck in an apple tree? Jamie did his best to shield the worst of the glare with his hand and squinted through the tangled branches. Two wiggling feet dangled nearly six feet above his head. They were encased in half-boots and were attached to a very shapely pair of female legs, clad in fine silk stockings which were held up with rather saucy pink garters. His eyes widened at the garters. From this perspective they appeared to be completely festooned with flowers. Above them, about an inch or two of creamy thigh was also on display. The rest of the woman was hidden by leaves.
Thankfully, a passing cloud chose that exact moment to block out the worst of the sun, allowing Jamie to get a better look at the rest of the dangling woman. Her slate-coloured skirt, so incongruous in comparison to her choice of vibrant underthings, had inverted and appeared to be wrapped tightly around her upper body. One arm clung to a branch above, the other, and her head, were apparently trapped within the fabric. Her generous bottom was resting on a feeble branch which appeared likely to snap at any moment and, with nothing beneath her except the hard ground, his best assessment of her position was precarious.
‘Try to remain still. I’m coming up!’
He supposed it was the gentlemanly thing to do, although Jamie had no idea if he was still actually capable of climbing a tree. Thanks to Napoleon, he could hardly walk, certainly struggled to run and his dancing days were most definitely over. Quickly, he tried to work out the best way to tackle the challenge. The last time he had cause to climb a tree, he had been a scrawny, nimble boy and he recalled it had been a simple procedure by and large. Thanks to his burly Warriner ancestors, and over a decade of growing, he was now an ox of a man. An ox of a man with a useless left leg.
However, that damned leg was not going to define him. If he wanted to climb a tree, he would climb a blasted tree! Putting all of his weight on his right foot, and using the strength of his arms, he managed to hoist himself laboriously upwards. It might have raised him less than a foot off the ground, but he had left the ground. He rearranged his good foot and heaved again. Two foot from the ground! What was that if it was not progress? Slow, laboured, feeble progress. Painful, humiliating, soul-destroying progress.
Oblivious to his grunts of exertion, or the supreme effort it took him to actually climb, the grey faceless bundle above his head decided this was the appropriate time for a conversation.
‘I suppose you are wondering how I came to be stuck up this tree in the first place...’ At this stage in the proceedings, how she came to be there was neither here nor there. All Jamie could concentrate on was putting one foot painfully above the other. ‘It’s a funny story really. My pony, Orange Blossom, has a fondness for red apples.’ As she spoke, her legs and bottom jiggled, causing the fragile branch to quiver with indignation. ‘And rather stupidly, I assumed... Oooh!’
The flimsy branch suddenly bent downwards as it split from the main trunk of the tree. Fortunately, she had the good sense to hook her legs around an adjacent branch and managed to halt her descent. Unfortunately, in doing so her dress had now ridden further up her thighs, displaying all of her legs quite thoroughly. As legs went, they were rather nice although now was really not the time he should be admiring them. As he had suspected, those saucy garters were festooned with pink-silk flowers. Her shapely derrière now hung between the two branches and directly over Jamie’s head. In her panic, she was wiggling in earnest now in an attempt to free her head from its dull, muslin prison, her visible hand still clinging desperately on to a straining branch above.
Jamie began to inch closer to her struggling form. ‘Madam, it is imperative that you remain still!’ Because if she fell, it was his cranium which would bear the brunt and the closer he got, the less confident he was he was strong enough to catch her. If her bottom was anything to go by, she was not exactly petite. He pulled himself on to a sound-looking branch and locked one arm around it.
‘Take my hand!’ Perhaps he could swing her down to the ground? Unless, of course, she wrenched his shoulder out of its socket. Then he would have a crippled arm to go with his ruined leg.
He watched her wrestle within her tangled skirts until her other hand burrowed its way out and her arm made a frantic bid for freedom, but instead of grabbing his outreached hand as he had quite plainly instructed, she used it to attempt to cover her exposed legs with her inverted clothing. Tiny, hard, barely formed apples began to tumble out of the fabric and rained down around him. Two of the lead-lined fruits bounced off his head like miniature cannonballs and made him yelp.
‘What in God’s name are you doing, woman! Grab my blasted hand now!’ For good measure, he prodded her arm to help her locate him.
More wood splintered somewhere close by and the faceless wench squealed again, her bottom lolling further between the branches and coming level with his face. At last, she swung her free arm around and grabbed his hand, but it was a moment too late. Thanks to weak, young wood and gravity, her advancing bottom had begun to gain some momentum and continued to slide on its journey downwards. Acting on impulse rather than gentlemanly manners, Jamie looped his good leg over another branch and tried to halt her descent in the only way now left open to him. Grabbing a handful of a rather pert, round cheek, he unceremoniously braced himself against it to stop her falling.
The headless woman squeaked in outrage and vehemently attempted to remove her posterior from his clenched hand by grasping at anything wildly to haul herself back up again. This frantic new movement proved to be problematic for both the tree and Jamie’s tenuous grasp of it. The branch supporting his good leg snapped with a loud crack, sending them both careening helplessly downwards.
He landed flat on his back, with a resounding thud. A split second later the woman landed on top of him. Jamie was hard pressed to decide which event caused him more pain. If he’d had any breath left in his lungs, he probably would have screamed in agony. All that came out instead was a weird hiss, almost as if his entire body was slowly deflating. By some miracle, his eyes still worked. He knew this because he was currently drowning in a sea of hair.
He felt her brace herself on to her hands and lift her head up. Two brown eyes stared, blinking directly into his, far too close to allow him to see anything else. ‘Are you all right?’
Hiss.
One hand came to the side of his face and she patted his cheek ineffectually, oblivious to the fact he was munching on a mouthful of her hair. ‘Sir? Can you speak to me? Are you injured?’
Jamie flexed his fingers. When no pain shot down his arms, he brought them up to grab her by the shoulders and smartly lifted her upwards. ‘Get your blasted hair out of my face this instant.’
She hastily scrambled off him and knelt at his side, peering down in concern. It was then that Jamie finally got his first proper look at her. Big brown eyes, with eyelashes so long they would give her pretty pony a run for its money, a heart-shaped face, obscenely plump lush mouth and a smattering of freckles dusting across the bridge of her nose. The hair which had threatened to choke him was neither red nor blonde. It hovered somewhere in between. But it was thick and heavy and really quite lovely. Even the way the twigs and leaves sprouted out of what was left of her hairstyle was strangely becoming. It was odd that splinters of foliage would suit a woman so.
He managed to lift himself up on to his elbows to test his neck. He moved it from side to side before stretching out his spine. Nothing broken so far, which frankly, was a miracle after he had been effectively dropped from a great height, then crushed.
‘You broke my fall.’
‘I am well aware of that.’ Jamie gingerly moved his bad leg. The fact it appeared no worse than it had before gave him some confidence. Carefully he raised himself to a sitting position and glared at the woman. She responded by grinning broadly and sticking out her hand. She grabbed his and shook it vigorously.
‘My name is Cassandra Reeves. I am the daughter of the Reverend Reeves, the new vicar of this parish. I am delighted to make your acquaintance, sir.’
Well, he definitely wasn’t delighted by the way the acquaintance had been made and, because he certainly did not feel like grinning, Jamie frowned instead. Her inappropriate cheerfulness was disconcerting. ‘James Warriner.’
‘Well, thank you for saving me. I really do appreciate it, Mr Warriner.’
‘It’s Captain Warriner.’ Why he had the urge to make the distinction to her, he could not say, when nobody hereabouts ever called him anything other than either his first name or, sneeringly, ‘one of those Warriners’. Yet to become plain old mister again, when he was still technically an officer in His Majesty’s army, was tantamount to accepting defeat. Until he resigned his commission, he would remain Captain Warriner for as long as was humanly possible. He might well have accepted his military career, as well as his life, was well and truly over—his shattered leg was never going to get any better than it was—but the rest of the world did not need to know he was finished. To be barely twenty-seven and rendered useless was a bitter pill to take.
‘A military man? That explains it.’
‘Explains what?’ He was growling because his probing fingers could feel a tender bump forming on his scalp from the impact of one of the apple cannonballs she had fired at him.
‘Your abrupt tone.’ She screwed her face into a frown and put on her best impression of a man’s deeper voice. ‘“It is imperative you remain still...” “Grab my blasted hand now!”’
Jamie stopped rubbing his head and stared disbelievingly at the woman. Was she pulling him up on his manners? Seriously? ‘Had you grabbed my hand in the first instance, then perhaps I might have prevented you from falling out of the tree. Your dithering caused us both to fall.’
‘My clothing was in disarray.’ That, he knew. He had seen those garters and they were hardly the sort of garters he would expect a vicar’s daughter to wear. ‘It would have been improper to leave it that way.’
‘Yet your nod to propriety proved to be remarkably ineffectual, did it not? Not only did it send us both crashing to the ground, it was a completely pointless exercise. Your skirts had been up for some time, Miss Reeves, and I am not blind.’
She blushed then, quite prettily, and those huge brown eyes widened with alarm. ‘You might have told me. It was hardly gentlemanly for you to look.’
‘Perhaps you would have preferred I closed my eyes and groped around in the branches blindly in the vain hope I might grab you on the off chance?’
‘You did grab me, as I recall, and most improperly, too.’ Her freckled nose poked into the air as she delivered this set down.
‘You are absolutely right. I apologise sincerely for grabbing the only part of your body that I could reach as you careened towards me at dangerous speed. What I should have done was avoided grabbing you in the first place. That would have been the gentlemanly thing to do. It also would have meant that you would have plummeted out of the tree there and then, and thus relinquishing me from the noble task of breaking your fall.’
* * *
When he put it like that, Cassie was prepared to concede he had a point. She had practically flattened the man, the poor thing could barely breath a few moments ago. If only he hadn’t seen her pudgy thighs. Or manhandled her massive bottom. And if only he wasn’t so devilishly handsome then she wouldn’t be feeling so self-conscious about her entire, ungainly body below the waist, as well as already feeling ridiculous for getting herself stuck up a tree in the first place. Captain Warriner’s eyes were the absolute bluest eyes she had ever seen. Like the clearest summer’s sky flecked with speckles of lapis lazuli. With all the dark, slightly over-long black hair and permanently frowning expression, he was exactly what she imaged a pirate to look like. Or a highwayman. Or a mythical knight sat around King Arthur’s table. Very few men could carry off chainmail or a dashing pirate’s earring, but she was quite certain Captain Warriner would. She would store his appearance away in her memory for when she needed inspiration for a handsome rogue...
But here she was, weaving him into one of her stories and the poor man was still sat on the floor. Probably still winded and trying to pretend not to be. Why, he hadn’t even raised himself from his seat on the grass.
‘I am being unforgivably ungrateful, Captain Warriner. You have been extremely decent in trying to save me and I am truly sorry for squashing you when I landed. If it’s any consolation, I did try to avoid you.’
Her fictional, fantasy pirate was still frowning. ‘I already know I am going to regret asking this question, Miss Reeves, but how did you come to be stuck in one of my brother’s apple trees?’
‘I did not realise they belonged to someone, else I never would have taken the liberty.’ Stealing was a sin, after all, and she was guilty of enough of them already to add one to the list. It was the Eighth Commandment. Cassie knew all of the Commandments verbatim. Forwards and, because her attention had a tendency to waver, backwards as well.
‘Did you fail to notice the twenty-foot wall and giant wooden gates?’
As he was gesturing behind her with his hand Cassie allowed her eyes to turn to take in the towering stone barricade looming against the horizon. Now that he happened to mention it, she had noticed the enormous structure as she had ridden down the unfamiliar lane, but as the gates were wide open, she had assumed it was a public park. Both Hyde Park and St James’s had gates, too, although granted nowhere near as imposing, so did the many parks she had frequented in Nottingham, Manchester, Birmingham, Liverpool and Bristol. But she was a very long way from those cities now and she supposed they had no real need for actual parks when lush, green countryside stretched out before you in every direction.
‘I did not realise this was private property. I am used to living in big towns, Captain Warriner, where people take the air in big parks. I feel very silly now.’
He waved her explanation away impatiently. ‘Anyway—the tree, Miss Reeves?’
She could tell by his expression he thought she was odd. His dark eyebrows were raised in question, but his eyes swirled with irritated bemusement. Cassie knew that look well. It was the way most people had always stared at her. Usually, it only hurt a little bit, because she was quite used to it—but for some reason having this dashing pirate view her in such a manner, when he had barely any time to get to know her, hurt a great deal. Clearly she was now irredeemably odd if an officer in the King’s army had spotted it straight away, when Cassie had been trying so very hard not to be quite so odd since she arrived in Retford. To make matters worse, her reasons for being up the tree were, now she considered it, quite daft indeed. Further evidence of her unfamiliarity with country life.
‘I was searching for apples for Orange Blossom. The ones on the lower branches were so very small and hard, I thought those higher up might be riper. Because they were closer to the sun...but I realise now, that it is far too early for any of the apples to be ripe. The ones I picked from the top were just as hard as the ones at the bottom.’
‘This, I am also aware of. The majority of them fell on my head while you were trying to adjust your clothing.’
Could this day get any worse? She had made a fool of herself, unwittingly trespassed and stolen unripe apples, then winded the most handsome man she had ever seen after flashing her fat legs at him. ‘I am sorry about your head, too,’ she said miserably, ‘and for climbing the stupid tree in the first place. When the branch beneath my feet gave way, my dress got caught on something and I couldn’t move. I shall be eternally grateful you came along. I might still be stuck there otherwise and I promised Papa I would be home by four to listen to Sunday’s sermon.’ Stuck inside again when she so loved being outdoors.
Captain Warriner merely stared at her, his magnificent eyes inscrutable, though obviously happy to end their acquaintance swiftly. Cassie stood up decisively and brushed the worst of the leaves and twigs out of her hair, chiding herself for her own ineptitude. Why did she always have to be so clumsy and so odd? People were always put off by her exuberance. As one pithy matron had said in the parish before the last one, Cassie was like a cup of tea with three sugars when only one was required. At little too much. Too loud. Too talkative. Far too passionate and prone to cause irritation in every quarter. Why couldn’t she simply pretend to be like all of the other young ladies? Why did her silly brain put daft ideas into her head and why did her even sillier head listen to them? Ripe apples and pirates. Two classic examples of her wandering, odd mind.
‘I suppose I should get going. Papa will be wondering where I have got to.’
Captain Warriner nodded, seemingly content to remain seated on the grass. ‘Yes. Probably best.’ He was a man of few words—either that or he didn’t suffer fools like her gladly.
‘Well, good afternoon then. And thank you again.’ Cringing with awkwardness, Cassie untied Orange Blossom and began to lead her down the narrow path out of the dreaded Orchard of Embarrassment. A jet-black stallion, obviously as unimpressed with her shenanigans as his owner, glared at her in disgust.
You are a very silly human, aren’t you?
Don’t listen to him, said Orange Blossom loyally, you meant well, Cassie.
It was cold comfort. Captain Galahad still thought her odd. For some reason, it was imperative she did not leave him on such a bad impression.
‘I am not normally this silly Captain.’ Cassie spun around only to see him wincing, resting painfully on one knee, as he tried to stand. ‘Oh, my goodness! You’ve hurt your leg.’ She dropped the reins and dashed to his side to offer him some assistance. ‘Let me help you up and then I will escort you home.’ After causing his injury it was the very least she could do.
Those lovely blue eyes hardened to ice crystals. ‘I’m not a blasted invalid, woman! I can get myself up off the floor and find my own way home!’ To prove his point, he stood and stubbornly limped towards his horse.
‘Please, Captain Warriner—allow me to assist you. Your poor leg!’
But he ignored her. He reached his horse quickly and grabbed the pommel of the saddle to steady himself. Then, with another wince, put all of his weight on his injured left leg so that he could place his right foot in the stirrup. He hauled himself upwards using only the power in his arms. Large muscles bulged under the fabric of his coat, emphasising his strength and excellent broad shoulders. He arranged himself comfortably before shooting her a scornful glare which could have curdled milk.
‘Good afternoon, Miss Reeves. Next time you decide to go out for a ride, kindly remember this is private property.’ He nudged the foreboding black stallion forward and the pair of them galloped off without a backward glance.
