Marrying His Cinderella Countess

by Louise Allen

  *

  She would be delighted finally to arrive somewhere and be able to stop jolting around and living out of valises, Ellie concluded when they started off again.

  She stared out of the windows as a succession of smoking chimneys, grimy streets and bulbous bottle kilns gave way to open fields. On the other hand, this was more comfortable than the stagecoach would have been, and much safer, and she was in no hurry to discover what awaited her in Lancashire.

  Yesterday had been extraordinary. What had she seen in Blake’s eyes? Surely not desire? For her? There had been heat, and almost a question, rapidly followed by him diverting those penetrating grey eyes to a close study of a dish of apples.

  If she was not a victim of her own torrid imagination then she ought to be wary. Very wary. And yet she could not feel threatened by him, and that was most strange. But then he had been at a safe distance, and she’d had her Dutch courage in the shape of a glass of wine.

  The crack and the lurch came some twenty minutes after they had left the town, just as the coach turned a sharp corner going uphill.

  For a second she thought the wheel had simply slipped into a rut, but then the lurch became a slide and the carriage tipped. There was a shout from the coachman, Polly’s piercing shriek, hands reaching for her—and then the world turned upside down as the whole vehicle fell over and all went black.

  *

  ‘Stop screaming!’ Blake rasped, and the girl wedged against his side subsided into terrified gulps. Where the hell was Eleanor? Her silence was worse than the maid’s panic. ‘Polly? Polly, listen to me. I can’t turn over—something is on my back. Can you look up? Can you see the door?’

  ‘Yes…yes, my lord.’

  ‘Are you injured? Can you move? Climb out?’

  ‘It hurts…’ The whimper turned into a determined sniff. ‘Not anything broken, I don’t think. I can try. It’s Mr Wilton, my lord, over your back. He’s unconscious and his head’s bleeding.’ She sniffed again and her voice wavered. ‘Not…not spurting, my lord. I’ll try and wriggle past him.’

  Blake braced himself against the pain the wriggling inflicted on him—the foot against his cheekbone, the pressure on his right shoulder that already felt as though it was on fire, the strain on his half-healed bullet wound.

  Then Polly called, ‘I’m out, my lord.’

  There were voices—she was talking to someone. Help would come. He made himself think—which was difficult with Jonathan’s dead weight pressing down on him.

  Not dead, remember, he reassured himself. He’s bleeding, but not badly.

  They must have slid down almost twenty feet of steep bank, he reckoned. But Eleanor…

  She had been on his left side. Then he realised that the soft, yielding surface he was pressed down into was Eleanor’s body, and they were lying as close as lovers, as intimately as lovers, his pelvis wedged into the cradle of her thighs, his chest against her breasts.

  Thank God—she’s breathing, he thought, his nose pressed into a mass of springing, lavender-scented hair. She smells delicious… She’s alive.

  ‘Eleanor, hang on—help is coming.’

  For a moment he thought she was unconscious, and then—so suddenly that he jerked his head, banging it hard against something wooden—she heaved under him like a trapped, netted deer.

  ‘Get off me! Get off, get off, get off…!’

  She sounded like a woman in a nightmare, fighting for her life, desperate, frantic.

  ‘Eleanor, it is me—Blake. I can’t move off you. I am sorry, but we’re trapped—just for a little while. Eleanor, lie still until help comes.’

  He kept talking—repetition, reassurance, nonsense. She kept struggling. And then suddenly, with a sob that might have been sheer exhaustion, she lay still.

  ‘I can’t,’ she whispered. ‘Can’t fight…’

  ‘You don’t have to, Eleanor,’ he said, and found he was whispering too. ‘Don’t try and fight. Help will be here soon.’

  Would it? It was very quiet outside. What if Polly had got out and then collapsed? Or Frederick, his coachman, was too badly injured to go for help? What if the horses were dead or had bolted?

  Stop it. This is a well-travelled road. Someone will find us soon.

  He scrabbled with his fingertips, found wood and braced himself, lifting his weight half an inch off Eleanor’s body.

  ‘I’ll make certain you get out safely,’ he promised.

  Beneath him he could feel her vibrating like a taut wire, and he remembered a leveret he had found when he was a boy, lying still as death in its form in a wheat field. It had stared at him with the huge, mad eyes that hares had, but it hadn’t moved. Only when he’d lain his hand on it he’d been able to feel its heart pounding, feel the shivering vibration that racked it.

  He had snatched his hand away, backed into the wheat until he had no longer been able to see it. But he could not stop touching Ellie, and before much longer he was not going to be able to support himself away from her body either.

  ‘Blake?’ The voice in his ear was puzzled. ‘What the hell happened?’

  ‘Jon!’ The relief that he was well enough to speak was almost physical. ‘We went over the bank. Polly scrambled out and I heard her speaking to someone, but that was perhaps half an hour ago. Eleanor is trapped beneath me and I can’t move.’

  ‘Not surprising with me on top. Hold on. The damn writing case has landed on my gut. Sorry—this is taking an age. I’ve been out of it for a bit—must have banged my head.’

  There was a heave, a loud and violent curse, and then most of the weight shifted off Blake’s back.

  ‘I’ve broken my confounded arm. If I can just—Sorry.’ His booted foot ground into Blake’s cheek. ‘Damn difficult with one hand. There—the door’s open.’

  More scrabbling, more curses and then light flooded in.

  ‘Right, can you get out now?’

  Warily Blake felt around, got a handhold and levered himself up and away from Ellie. The coach was on its side and she was against the window which, thankfully, had been open, so the glass had not broken.

  He got one arm through the open door above him, heaved and was out. Jon looked appalling, his face pale under a mass of blood from the cut to his head and his left hand supporting his right arm, but he seemed alert and otherwise uninjured. Blake pulled him close, looked at his eyes. The pupils were normal, thank God.

  ‘Are you hurt, Blake?’ Jonathan was looking him over with as much concern.

  ‘No, just bruises and scrapes. I’ve had a lot worse in Gentleman Jackson’s after a round of sparring. I just hope and pray Eleanor is all right.’ There was total silence from inside the coach. He climbed up and leaned in. ‘Eleanor?’

  She lay where he had left her, on her back, her eyes wide, her freckles standing out against her dead white face. ‘Yes. I think so.’

  Her voice was a mere whisper.

  ‘Move your arms and legs,’ he ordered, suddenly convinced that he must have broken her spine, crushing her like that. And what had it done to her crippled leg?

  Obediently she moved her hands and feet, then sat up. ‘Nothing is broken.’

  ‘Then take my hands.’ He lay down flat and reached in. ‘Try and stand as I pull.’ Behind him he could hear horses, raised voices. ‘Help is here.’

  There was the merest hesitation before she reached up. He took her wrists and pulled, his bruised body screaming in protest, and she came up, using her legs without any sign of pain, out of the door until she could slide onto solid ground.

  Blake got to her just as she folded neatly and quietly into a dead faint.

  *

  She hurt all over. That was the first thing she was conscious of. Then it all came back—even before she opened her eyes. The terrifying lurch and slide, the impact, the falling bodies and the blow to the head that had stunned her. And then coming back to herself in the gloom to find a man’s body plastered to hers—intimately, heavily, his hands on her shoulders, hi
s face against her cheek, his breath hot on her face, his…maleness all too evident.

  Ellie’s eyes flew open. It was daylight. Above her was a ceiling, beneath her a comfortable bed. And someone was in the room with her. She sat up too fast, and almost whimpered at the pain from her bruises. Blake was sitting on a chair in the far corner of the room.

  ‘Eleanor?’ His face was marked, scraped and discoloured.

  That was who had been on top of her. Blake. She had fought him, beaten at him, struggled as he’d lain helpless. Injured. Goodness knew what she had said to him.

  ‘I am so sorry. So sorry I hit you. I panicked.’

  ‘No. Don’t apologise.’ He got to his feet, then sat down abruptly. ‘I shouldn’t be in your room, but I needed to make sure you were all right. In the carriage, when you were trapped beneath me, you panicked—and it was not because of the accident…it was because a man was pinning you down. I am sorry, it must have been terrifying, and there was nothing I could do until Jonathan managed to get out.’

  She shook her head. ‘It is no matter.’

  ‘But it is. It put you in fear. Who was it, Eleanor? Who made someone as brave as you feel like that?’

  She winced at the word. He thought her brave? How little he knew. All she had done was to pick herself up and somehow limp on.

  ‘No one.’

  Blake made a gesture—the abrupt, impatient gesture of a man used to getting his own way, to getting answers when he asked. She saw him catch himself doing it, saw the care with which he clasped those long fingers together and sat back in the chair, consciously making himself unthreatening.

  ‘You flinch when a man touches you,’ he said, his voice neutral, as though he was describing the view from the window. ‘You move in a room so that you always have an escape route. You lock your door at night even when you share the room with your maid and you are in a private area. You reacted in terror to the feel of a man’s body pressed to yours—overpowering you, it must have seemed. Who was it?’

  Probably spontaneous combustion by blushing was impossible, but it did not feel so just at that moment. Ellie tried to get the memory his body against hers as they lay pressed together in the carriage out of her mind.

  ‘No one. I am simply unused to being with men, that is all. I do not want to talk about this.’

  She could hear him getting to his feet, walking towards the door, but she kept her burning face turned away.

  ‘Of course. But I should say that both Jonathan and I would consider ourselves something less than men if we ever forced our attentions on an unwilling woman.’ His voice was as cool, as clinical, as it had been throughout his little interrogation.

  Oh.

  ‘Of course.’ She sat up again—again too fast. ‘I would not for a moment think… My reaction—I cannot always control it. I am sorry. It is like…like running away from a spider, even though one knows they are harmless.’

  His faint smile in response was lopsided, and now she could see him without the light behind him the scraped, bruised side of his face was clearly visible.

  ‘Are you badly hurt? And Polly? Mr Wilton?’

  ‘Polly is fine—just bruised and shocked. I am black and blue and dented more by Jon’s big feet than the original accident. He has a broken arm and, unlike your spider, he only has four limbs, of which he can write legibly with only one. One cannot help but think that a conscientious secretary would have broken the left arm…’

  He was gone and the door was closed before Ellie realised that he was joking, and that Jonathan could not be in a dangerous state.

  How near she had come to telling Blake about that shameful, shaming night. She had done nothing to be ashamed of—she knew that—but all the knowing in the world did not stop the emotions. Her only fault, she had told herself over and over, was to have started to develop womanly curves in the months leading up to her mother’s death. It had never occurred to her to try and disguise them other than by continuing to dress modestly, as befitted a gentleman’s daughter.

  She knew she hadn’t flaunted herself, hadn’t teased and tempted, hadn’t asked for it—all the foul things her stepfather had thrown at her as she’d struggled. Why did knowing that not make it possible to ignore those words?

  Along with the key and the barricades and the knife, her only other weapon had been to lose those curves. She had always been tall, always slender, never pretty. Now, by eating very little, she had become thin, her features plain. Hunger was a small price to pay for becoming unattractive to any potential predator.

  Ellie sat up and threw back the covers. It was time she got up, reviewed the damage—the bangs and bruises.

  The door was unlocked. She took a painful limping step towards it, then made herself turn back towards the dressing table. There were no predators here. She was safe with these men. Jonathan was a decent man and Blake… Blake made her feel safe in ways she could not begin to understand.

  Her face, with a scratch down her nose, a bruise on her chin and dark circles under her eyes, returned her stare in the glass. The only things that were in danger were her own foolish daydreams.

  *

  ‘I am perfectly able to travel.’ Jonathan’s voice was raised well above his usual discreet tones.

  For a man dosed with laudanum and recovering from the doctor’s manhandling as he set his arm, Jonathan sounded a lot livelier than Blake felt. He winced at the effect on his thudding headache. A night’s sleep in the inn at Stoke had done little to soothe it.

  ‘You stay here while I take Eleanor to Lancashire. You need to rest—you heard the doctor.’

  ‘Why have you got to take her in such a rush? She will come to no harm here for a while.’

  ‘Because she is a lady, and she should not be with two men unrelated to her like this.’

  ‘She’s been with us for long enough to ruin a Mother Superior in the eyes of Society.’

  ‘And do you want to end up married to her?’

  Jonathan, who had been lying on his back on the sofa in the private sitting room, opened his eyes and turned his head to fix Blake with a hard stare. ‘No.’

  ‘No more do I. Plain spinsters are not for either of us, if I’ve anything to say to it.’

  Plain and deeply wary of men, poor creature.

  Why was he so vehement about it—as though he was trying to persuade himself, not his brother?

  ‘She goes to Lancashire and you rest. When I get back we will go home. I had better get you a valet for while I’m away—you can’t even hitch up your breeches by yourself in that state.’

  Jon opened his mouth to argue—he always argued, the stubborn devil—and then his gaze switched to the door. ‘Er… Blake—’

  He turned and found Eleanor standing on the threshold of her room, her bruised and scratched hands folded demurely in the rusty black skirts of her disaster of a gown.

  Oh, hell. How much of that had she heard?

  Chapter Six

  If Eleanor had overheard his remark about plain spinsters she gave no sign of it. Her expression was neutral, her tone simply matter-of-fact.

  Blake expelled the breath he had been holding. Damn it, he didn’t want to hurt her feelings—simply wanted not to have her anywhere around, muddling his feelings. After he had made that disastrous proposal to Felicity he had sworn to keep his dealings with women simple. Mistresses who knew what they were doing and had very clear expectations from him, and eventually a suitable marriage to an eligible lady—one who would not expect emotions to come into the equation.

  Felicity had been his for the asking—or so he had assumed—since they were children. And he had taken her for granted—never bothered to explore his own feelings, let alone hers. He had lost his love before she was his, and since then it had been easier—safer—simply not to feel, not to allow his happiness to depend on anyone else. Except for Jon, of course, but he was his brother, and that was different.

  But to accept responsibility for anyone else’s happiness, to put
them at risk of his own inability to care enough… He forced his thoughts to a juddering halt, back to the present.

  Eleanor inclined her head and went to Jonathan’s side, her expression concerned. Blake heard her murmured questions about whether he needed more laudanum, or a drink, perhaps. A shabby ministering angel. Which made him think…

  ‘I must go out and find Jonathan a temporary valet. May I take Polly with me? She can help with some shopping, replace the things that were damaged in the accident.’

  ‘Yes, of course.’ Eleanor scarcely glanced up. ‘She says she is quite well this morning, but please make sure she does not overtire herself.’

  Blake left to find the maid, contemplating the wreck of his comfortable life just at the moment, largely thanks to the Lyttons. A scandal at the club—not that he could blame that on Lytton…that had been his own damned fault—a heap of boring sensitive work around the death and the inquest and the funeral, and then, to crown it all, he had allowed himself to be cozened into this trip up the length of the confounded country.

  He knew why he had not simply loaned Eleanor his carriage and provided her with an escort. It had not been a quixotic act of gallantry on the spur of the moment. It had been because of his well-submerged conscience—not nagging him about this woman or about Lytton’s death, exactly, but reminding him that he was capable of letting people down and that included women too.

  Love was dangerous, because love meant loss, which meant pain, and the people you loved let you down sooner or later, or you blundered and hurt them… And why was he even thinking about love, of all things? He was done with that. This was all about the duty he owed as a gentleman to a lady in distress.

  ‘My lord?’ Polly stood in the middle of the corridor, where she had apparently come to a dead halt as he strode down it, unseeing. ‘Were you looking for me?’

  Now his infuriatingly tender conscience was prompting him to more insanity. ‘Yes.’ Be tactful. ‘How are you? Should you be resting?’

  ‘I’m just a bit bruised, my lord, thank you for asking. I’m keeping moving—stops it all stiffening up, like.’