He had long experience at enduring pain. He rarely took any medicine to dull it, and he rarely allowed it to slow him down or confine him to his bed. It was a fact of his life and always would be. All he could do to control it was avoid the sort of activities—like long days seated in a carriage—that would intensify it.
Quinn came within five minutes and silently pulled off his boots and set to work massaging stiff muscles and working out clenched knots until he could relax more.
“Does she know about this?” he asked.
“Good Lord, no,” Ben said. “Why should she?”
They had talked determinedly through much of the day. And actually it had not been too difficult after a while. He had noticed that with her before. She was easy to talk to. She would always answer his questions and then ask her own in return. She neither monopolized the conversation nor expected him to do all the talking. They had exchanged memories of childhood. She remembered dancing barefoot in the grass with her mother and splashing and swimming in a stream with some other children from the village. He remembered swimming in the lake at Kenelston and climbing trees with the gamekeeper’s two boys and engaging in sword fights with them, using the wooden toy weapons their father had carved for them all—Ben included.
They had even sat in companionable silence some of the time, watching the scenery go by on their respective sides of the carriage, alone with their own thoughts.
“You might suggest slowing the journey down,” Quinn said. “Anyone would think from your speed that she was an underage maiden heiress and you a penniless nobody abducting her to Gretna Green.”
“And so muddleheaded that I am taking her in quite the wrong direction?”
“You will be crippled before you get to the wilds of beyond,” Quinn said, jerking his head in a direction that Ben guessed was meant to indicate the southwest coast of Wales.
“I think not,” Ben said. “Give me half an hour, Quinn, and then come back to help me dress for dinner.”
His valet grunted and withdrew. He had been a groom in the Duke of Stanbrook’s stables at Penderris when Ben first encountered him. In those early days of all-consuming agony, only that particular groom was able to move him and turn him for the necessary washes and changes and treatments without his quite passing out from the pain. His Grace had pretended to grumble when Ben appropriated the groom to be his nurse and then his valet.
An hour later Ben descended to the private dining room, feeling considerably restored.
His first thought after opening the door was that he must have the wrong room. She was standing beside the table, which had been set for their meal, and she was wearing a high-waisted, short-sleeved evening dress of pale blue muslin. Her near-black hair was piled on her head in an intricately tied knot.
He stared at her, transfixed and aghast.
“What the devil?” he said, and he took an incautiously hasty step forward and shut the door firmly behind him.
She raised her eyebrows. “I left all my blacks at Bramble Hall, except what I wore today,” she told him. “I will not wear those again. They were ordered from Leyland and sent to Bramble Hall without any consultation with me or any fitting with a proper modiste. They are ugly and impersonal and ill-fitting, and they in no way reflect the genuine sorrow I felt at the premature death of my husband. They are the mere ostentatious trappings of grief, designed to impress the world. I will not put on a meaningless show any longer. That part of my life is over, and the next part of my life has begun.”
He took one step closer. “Have you forgotten,” he said, “that we are traveling as a major and the recent widow of his military friend? Who has seen you dressed like that?”
“Like what?” she asked. “You make me sound as if I am dressed like a harlot.”
“Like a young lady,” he said between his teeth, “traveling with a gentleman who is not her husband. Who has seen you?”
Her cheeks had flushed. “The landlord showed me where the dining parlor was,” she said. “There were a few other people. I did not take much notice.”
“You can be sure the landlord took notice,” he said. “Good Lord, and you do not even have a maid with you.”
“If you wish to go away, Sir Benedict—” she began.
“Stop talking nonsense,” he snapped at her. “From now on, starting tomorrow, we are going to have to be husband and wife. That is the only solution.”
“How ridiculous,” she said.
“You will be Lady Harper from tomorrow on,” he told her. “Oh, do not worry for your virtue. We will take separate rooms at the inns where we stay. My injuries make me restless and so make it imperative that I sleep alone. Not that we will be called upon to explain ourselves.”
“I think, Sir Benedict,” she said, “you are a bit stuffy. As well as tyrannical.”
“What I am,” he told her, “is concerned for your reputation, ma’am. And that is going to have to be Benedict and Samantha tomorrow. We will be husband and wife.”
“I suppose,” she said, “you would be happier if I were shrouded in black for the rest of my life.”
“You may wear scarlet every day until you are eighty,” he said, “after you have been delivered safely to your cottage and I have gone on my way.”
“Delivered,” she said. “Like an unwanted package.”
The door opened behind him, and a maidservant carried in a large tray with their evening meal.