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his veins would not allow it. Her soft breasts pressed into his chest and her scent tangled in his murky head. With the danger passed, now he felt the woman in his arms, her warm, slight body that yielded so easily to his, so naturally. He shifted his hands, slipping them down her back, the long, graceful sweep of her spine beneath his fingertips like the rounded rocks upon the floor of a brook, and he felt woman. Woman , young and soft and beautiful and alive, her pulse thrumming through her trembling body.
    She sucked in breath again and shifted in his hold to push him away. But he was not finished. He held her firmly, the blood rushing in his ears like wind as he curved his palm over the arc of a perfect, feminine buttock.
    “Mr. Yale ,” she whispered upon a gasp. “You must stop .”
    Because even a bottle of brandy could not topple what years of training had built, he put her off and stepped back. It was no less dim in the stable, but his eyes had accommodated the dark, and he saw her. He smelled her and heard her, her light, quick breaths amidst the shiftings and snorts of the animals.
    It had become something of a challenge to stand; he leaned against a stall door.
    “What, pray tell, Miss Lucas”—he formed the words carefully—“are you doing in this stable?”
    “Hiding from him. But he found me. Just—Just as you did.” Her voice was thinner than earlier, and rushed.
    “Forgive my ill manners, ma’am. At present I am somewhat—”
    “Foxed.”
    “—indisposed.”
    “Teresa said men in their cups can be amorous even when they do not intend it.”
    He had intended it. And he wished it still. Her warmth clung to the palms of his hands and his chest, the memory of her softness upon his lips tightening his breeches.
    “That beastly man was too.” Her voice dipped. “He called me a poppy . Have you ever heard such an imbecilic thing? He looked like a gentleman, but he turned out to be not heroic in the least.”
    Wyn shook his head, jarring a fragment of clarity into it. “Miss Lucas, return to your bedchamber, lock the door, and go to sleep.”
    “Don’t you even want to know why I am not there now?”
    “I may be foxed, but I am far from stupid. I know why you are not there now.”
    “You know I went looking for another gentleman to assist me because you refused?”
    “I know you even better, perhaps, than you know yourself.” Nine girls. In ten years he had found and rescued nine runaway girls. Also two infants, one amnesiac, a pair of children sold to the mines by a twisted guardian, one former solider who’d gone a bit mad and hadn’t realized he had abandoned his family, and one Scottish rebel who turned out not to be a rebel after all. But nine girls. They always assigned to him the girls. They even chuckled when they said he had a particularly good rapport with girls, as though they shared a marvelous joke. “Now go.” He pulled back the door.
    She went, neither defiantly nor meekly. She simply went, cutting a silhouette in the glow of lamplight from the inn that Wyn consumed with his fogged gaze, the gentle swell of her hips, the graceful taper of her shoulders. He was drunk. Too drunk not to stare and not drunk enough to be unmoved by the sight of her.
    In the morning he would offer her a proper apology for his wandering hands. But now he could not. He could never lie convincingly while under the influence of brandy, and Diantha Lucas was not a girl to be lied to. Even drunk he realized that.
    A sliver of sunlight sliced across Wyn’s vision. Someone was scratching at the door, dragging him out of thick sleep.
    He rubbed the slumber from his face and went to the door. The stable hand stood in the corridor, his brow a highway of ruts. He tugged his cap.
    “Mornin’, sir.” His voice was far too agitated for Wyn’s unsteady nerves. A bottle would cure those. But he never drank before noon. Ever. The single rule he lived by. The single rule among the many others his great aunt