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pursed his lips. She would not like that loss to her dignity.
    She rose to her knees, set her hands flat on the ground, and … laughed . It was a merry sound of pure amusement, though it did end in a little hiccup of pain.
    “Mr. Trentham,” she said, “you have my permission to say ‘I told you so.’ ”
    “I told you so,” he said—one must not disoblige a lady. “And it is Lord Trentham.”
    Silly of him to insist upon that detail, perhaps, but she irritated him.
    She turned to sit on the ground. It was probably still damp from yesterday’s rain, he thought. Serve her right. He gazed down at her with hard eyes and set jaw.
    She sighed as she looked up at him. Her face had turned pale again. He would wager that that ankle was throbbing like a thousand devils. Maybe five thousand after her attempt to put weight on it.
    “You gave me a choice a short while ago,” she said, all the haughtiness gone from her voice, though a trace of her laughter remained. “And since I am not a silly woman, or at least do not wish to appear silly, I choose the second. If the option is still open to me, that is. You would be quite within your rights to withdraw it now, but I would be much obliged if you would carry me to Penderris, Lord Trentham, even though I find the thought of imposing my presence there deeply distressing. Perhaps you would be good enough to lend me a carriage when we get there so that I do not even have to enter the—”
    He bent and scooped her up again. As humble pie went, she had eaten a fair portion.
    He strode onward in the direction of the house. He did not try to make conversation. He could only imagine the sort of reception he was going to get, and the sort of teasing he was going to have to endure for the rest of his stay at Penderris.
    “You are or have been a military gentleman, Lord Trentham,” she said, breaking the silence a couple of minutes later. “I am right, am I not?”
    “What makes you say so?” he asked without looking down at her.
    “You have the bearing of an officer,” she said, “and the hard-jawed, intense-eyed look of a man accustomed to command.”
    He looked down briefly at her. He did not reply to her words.
    “Oh, this is going to be horribly embarrassing,” she said a couple of minutes later as they approached the house.
    “But better, I daresay,” he said curtly, “than lying out on the slope above the beach, exposed to the elements and waiting for the seagulls to come and peck out your eyes.”
    Uncharitably, he wished that that was precisely where she was, though he would not wish the eye-pecking gulls on her.
    “Oh,” she said with a grimace. “When you put it that way, I must confess you are right.”
    “I sometimes am,” he said.
    Lord! Today’s grand joke had been that he was to go down onto the beach to find a personable woman to marry. And here he was, right on cue, carrying a genuine lady back with him. A damnably pretty one too.
    Perhaps she was not single, though. Indeed, she almost certainly was not. She had introduced herself as Lady Muir. That suggested that somewhere, perhaps in the village a mile away, there was a Lord Muir. Which fact would not save him from the teasing. It would merely enhance it, in fact. He would be accused of the most naïve form of miscalculation.
    It was going to take him a long time to live this one down.
    Gwen would have been experiencing surely the worst embarrassment of her life if her mind had not been more preoccupied with pain. She felt embarrassed nevertheless.
    Not only was she being taken to a strange house owned by a man of some notoriety who was not expecting her, but also she was being carried by a large, morose stranger who had done nothing to hide the fact that he despised her. And the trouble was that she could hardly blame him. She had behaved badly. She had made an idiot of herself.
    She was pressed against all that muscled strength she had observed as he approached her across the pebbles, and he felt