She closed her eyes as the coach stopped.
“Is it highwaymen?” the woman next to her asked, panic in her voice.
“I don’t think so,” replied the first. “Looks like a madman.”
Sophie craned to look out the window.
Her heart began to pound.
He didn’t look like a madman. He looked rather perfect.
But he sounded rather furious. “Sophie Talbot, come out of that damn coach now before I come in and fetch you!”
The man by the window nudged the woman next to him. “You called Talbot?”
She shook her head.
He asked the other women in the coach one by one, ignoring Sophie altogether. When they’d received denials from all wearing frocks, the man lowered the window and shouted, “There ain’t no miss named Talbot in this coach.” He turned back and said to the now rapt audience, “He don’t believe me.”
Sophie shrank back against the seat and lowered her cap, willing herself invisible. The door burst open, heralding early-morning light and her husband, whose gaze immediately found her, then scanned her clothing. “Does no one in the goddamn country look at footwear?”
She looked down at her too-tight slippers. “There were no boots that fit.”
The man at the window started back. “He’s a girl!”
“He is, indeed,” King said dryly, clearly unamused. “What have I said about mail coaches, Sophie?”
She scowled. “As you packed me off to London mere hours ago, with a promise never to see me again, I’m not terribly interested in what you have to say about my means of travel.”
“Ah. Lovers’ quarrel,” explained the woman next to her, sounding rather gleeful.
“We’re not lovers,” Sophie snapped.
“If he’s chasing after the mail coach to fetch you, you will be,” said the man by the window, lowering his cap over his eyes and leaning back in his seat.
Except they wouldn’t.
“Little do you know. He doesn’t even like me.”
“Get out of the coach, Sophie.”
“Go on, Sophie, we’ve all places to be,” said another passenger.
“As do I!” she insisted.
King raised a brow. “Oh? Where are you headed?”
She didn’t know that bit. Not yet. Still, she wasn’t about to say as much to him. “Sprotbrough. Perhaps you remember it. Handsome doctor?”
“I remember it, love. Every minute of it.”
“Don’t call me that.”
“Why not? I love you.”
She caught her breath at the words. He was a beast. “Get out,” she said softly, hating him for saying them. For making her wish they were true.
“In or out, my lord,” the coachman said from King’s shoulder. “I’ve a schedule to meet.”
He didn’t look away from her when he said, softly, “Shall I get in? Or will you come out?”
“I’ll go if she won’t,” said another woman in the carriage.
“Go, girlie,” said the man at the window.
She ignored him. “You sent me away.”
“I was an ass.”
“You were, rather.”
“That’s it, lass,” her neighbor said. “You stand for yourself.”
King reached in, one strong hand extended to her. “Please, Sophie. I’ve so much to say. Come out and hear me?”
To the immense gratitude of the driver, the mixed feelings of the passengers, and her own significant doubt, Sophie exited the coach. The coach was in motion in seconds, leaving her and King alone on the Great North Road, with none but his mount as witness.
She turned to him as the sound of the mail faded into the distance. “What—”
He stopped the question with a kiss, deep and long and with an urgency that unsettled even as it tempted, his hands cupping her face. She lost herself in the caress almost instantly, devastated by it, by the fact that she’d never imagined he’d kiss her again.
She shouldn’t let him kiss her.
It wasn’t fair that she so desperately wanted him to kiss her.
As he released her, leaving them both gasping for air, she realized his hands were trembling. She clasped them with her own. “King?”
“I thought you were dead,” he whispered before taking her lips again, equally as urgently.
She pulled away. “What? I wasn’t dead. I was on a mail coach.”
“The carriage crashed.”
Her eyes went wide as she remembered how he so carefully checked the horses’ harnesses whenever he was preparing for a journey—a vestige of the drive with Lorna. “How?”
“The wheel broke,” he said. “I watched it fall.” He shook his head. “I couldn’t stop it. You could have died.”
She took his hands in hers, holding them tightly, knowing he relived the moment—his worst nightmare. “The coachman?”
“Well. Miraculously well.”
“Thank God.”
“But you could have been killed,” he repeated.
She pressed his hands to her cheeks. “I am quite alive.”
“I nearly lost you,” he said, the words quiet and devastating. “And then, just as I discovered you weren’t in the coach—that you were alive, I lost you again.”
She released him and took a deep breath, stepping away from the words. From their truth. “You sent me away.”
He reached for her. “Sophie—”
She stepped back. “I told you that I loved you, and you sent me away.”