It was not as though having the leisure to observe an athletically built gentleman in well-cut breeches was in any way a hardship, of course. Even the fact that the horses available from the posting stations were far below the standard Rhys would normally ride in no way diminished the sight, for it only showed his skill to advantage. As a boy and a young man he had been gangly. Now he had filled out and most of it appeared to be well-coordinated muscle. What did a gentleman do to keep fit, she wondered, other than bed sport? Sporting pursuits, she supposed, firmly instructing her imagination to cover that body with clothing.
A modest gentlewoman would not stare, let alone permit speculation to run wild through her daydreams. Which doubtless meant that she fell far short of the standards of breeding expected of her. Thea contemplated this lowering conclusion for a moment, then decided that she did not care.
Rhys’s amorous interest was fixed, as it had always been, on curvaceous, tall, blue-eyed blondes of a coming disposition, and he would be thoroughly embarrassed to discover that his childhood friend had rediscovered the youthful attraction that—thank Heavens!—he had been blind to before.
The problem now was that the innocent adoration of her fourteen-year-old self had been replaced by the more mature understanding of a curious and uninhibited young lady. She understood what her body wanted and she was coming to regret, very much, that it was not going to experience it.
Still, it did no harm to fantasise. She was sure now that she was not going to find a man to love and who would love her in return, which meant she was not prepared to marry, even if Papa did find her and drag her back.
Thea stamped on the stirring of panic and made herself think of the present. If she did not marry, then that inexorably led her to the conclusion that she was never going to know what it would be like to lie naked with a man. She could not find the slightest shame in her for wishing to experience lovemaking, not after her experience with Sir Anthony. But it was certainly inconvenient for her composure that, if she had to choose a gentleman from a fairly wide acquaintance for the experiment, it had to be this one.
The vine-clad slopes of the Côte d’Or rolled past to the right of the chaise. The stop at Beaune for a change of horses had been regrettably short. The town had looked intriguing and the vast, bustling market colourful and exotic, but Rhys wanted to reach Lyon that evening, for some reason. When she had asked him the reason for his haste he’d simply closed his lips into an implacable line and strode off to talk to Tom Felling, the coach driver.
The horse Rhys had chosen at the livery stables was rather better than the previous one, Thea mused, her attention drawn back from the passing scene to the rider on the wide grass verge. He guided his mount to the side to jump a fallen tree and her breath caught at the fluid beauty of man and animal as they cleared the obstacle.
How would his skin slide under her hands—like silk or would it feel more like kidskin? How would his weight be, over her? He was so much larger than she was that it must be a matter of technique, she supposed. How would it feel when he sheathed himself within her? Would it hurt? Probably, it had with Anthony. She was less clear what happened then in bed, when lovemaking was a leisurely matter of mutual pleasure giving—movement, obviously, with that hard, strong body and her own soft, lesser strength somehow finding a rhythm and a unity.
She had seen Rhys naked as a child, swimming in the lake, but a man’s body was different. Did he have a hairy chest? Would that chafe against her breasts or tickle? They tingled at the thought. She would run her fingertips through—
‘Whoa!’ From behind, Tom Felling shouted at his team. The chaise juddered and skidded as the postilions reined back their horses and Thea jerked her attention to the window at the front and the view beyond the be-capped boys and their waving whips.
A diligence, one of the lumbering French stagecoaches, had overturned, its bulk teetering over the deep ditch that bordered the road. In the road half a dozen passengers seemed stunned with shock and the driver and guard were struggling with the team as they thrashed in panic in the tangled traces.
Thea pushed open the door and jumped down as Rhys dismounted, shouting at the postilions, ‘Hold our horses. Felling, go and help them free the team.’ He saw her. ‘Thea, get back in the chaise, this is no place for you.’
‘I will do no such thing. There are people hurt.’ She ran to help a stout woman to her feet, then pulled off the fichu around her neck to hold to the forehead of a slender young man who was slumped against the bank, blood pouring down his face. This is no time to have missish vapours about blood, she told herself firmly, swallowing hard.
‘It is just a cut,’ she began in English. ‘They always bleed dramatically from the head. Oh, pardon, c’est—’
‘I am English,’ he said faintly and lifted his hand to hold the pad in place. ‘Thank you, ma’am. I will do well enough. Please, see if anyone else is in need of your help.’
A young woman was screaming, in shock more than pain, Thea thought as she ran to her. Then she saw the girl was pointing a trembling finger towards the wide ditch. ‘Mon fils, mon fils!’
The diligence had been stopped from sliding down only by the spokes of one broken wheel and a scrubby thorn bush growing up from the side of the drain. It was slowly collapsing under the weight, the wheel making ominous cracking noises.
For a moment Thea could not see what the girl was panicking about, then she heard a faint wail and saw movement from a bundle of white cloth in the mud, directly under the collapsing carriage.
‘Rhys! There is a baby!’
‘I see it.’ He slid down into the ditch, ducked under the edge of the coach and braced his back to it, his feet dug into the bank. The cracking stopped, but how much longer could he hold it? Thea scrambled down at the other end and crouched to look. The veins stood out of Rhys’s forehead, his hands were white where the load pressed down, his body was bent double like Atlas under the weight of the globe. She wriggled closer and grabbed for the baby in the narrow space.
‘Get out,’ Rhys hissed between gritted teeth. ‘I don’t know how long I can hold this.’
‘You can hold it,’ she said, utterly confident as she got onto her stomach and wormed closer. This was Rhys: in that moment she trusted him to hold the world up if lives depended on him. Her fingers touched, gripped, pulled. The baby howled as she dragged him towards her. The wheel slid down with a jerk, Rhys cursed, shifted and it stopped.
There was movement at her feet, someone trod on her leg, apologised in English. ‘Sorry. Can you slide out under me?’ It was the injured Englishman, supporting the other end of the coach.
Thea wormed her way back with all the speed she could muster.
‘She’s out!’ the Englishman shouted as hands reached down to haul her and her burden up the bank.
‘Then roll free, this is about to go,’ Rhys called, his voice strained to the point of being almost unrecognisable. ‘On my mark. One, two, three—’
The young man landed in an ungainly heap in a patch of nettles as Thea thrust the baby into the arms of its sobbing mother and the diligence subsided into the ditch with the sound of splintering wood. ‘Rhys!’
It seemed to take minutes, not seconds, to reach the side of the coach he had been supporting. Now he lay clear of it, on his back in the mud, eyes closed, hands bleeding, face white. Thea hurled herself down beside him and pressed her ear to his chest. Surely he hadn’t broken his neck?
Under her hands she felt him drag air down to his diaphragm. Not dead, then. ‘Rhys! Rhys, wake up.’
‘Thea?’ He seemed to come to with a jolt and she scrambled to her knees as he reached for her, his eyes opening wide and dark in his pale face, his grip on her wrists painful. ‘You aren’t hurt?’
‘No, just terribly muddy. I thought you were under that when it fell.’ She collapsed back onto his chest and hugged as much as she could of him.
‘Mmm,’ Rhys murmured. ‘Much as I appreciate being cuddled, I prefer not to be sinking into the mire at the same time. I seem to be squashing a frog.’
‘Idiot! I thought... I feared...’
‘Don’t you dare cry on me,’ he said mildly. ‘How do you think I felt when I saw you wriggling into that death trap, you madcap creature?’
Thea got to her feet, trying not to tread on him. He was battered enough without squashing what breath remained in him. ‘Well, who else did you think was going to go in?’ she said belligerently to cover her reaction. ‘The passengers were too shocked or too large. Are you hurt?’
Rhys sat up, winced and uncoiled himself from the ditch. ‘Other than feeling as though our esteemed Prince Regent has been sitting on me, and kicking while he was at it, I am perfectly all right.’
Thea repressed the urge to fuss. ‘I’ll see how the Englishman is, then. He had a nasty cut to the head before he joined us in the ditch.’
She found him retrieving his baggage from the piles strewn along the road. ‘Sir? Should you be on your feet?’
He had tied her fichu into a lopsided bandage which gave his pleasant, regular features an alarmingly piratical cast at odds with his severe pallor, and he was moving with great care as though all his joints hurt. Which, she supposed, they did.