For a second she thought the wheel had simply slipped into a rut, but then the lurch became a slide and the carriage tipped. There was a shout from the coachman, Polly’s piercing shriek, hands reaching for her—and then the world turned upside down as the whole vehicle fell over and all went black.
*
‘Stop screaming!’ Blake rasped, and the girl wedged against his side subsided into terrified gulps. Where the hell was Eleanor? Her silence was worse than the maid’s panic. ‘Polly? Polly, listen to me. I can’t turn over—something is on my back. Can you look up? Can you see the door?’
‘Yes…yes, my lord.’
‘Are you injured? Can you move? Climb out?’
‘It hurts…’ The whimper turned into a determined sniff. ‘Not anything broken, I don’t think. I can try. It’s Mr Wilton, my lord, over your back. He’s unconscious and his head’s bleeding.’ She sniffed again and her voice wavered. ‘Not…not spurting, my lord. I’ll try and wriggle past him.’
Blake braced himself against the pain the wriggling inflicted on him—the foot against his cheekbone, the pressure on his right shoulder that already felt as though it was on fire, the strain on his half-healed bullet wound.
Then Polly called, ‘I’m out, my lord.’
There were voices—she was talking to someone. Help would come. He made himself think—which was difficult with Jonathan’s dead weight pressing down on him.
Not dead, remember, he reassured himself. He’s bleeding, but not badly.
They must have slid down almost twenty feet of steep bank, he reckoned. But Eleanor…
She had been on his left side. Then he realised that the soft, yielding surface he was pressed down into was Eleanor’s body, and they were lying as close as lovers, as intimately as lovers, his pelvis wedged into the cradle of her thighs, his chest against her breasts.
Thank God—she’s breathing, he thought, his nose pressed into a mass of springing, lavender-scented hair. She smells delicious… She’s alive.
‘Eleanor, hang on—help is coming.’
For a moment he thought she was unconscious, and then—so suddenly that he jerked his head, banging it hard against something wooden—she heaved under him like a trapped, netted deer.
‘Get off me! Get off, get off, get off…!’
She sounded like a woman in a nightmare, fighting for her life, desperate, frantic.
‘Eleanor, it is me—Blake. I can’t move off you. I am sorry, but we’re trapped—just for a little while. Eleanor, lie still until help comes.’
He kept talking—repetition, reassurance, nonsense. She kept struggling. And then suddenly, with a sob that might have been sheer exhaustion, she lay still.
‘I can’t,’ she whispered. ‘Can’t fight…’
‘You don’t have to, Eleanor,’ he said, and found he was whispering too. ‘Don’t try and fight. Help will be here soon.’
Would it? It was very quiet outside. What if Polly had got out and then collapsed? Or Frederick, his coachman, was too badly injured to go for help? What if the horses were dead or had bolted?
Stop it. This is a well-travelled road. Someone will find us soon.
He scrabbled with his fingertips, found wood and braced himself, lifting his weight half an inch off Eleanor’s body.
‘I’ll make certain you get out safely,’ he promised.
Beneath him he could feel her vibrating like a taut wire, and he remembered a leveret he had found when he was a boy, lying still as death in its form in a wheat field. It had stared at him with the huge, mad eyes that hares had, but it hadn’t moved. Only when he’d lain his hand on it he’d been able to feel its heart pounding, feel the shivering vibration that racked it.
He had snatched his hand away, backed into the wheat until he had no longer been able to see it. But he could not stop touching Ellie, and before much longer he was not going to be able to support himself away from her body either.
‘Blake?’ The voice in his ear was puzzled. ‘What the hell happened?’
‘Jon!’ The relief that he was well enough to speak was almost physical. ‘We went over the bank. Polly scrambled out and I heard her speaking to someone, but that was perhaps half an hour ago. Eleanor is trapped beneath me and I can’t move.’
‘Not surprising with me on top. Hold on. The damn writing case has landed on my gut. Sorry—this is taking an age. I’ve been out of it for a bit—must have banged my head.’