Marrying His Cinderella Countess

There was a heave, a loud and violent curse, and then most of the weight shifted off Blake’s back.

‘I’ve broken my confounded arm. If I can just—Sorry.’ His booted foot ground into Blake’s cheek. ‘Damn difficult with one hand. There—the door’s open.’

More scrabbling, more curses and then light flooded in.

‘Right, can you get out now?’

Warily Blake felt around, got a handhold and levered himself up and away from Ellie. The coach was on its side and she was against the window which, thankfully, had been open, so the glass had not broken.

He got one arm through the open door above him, heaved and was out. Jon looked appalling, his face pale under a mass of blood from the cut to his head and his left hand supporting his right arm, but he seemed alert and otherwise uninjured. Blake pulled him close, looked at his eyes. The pupils were normal, thank God.

‘Are you hurt, Blake?’ Jonathan was looking him over with as much concern.

‘No, just bruises and scrapes. I’ve had a lot worse in Gentleman Jackson’s after a round of sparring. I just hope and pray Eleanor is all right.’ There was total silence from inside the coach. He climbed up and leaned in. ‘Eleanor?’

She lay where he had left her, on her back, her eyes wide, her freckles standing out against her dead white face. ‘Yes. I think so.’

Her voice was a mere whisper.

‘Move your arms and legs,’ he ordered, suddenly convinced that he must have broken her spine, crushing her like that. And what had it done to her crippled leg?

Obediently she moved her hands and feet, then sat up. ‘Nothing is broken.’

‘Then take my hands.’ He lay down flat and reached in. ‘Try and stand as I pull.’ Behind him he could hear horses, raised voices. ‘Help is here.’

There was the merest hesitation before she reached up. He took her wrists and pulled, his bruised body screaming in protest, and she came up, using her legs without any sign of pain, out of the door until she could slide onto solid ground.

Blake got to her just as she folded neatly and quietly into a dead faint.

*

She hurt all over. That was the first thing she was conscious of. Then it all came back—even before she opened her eyes. The terrifying lurch and slide, the impact, the falling bodies and the blow to the head that had stunned her. And then coming back to herself in the gloom to find a man’s body plastered to hers—intimately, heavily, his hands on her shoulders, hi

s face against her cheek, his breath hot on her face, his…maleness all too evident.

Ellie’s eyes flew open. It was daylight. Above her was a ceiling, beneath her a comfortable bed. And someone was in the room with her. She sat up too fast, and almost whimpered at the pain from her bruises. Blake was sitting on a chair in the far corner of the room.

‘Eleanor?’ His face was marked, scraped and discoloured.

That was who had been on top of her. Blake. She had fought him, beaten at him, struggled as he’d lain helpless. Injured. Goodness knew what she had said to him.

‘I am so sorry. So sorry I hit you. I panicked.’

‘No. Don’t apologise.’ He got to his feet, then sat down abruptly. ‘I shouldn’t be in your room, but I needed to make sure you were all right. In the carriage, when you were trapped beneath me, you panicked—and it was not because of the accident…it was because a man was pinning you down. I am sorry, it must have been terrifying, and there was nothing I could do until Jonathan managed to get out.’

She shook her head. ‘It is no matter.’

‘But it is. It put you in fear. Who was it, Eleanor? Who made someone as brave as you feel like that?’

She winced at the word. He thought her brave? How little he knew. All she had done was to pick herself up and somehow limp on.

‘No one.’

Blake made a gesture—the abrupt, impatient gesture of a man used to getting his own way, to getting answers when he asked. She saw him catch himself doing it, saw the care with which he clasped those long fingers together and sat back in the chair, consciously making himself unthreatening.

‘You flinch when a man touches you,’ he said, his voice neutral, as though he was describing the view from the window. ‘You move in a room so that you always have an escape route. You lock your door at night even when you share the room with your maid and you are in a private area. You reacted in terror to the feel of a man’s body pressed to yours—overpowering you, it must have seemed. Who was it?’

Probably spontaneous combustion by blushing was impossible, but it did not feel so just at that moment. Ellie tried to get the memory his body against hers as they lay pressed together in the carriage out of her mind.