“Are you hurt?” Kinvarra asked, casting a quick eye over him.
“No, I thank you, sir.” The effete blond fellow turned back to the carriage. “Come, darling. Let me assist you.”
A graceful black-gloved hand extended from inside and a cloaked woman emerged with more aplomb than Kinvarra would have believed possible in the circumstances. Indications were that neither traveler was injured, so he concentrated on the trapped horse. When he spoke soothingly to the terrified beast, it quieted to panting stillness, exhausted with thrashing. While Kinvarra checked its legs, murmuring calm assurances, the stranger helped the lady up to the roadside.
The horse shook itself and with a few ungainly jumps, ascended the bank to trot along the road toward its partner. Neither animal seemed to suffer worse than fright, a miracle considering that the curricle was beyond repair.
“Madam, are you injured?” Kinvarra asked as he climbed the ditch. He stuck his riding crop under his arm and brushed his gloved hands together to knock the clinging snow from them. It was a hellishly cold night. Christmas tomorrow would be a chilly affair. But then of course his Christmases had been chilly for years, no matter the weather.
The woman kept her head down. With shock? With shyness? For the sake of propriety? Perhaps he’d stumbled on some elopement or clandestine meeting.
“Madam?” he asked again, more sharply. Whatever her fear of scandal, he needed to know if she required medical assistance.
“Sweeting?” The yellow-haired fop bent to peer into the shadows cast by her hood. “Are you sure you’re unharmed? Speak, my dove. Your silence troubles my soul.”
While Kinvarra digested the man’s outlandish phrasing, the woman stiffened and drew away. “For heaven’s sake, Harold, you’re not giving a recitation at a musicale.” With an impatient gesture, she flung back her hood and glared straight at Kinvarra.
Even though he’d identified her the moment she spoke, he found himself staring dumbstruck into her face. A piquant, vivid, pointed face under an untidy tumble of luxuriant gold hair.
Furious and incredulous, he wheeled on the milksop. “What the devil are you doing with my wife?”
***
Alicia Sinclair, Countess of Kinvarra, was bruised, angry, uncomfortable, and agonizingly embarrassed. Not to mention suffering the aftereffects of her choking terror when the toppling carriage had tossed her around like a pebble in a torrent.
Even so, her heart lurched into the wayward dance it always performed at the merest sight of Sebastian.
She’d been married for eleven miserable years. Their short interval living as man and wife had been wretched. She disliked her husband more than any other man in the world. But nothing prevented her gaze from clinging to every line of that narrow, intense face with its high cheekbones, long, arrogant nose and sharply angled jaw. He looked older than the last time she’d seen him, more cynical if that was possible. But still handsome, still compelling, still vital in a way nobody else she knew could match.
Damn him to Hades, he remained the most magnificent creature she’d ever seen.
Such a pity his soul was as black as his glittering eyes.
“After all this time, I’m flattered you recognize me, my lord,” she said silkily.
“Lord Kinvarra, this is a surprise,” Harold stammered, faltering back as if anticipating violence. “You must wonder why I accompany the lady—”
Oh, Harold, act the man, even if the hero is beyond your reach. You’re safe. Kinvarra doesn’t care enough about me to kill you.
Although even the most indifferent husband took it ill when his wife chose a lover. And Kinvarra had always suffered an overabundance of pride. There wasn’t the slightest hope that he’d mistake Alicia’s reasons for traveling on this isolated road in the middle of the night. She stifled a rogue pang of guilt.
Curse Kinvarra, she had absolutely nothing to feel guilty about.
“I’ve recalled your existence every quarter these past ten years, my love,” her husband said equally smoothly, ignoring Harold’s dismayed interjection. Although the faint trace of Scottish brogue in Kinvarra’s deep voice indicated that he reined in his temper. His breath formed white clouds on the frigid air. “I’m perforce reminded when I pay your allowance. A substantial investment upon which I receive woefully little return.”
“It warms the cockles of my heart to know that I linger in your thoughts,” she sniped. She refused to cower like a wet hen before his banked anger. He sounded reasonable, calm, controlled, but she had no trouble reading the tension in his broad shoulders or in the way his powerful hands opened and closed at his sides as if he’d dearly like to hit something.
“In faith, my lady, you speak false. Creatures of ice have no use for a heart.” A faint, malicious smile lifted the corners of his mouth. “Should I warn this paltry fellow that he risks frostbite in your company?”
She steeled herself against Kinvarra’s taunting. He couldn’t hurt her now. He hadn’t been able to hurt her since she’d left him. Any twinge was merely the result of temporary shakiness after the accident. That was all. It couldn’t be because this man retained the power to stick needles into her feelings.
“My lord, egad, I protest.” Fortunately, shock made Harold sound less like a frightened sheep. “The lady is your wife. Surely she merits your chivalry at the very least.”
Harold had never seen her in her husband’s company, and some reluctant and completely misplaced loyalty to Kinvarra meant she hadn’t explained why the Sinclairs lived apart. The accepted fiction was that the earl and his countess were polite strangers who by mutual design rarely met.
Poor Harold, he was about to discover the nasty truth that the earl and his countess loathed each other.
“Like hell she does,” Kinvarra muttered, casting her an incendiary glance under long dark eyelashes.