One Unashamed Night Read Free Page B

minutes from here and you look as if you may not be able to stand the journey.’
    ‘What of the old Smith barn?’ the other yelled. ‘The hay is in and the walls are sturdy.’
    ‘Where is it?’ Taris Wellingham sounded tired, the gash on his head still seeping and new worry filled her.
    ‘Five minutes on from here is a path to the left marked with a white stone. Turn there and wait for help. We will send it when we can.’
    When we can? The very thought had Bea’s ire running.
    ‘I cannot…’
    But the others were gone, spurred on by the wind and by need and by the thick white blankets of snow.
    ‘It’s our only chance,’ Taris shouted, a peal of thunder underlining his reason. The next flash of lightning had her horse rearing up and though she managed to remain seated, the jolt worsened the ache of her lip. Tears pooled in her eyes, scalding hot down her cheeks, the only warmth in the frozen waste of the world.
    ‘I’m sorry.’ She saw him looking, his expression so unchanged she knew instantly that he was one of those men who loathed histrionics.
    ‘Look for the pathway, Mrs Bassingstoke. We just need to find the damn barn.’
    Prickly. High-handed. Disdainful.
    Dashing her tears away with the wet velvet of her cloak, she hated the fact that she had shown any man such weakness. Again.
    The path was nowhere. No stone to mark it, no indent where feet might have travelled, no telltale breakage in the hedges to form a track or furrows in the road where carts might have often travelled.
    ‘Are you looking?’
    Lord, this was the fifth time he had asked her that very question and she was running out of patience. She wondered why he had dismounted and was leading his steed, his feet almost in the left-hand ditch on the road. Feeling with his feet. For what? What did he search for? Why did he not just ride, fast in the direction they had been shown?
    She knew the answer even as she mulled it over. It was past five minutes and if they had missed the trail…?
    Suddenly an avenue of trees loomed up.
    ‘Here! It is here!’
    He turned into the wind and waited.
    ‘Where? What do you see?’
    ‘Trees. In a row. Ten yards to the left.’
    The stone was where the travellers had said it would be, but covered in snow it was barely visible, a marker that blended in with its background, alerting no one to the trail it guarded.
    When Taris Wellingham’s feet came against it she saw the way he leant over, brushing the snow from the top in a strangely guarded motion, the tips of his fingers purple with the extreme and bitter cold. The stillness in him was dramatic, caught against the blowing trees and the moving landscape and the billowing swirls of his cloak. A man frozen in just this second of time, the hard planes of his face angled to the heavens as though in prayer.
    Thank the Lord they had found the barn, Taris thought, and squinted against the cold, trying to see the vestige of a pathway, his eyes watering with the effort.
    Beatrice-Maude Bassingstoke’s teeth behind him chattered with an alarming loudness, though she had not spoken to him for the last few moments.
    ‘Are you able to make it to the barn?’ he asked, the concern in his voice mounting.
    ‘O…of c…c…course I c…c…can.’
    ‘If you need any help…?’
    ‘I sh…shan’t.’ Tears were close.
    ‘Are you always so prickly, Mrs Bassingstoke?’ Anger was easier to deal with than distress and with experience Taris had come to the realisation that a bit of annoyance gave women strength.
    But this one was different, her silence punctuated now with sniffs, hidden he supposed by the muffled sound behind the thick velvet of her cloak.
    A woman at the very end of her tether and who could blame her? She had not sat in the coach expecting others to save her or bemoaned the cold or the accident. She had not complained about the deceased passenger or made a fuss when she had had to vacate her seat to allow the driver some space. No, this woman was a