“No, you do not!”
He kept coming after her.
She held out an arm. “Stay where you are, sir!”
“If only you’ll let me embrace you, Lady Magnificent. I can convince you that—” His eyes widened, his steps faltered, his head craned up to above Maggie’s head. “Mr. Blake,” he said with a shaky voice.
“The hunting party left earlier this morning, Pellham. There’s no hunting to be done in the gardens.” Mr. Blake’s voice rumbled behind her with clear warning.
Maggie craned her neck up instead of turning around and lost her balance. She fell a step backward and bumped into a hard, warm wall of male body. An arm snaked around her waist, steadying her.
“I hear you’re a good shot, Pellham,” Mr. Blake said, “but lousy with fisticuffs. I’m good at both. Too bad we’ve no guns about our persons.”
“Are … are you challenging me to a duel?”
This time Maggie did turn to see Mr. Blake’s expression.
He cocked his head to the side, as if considering Marcus’s question. “I do have quite the reputation for calling out men who threaten my women. In fact, the last man to threaten my sister now lives, oh, where was it?” He waved his hand in the air as if the location hardly signified. “Canada? No matter. Someplace wild. And far away.”
“Yourwoman?” Marcus’s eyes flickered from Mr. Blake back to Maggie. “But I thought … I’d heard,” he gulped, “she’s ruined. You ruined her. And you did not propose.”
“Only lack of learning ruins a woman,” Mr. Blake said, and Maggie had the distinct impulse to hug him to her tight. “Now leave us be.”
Marcus nodded, then Marcus fled.
How wonderful! Yet … she turned to face Mr. Blake. How annoying. “I was getting rid of him. You didn’t have to come to my rescue.”
“Oh? How did you plan on saving yourself? Interpret last night’s dreams?” His eyes glanced at the notebook abandoned on the bench. “Sketch him away?”
She scowled and whipped her notebook behind her back.
He grinned. “You’re too tiny to do damage to his person. You’d have to break his heart, instead.”
“Thank you, Mr. Blake, for getting rid of an annoyance.Youmay leave now.” She sat back on her bench, hiding the notebook in the folds of her skirt. She should hide the cursed thing for good, in her bedroom or elsewhere. But the thought of someone discovering it accidentally sent tears straight to her eyes. Best to keep it safely on her person at all times.
He sat next to her, but further from her than Marcus had sat, giving her room. “It’s odd,” he said, “that I should find you being propositioned by another man when I sought you out to make a proposition of my own.” He stretched an arm across the back of the bench and leaned toward her. “What were you sketching? Or not sketching. Where’s your pencil?”
She clutched the notebook tighter. “I don’t know.” She looked up, down, on either side, in the dirt under the bench. “I’ve lost it.”
“Here it is.” Mr. Blake reached for her, his knuckles almost brushed her cheek as he pushed his long fingers through her hair to cup the back of her skull and pull a pencil from her chignon. He held it out to her. “Here.”
“I don’t remember putting it there.”
“You were, I assume, busy with more pressing matters, namely fending off an overzealous second-rate novelist.”
“You don’t like Marcus’s work?”
“Ha. He’s no Shakespeare.”
“Shakespeare isn’t a novelist.”
Mr. Blake shrugged. “He’d have been a good one if he’d wanted to be.”
She suppressed a laugh. “If novels had been about in Shakespeare’s time, I’ve no doubt, sir. Why are you here, Mr. Blake? You said something about a proposition?”
“Why do you call the second-rate novelist Marcus but me Mr. Blake?”
“Because I was actually introduced to him and have had several conversations with him in the last two weeks. You, I met officially two days ago. You, I talked to for the first time two days ago and under what most people in polite society would consider scandalous circumstances.”
