“On three,” she said.
“Aye.”
She waited. The horses thundered on. No one spoke. Finally she realized—
“I meant foryouto count!”
“For Christ’s sake, woman! One—two—thr—”
Lydia cut the strap.
As Strathrannoch had predicted, her horse shot forward, outstripping the earl and his mount. Her fingers ached from clutching the horse’s mane, and her throat burned from—
Oh. She was screaming.
She made herself stop. She wrenched herself forward and dropped the dirk, trying not to fall, trying to get herself turned back around and able to ride. Georgiana was safe. She would be fine. She just needed to grab the bloody reins and—
She had them—she almost had them. She was half turned, the stirrups slapping against her feet and her hair whipping around her eyes, when the horse realized it was free and plunged sideways, toward the center of the road.
She felt herself slip to one side. Her hand scrabbled for the saddle, the reins,anything—
And then Strathrannoch was there at her side, heedless of her horse’s erratic flight. He was well above her on his enormous black, and he reached down toward her and wrapped one powerful arm about her waist.
“Are you caught in the stirrups?” he shouted.
“I—no—”
Before the word was fully out of her mouth, Strathrannoch flexed his arm at the elbow and dragged her up and into his chest.
Her face smashed against thin linen and, beneath it, a rock-solid pectoral muscle. She felt his arms rippling as he clutched her close and sawed at the reins with his other hand, urging hishorse to slow, pulling them off the road and into the trees that flanked it.
“For God’s sake, woman!” Strathrannoch bellowed in her ear. “I have you! Stop screaming!”
Oh. She hadn’t realized she’d started again.
She forced the screams back down and turned her head just in time to see the zebras blow past them in a blur of black and white. She smelled the mud from the road and animal sweat, and also the scent of the man who held her: smoke and earth and burnt honey.
“Georgiana,” she mumbled into his shirt. “The carriage.”
“Aye, aye, dinna fash—”
Dinna fash?Had the man not realized she was composed primarily of worry? She clutched his shirt in one hand and dragged herself up to look over his shoulder as his mount finally came to a halt beneath the canopy of oaks.
Good heavens, her horse had covered a lot of ground. Georgiana was yards back, the carriage halted just off the road and well out of range of the passing zebras. She was, as far as Lydia could tell, already on her feet and busily attempting to detach the remaining horse from its harness. Bacon was on the ground, charging alternately at the zebras and a tall stalk of grass.
Lydia’s horse, meanwhile, had spun about and was making its way back toward Strathrannoch Castle. Rather than running from the oncoming zebras, it appeared to havejoinedthem.
“Traitor,” she mumbled.
“What?”
“Nothing,” she said, and then she looked up into Strathrannoch’s face.
He was looking down at her. His face was set in a scowl, andthough the goldish stubble might have disguised it when she was on the ground and he was looming a full head above her, she could see now that the line of his jaw was hard and sharp and precise.
Nothing about his face was soft. Even his eyes—gold around the pupil, surrounded by blue and green—were hard as they bore down upon her.
Her lips parted. His gaze dropped to her mouth.
