Harry smiled. “Really? You don’t seem sure.”
She threw him a glance—a penetrating dart of blue. Ah, he remembered those eyes. They were the best shade of blue. Not shallow or watery, the way blue eyes could sometimes be—but a rich, cornflower hue that kept a man looking.
“Where are your friends?” he asked.
She ducked under her bonnet again. “If you’ll just come this way.”
They followed her through a smallish gap in the hedgerow, fighting and shoving their way through the grabby branches.
“My sister caught herself on a thorn, you see. And then poor Miss Farnsworth fainted dead away at the sight of blood.”
They emerged to find a scene reminiscent of a Greek tragedy. Two muslin-clad ladies draped across the grass, moaning. Harry probably shouldn’t have been tempted to laugh, but truly. Apparently the “accomplishments” of well-bred young women didn’t include common sense these days. What was England coming to when three ladies tangled with a hedgerow, and only one survived the experience?
At least Miss Eliza Cade was the one left standing.
Two points to the hedgerow, one point to her.
Harry pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and doused it with brandy from his flask before holding it under the unconscious lady’s nose. Miss Farnsworth, was it? Meanwhile, Brentley assessed the elder Miss Cade’s wound.
“How did this happen?” he asked, gingerly poking her arm with a gloved finger.
“Bad luck,” she answered, wincing. “And inattention. I was reading.”
“Reading this?” Brentley plucked a small volume from the grass. He smiled upon reading the title. “Shakespeare. How fitting. ‘Is love a tender thing? It is too rough. Too rude, too boisterous, and it pricks like thorn.’”
Oh, if Miss Cade felt any pain, Harry could see it was all forgotten at that moment.
“‘If love be rough with you, be rough with love,’” she recited back to him. “‘Prick love for pricking—’”
“‘And you beat love down,’” they finished together.
The two smiled at each other—sweet smiles, just sticky with treacly, poetic emotion.
Harry felt he’d be sick. The last thing Brentley needed was a summer romance—especially not a romance with a dewy-eyed poet who, for all her reading, couldn’t outsmart the average hedgerow. Romeo and Juliet were just as idiotic, and look how that had turned out.
He’d put a stop to this. Here and now.
Harry rose to his feet. “Here’s what we should do. Brentley’s coach is following with our things. It’ll pass this way soon. Brentley, you wait here with Miss Farnsworth. Perhaps she’ll have come to herself by then, or else the footmen can help put her inside the coach. I’ll drive Miss Cade back to Farnsworth Hall in the phaeton. She needs a surgeon’s attention, and it’s the fastest way.”
Brentley nodded. “That makes the most sense. What about Miss Eliza?”
“The phaeton will seat three. Miss Eliza may have her choice. Come along with her sister, or wait here with you.”
He watched her wrestling with that devil’s choice—weighing the unpleasantness of time spent with Harry against the danger of leaving such a scoundrel alone with her sister.
“I must go with Philippa,” she finally said, resigned.
He’d known she would.
They found a larger gap in the hedgerow this time, and Harry helped them up into the phaeton seat. They situated the elder Miss Cade on the outer edge, so that the rail wouldn’t bounce against her injured arm. Harry, of course, took the other side—which meant Miss Eliza must squeeze in the middle.
Miss Eliza Cade, with her new womanly hips, her impatient blue eyes, her honeysuckle scent…and her enormous, rings-of-Saturn bonnet.
“You’ve grown up since we last met,” he murmured, confident her sister could not hear over the noise of hoofbeats.
“And you’ve sunk lower, I understand,” she replied, without turning to look at him. “The duke’s cut you off without a penny. Everyone knows it. I suppose Brentley is the only soul kind enough to take you in.”
Ouch.
She was right, of course. The duke had cut him off, and everyone did know it. But it wasn’t a surprise. Harry was only the heir because of some quirk of bloodlines and infertility generations in the past. They’d never been close.
It wasn’t the barb in her words that needled him, but the primness in her voice and posture. And that bonnet. That damned, enormous bonnet that kept gouging him in the neck.
So, he thought. They’d gotten her, too. Seeing as how she alone had escaped the Hedgerow of Doom, he’d thought perhaps Eliza Cade hadn’t succumbed to the plague of blandness that seemed to claim every Englishwoman by the age of twenty or so.