“I asked if you were feeling better.”
“Yes. No.” She grimaced. “Yes, I feel better. I’m sorry, I’m rather tired.” Deliriously tired seemed more fitting, given that she was daydreaming about ravishing Mr. McAlistair in the woods. How extraordinarily absurd.
Well, perhaps the woods bit wasn’t entirely absurd, but the rest was several degrees, several dozen degrees, beyond ridiculous.
“I’d like to get up.” She didn’t wait for his agreement, and he didn’t argue, but when she moved to stand, he put a restraining hand on her shoulder.
“Sit. Rest.”
“I’d like to, but…that is, I’ve need…” She waggled her finger at a thick clutch of trees.
“To take a walk?”
“What? No.” She dropped her hand. “Well, in a way. I’ve been on a horse for hours, Mr. McAlistair. I require a moment of privacy.”
“Ah.” He straightened. “Do you need help?”
Help? “With what?”
“Standing. Walking.”
“Oh.” Oh, she dearly hoped not. She wiggled her toes experimentally, pushed her heel down and felt the pull up to her hip. “No, thank you. I believe I can manage.”
Please, please, let her manage.
She accepted his offered hand, but let go with a great rush of relief when she found she could stand on her own without difficulty. Her leg was still tender and likely would ache for days. But she could feel her leg, put weight on it, and place one foot in front of the other, all of which meant she could take her moment of privacy without assistance.
Thank heavens.
“Don’t go far,” McAlistair advised.
“I rather doubt I could.”
She hobbled into the woods and muddled through the process of seeing to her needs out-of-doors. There were times, she groused to herself as she righted her skirts, that a woman should be allowed to wear breeches, or at least fewer, and preferably shorter, layers of fabric.
When she returned, several minutes later, she found McAlistair lifting a satchel from the back of his horse.
Curious, she wandered closer. “What are you doing?”
He spared her a single assessing glance. “Unpacking. You’re well?”
“Yes, of course.” She waved the question away, more than ready to be done with the subject of her health. “Why are you unpacking?”
“We’ll camp here.”
“Here? In the woods?” Evie looked around. Why she bothered, she didn’t know.
“You like the woods,” he pointed out, reminding her that he knew a great deal more about her than she did of him.
“I like walking in the woods, not sleeping in them.”
“Have you ever tried?”
“I have, actually. I snuck out of Haldon when I was fifteen and made a camp in the woods for a night.”
He stopped what he was doing to look at her. “You didn’t care for it?”
She’d loved it, and not only because it was forbidden and therefore appealing. She’d lain under an old Scots pine and listened to the trees creaking in the wind while the smell of the outdoors filled her lungs. Her last thought as she’d drifted off had been that sneaking out to sleep in the woods was quite the finest idea she’d ever had.
Her next had been that it was the worst. She’d woken midway through the night in terrible pain, her leg cramping mercilessly in protest of the hard ground.
She could only imagine how she would fare after a ride like the one she’d just endured.
“Evie?”
“I…couldn’t we press on? There’s light left yet.”
“You need rest.”
So very true, and so very irritating. “I’m not one of the horses. And I thought you were worried someone was chasing us.”
“Good a time as any to make a stand.”
She felt her lips twitch. “I’ll assume that’s another joke, though it marks you as a man who prefers quantity over quality.”
“Out of practice,” he reminded her. “Answer my question.”
She bit her lip—more in an effort to stop herself from commenting on his high-handed order than an act of nerves—and shifted her feet, which was, she was forced to admit, very much an act of nerves. How many times would they both have to be reminded of her infirmity in one day?
“Evie.”
She shifted again, then capitulated. What was a little more lost pride? “Yes, I enjoyed sleeping in the woods…but my leg did not. May we move on now? I—”
“Did you take care where you placed your bedding?”
“Well, of course. I brought a blanket and cleared a space of rocks. I’m not a fool.”
He shook his head. “There are ways to make a spot more comfortable for sleeping. Pine boughs, grass, even leaves can soften the ground.”
“Oh.” She frowned a little. “No, I didn’t think of that. I didn’t know.”
“How would you?”