Why the sight affected her so, she couldn't understand-men's bare torsos, viewed from childhood in the fields and forge, had never before made it difficult to breathe. Then again, she couldn't recall seeing a chest quite like her rescuer's before.

He glanced back. "How did you come to be in the lane alone?" He paused, shifted the youth in his arms, then strode on.

"I wasn't exactly alone," Honoria explained to his back. "I was returning from the village in the gig. I saw the storm coming and thought to take a shortcut."

"The gig?"

"When I saw the body I went to investigate. At the first thunderclap, the horse bolted."

"Ah."

Honoria narrowed her eyes. She hadn't seen him glance heavenward, but she knew he had. "It wasn't my knot that came undone. The branch I tied the reins to broke."

He glanced her way; while his face was expressionless, his lips were no longer perfectly straight. "I see."

The most noncommittal two words she had ever heard. Honoria scowled at his infuriating back, and trudged on in awful silence. Despite his burden, he was forging ahead; in her kid half boots, not designed for rough walking, she slipped and slid trying to keep up. Unfortunately, with the storm building by the second, she couldn't hold the pace he was setting against him.

The disgruntled thought brought her mentally up short. From the instant of encountering her rescuer, she'd been conscious of irritation, a ruffling of her sensibilities. He'd been abrupt, distinctly arrogant-quite impossible in some ill-defined way. Yet he was doing what needed to be done, quickly and efficiently. She ought to be grateful.

Negotiating a tangle of exposed tree roots, she decided it was his assumption of command that most irked-she had not before met anyone with his degree of authority, as if it was his unquestionable right to lead, to order, and to be obeyed. Naturally, being who she was, used to being obeyed herself, such an attitude did not sit well.