The Wagered Miss Winslow Read Online Free

in it before tying the bag to the rope that spanned her waist. “I’ve never yet met a man who used his head for anything more than a convenient place to hang his hat. Mollie, we must be going.”
    She had just reached the pony cart—Mollie trailing behind her, still watching the curricle, her bottom lip tucked behind her top teeth—when the inevitable happened. Rosalind turned at the sound of splintering wood as one of the equipage’s wheels slipped into a rut, to watch as man and curricle parted company, the curricle dragging the spirited pair of bays to an abrupt halt while the ground performed that same service for the driver. “Good,” she said, satisfied. “Where did he think he was, on one of the King’s turnpikes? Come on, Mollie, I suppose, as good Christians, we must make sure he has not broken any bones.”
    Now, Rosalind wasn’t a cruel person, truly she wasn’t. She just didn’t have time to waste on fools, and the man driving a curricle neck-or-nothing over these sad country lanes certainly could not be classified as a person of superior intellect, at least not in her book.
    Besides, she had already cut it too fine, her earlier daydreaming leaving her barely enough time to return to Winslow Manor, clean up her dirt, and present herself in the drawing room for tea. Riggs would be most disapproving, poor fellow. He suffered in silence (when he was not apologizing for her lapses, as if he had caused them), this man who felt he labored beneath the weight of the entire earth. But it certainly put one off one’s food to watch his herculean struggle to perform his duties whenever he considered himself to be wounded by one of those “slings and arrows of outrageous fortune” that Shakespeare referred to so eloquently.
    While Mollie ran ahead, her skirts inelegantly lifted above her ankles, Rosalind strolled leisurely toward the downed man, for she had seen him move one of his legs, which assured her that he was not dead. That was good. A wounded man was bad enough, surely. A dead man would be totally insupportable!
    She noticed that the pair of bays was standing quietly, having found some tender grass to munch on, and obviously not hurt, for all their master’s imbecility. Passing them by, and giving only a cursory look to the broken wheel, she at last came to the man, who had recovered sufficiently by this time to be sitting upright in the lane, an embarrassed smile on his face as he rubbed at the side of his head.
    “He’s fine, miss,” Mollie informed her, beaming as if she had been personally responsible for the man’s recovery from his spill. “Says his name is Mr. Remington. Beaumont Remington. But he might be foreign. I heard him say a couple o’ words I ain’t never heared before—and I don’t think they were very pretty either.”
    Dear Mollie. Living as she was in the company of women—except for Riggs, of course, although he truly did not count—she had not been exposed to the rough words a man might use when he felt his sensibilities had been abused. “Thank you, my dear,” Rosalind said, stifling a smile for, even if she also had not been privy to such manly language more than a time or two in her life, she had a fairly clear idea of what Remington had said. “You may go to the horses now, if you please, just in case they belatedly decide to take exception to the cavalier treatment they have been forced to suffer from their cow-handed driver.”
    “Cavalier, is it?” questioned Beau, just now sitting on his rump (and the majority of his dignity) in the roadway, cocking his head in her direction, feeling tolerably amused. Now here was a woman who didn’t mince words, he decided, looking up at her. Bridget would adore her. “Now, is that nice?”
    “Probably not. And you forgot, I said you were cow-handed as well,” Rosalind said, offering him her hand so that he might rise. “Or did that insult travel safely over your head?”
    Miss Rosalind Winslow was not quite the