Madeleine ignored the small voice in her heart that rejoiced at the idea of a broken engagement.

“Break off my engagement?” Braddon was clearly appalled. He clutched Maddie a little closer, thinking of his mother’s wrath. Then he sat up.

“I have it! I need to really break my leg! I’ll fall off a horse. Then all I have to do is get someone to fetch Sophie off that damned ladder and bring her over to my house, and she’ll see the plaster. She can’t blame me once she sees the evidence.”

Madeleine sighed. Truly, her English lord needed someone to take care of him.

“Don’t be such a bumble-brain! You can’t break your leg as easily as all that.”

“Yes, I can,” Braddon retorted. “I broke my left leg when I was a young nipper, and the doctor told me to go easy, because it would break again as easy as look at it. I reckon all I’d have to do is fall off a horse on the left, and keep that leg under me, and I’d be sure to break it again.”

Madeleine’s heart chilled. “It would probably not heal properly, and you’d be left with a permanent limp. Then Lady Sophie wouldn’t want you anyway.”

“You think so?”

“Ladies all like to dance,” Madeleine said with the certainty of someone who had no recollection of ever meeting a true lady. “No lady would ever marry a man who had a limp and couldn’t dance.”

“Oh.”

Madeleine found, to her disgust, that she couldn’t resist the disconsolate note in Braddon’s voice. “I could give you an adhesive plaster,” she stated baldly.

“What on earth do you mean?” Braddon had given up thinking about elopements and was nuzzling Madeleine’s delicate ear with his lips, for all the world like Gracie the horse.

“We have all the materials here … for when a horse needs an ankle splint. I could give you a plaster and everyone would believe that you had broken your leg.”

Braddon whooped and gave her an exuberant squeeze. “That’s my Maddie!”

When Madeleine turned her head to shush him into silence, Braddon captured her mouth, and it was quite a while before they got down to business. But forty minutes later Braddon had suffered the slicing of his best breeches up the side, protesting only a little about Kesgrave’s inevitable reaction, and Madeleine had wound a quite reasonable-looking plaster around his lower left leg.

There was an embarrassing bit, to Maddie’s mind, when Braddon refused to let her see his bare leg and insisted on winding the first layer himself. But then she got revenge by slapping on enough plaster of paris to brace the ankle of an elephant.

In fact, by the time Braddon hopped out of the stables, supporting himself on Madeleine’s shoulder, he felt as if he truly had injured his leg.

“Do you think you used a bit too much plaster?” Braddon looked dubiously at the monstrous bulge of white which covered his leg from knee to ankle.