“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.

“Oh no,” Madeleine assured him. “Your leg was very broken. If you were a horse, we’d have had to put you down.”

Braddon tossed two shillings to the boy watching his horse. “You’d better tie it up in the stables and then get me a hackney.”

The boy looked curious. “Got yourself an injury, milord?”

Braddon sighed and threw him another coin. “The hackney.”

“Right you are, milord.” The boy ran off toward the street, leaving the horse tied to a pole.

“I suppose he’ll remember my horse later,” Braddon said doubtfully. He started to hop toward the gate to Vincent’s Horse Emporium, delicately carrying his spare boot in his fingers. Kesgrave would kill him if he got greasy fingerprints on a boot, broken leg or no.

“Don’t worry,” Madeleine said. “I’ll rescue your horse.”

Braddon looked down affectionately at her soft rumpled hair.

“I love you, you know that?”

Madeleine stopped and clutched his arm. “Don’t talk like that! What if Papa heard you? You’re not even whispering.”

Braddon shrugged. “I’m a wounded man. What can he do? And it’s true. I love you, Maddie.”