LITMIR.BIZ

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Ned continued. “No doubt you and your tea have a great deal to converse about. Can I call it merely tea?” She looked up at him in surprise. “I’d hate to insult your efforts to transform it into a syrup, after all.”

      A reluctant smile touched her lips, and she set down her worthless, oversweetened beverage. And oh, he didn’t know why, but he reached out and laid his hand atop the fingers she had freed. The delicate bones of her hand felt just right against his skin.

      “Let me guess,” Ned said. “I’ve mucked up the forms of address. You’ll have to excuse me. I haven’t thought about etiquette and precedence in years. You’re a duke’s daughter, and furthermore, you are the tea’s only natural predator. According to Debrett, that means—”

      “I am not!” she said. But she hadn’t lost that shine in her eyes. Maybe, if he made her laugh again, he could resume where they’d left off. Maybe he could bridge the gap between them with humor.

      “You’re not a duke’s daughter?” He looked about the room in exaggerated confusion. “Does anyone else here know that? Because I shan’t tell if you won’t.”

      Her hand shifted under his, and he won another reluctant smile from her. This, too, Ned remembered—his attempts, at breakfast, to make her choke on her toast and reprimand him for making her cough. It had seemed a dangerous endeavor then, even in the bright light of day.

      “Don’t be foolish,” she admonished.

      “Why not?” He reached out and tapped her chin.

      She tilted her head. And then, he remembered why conversing with her had always seemed so dangerous. Because she looked up at him. The years washed away. And for one second, the look she gave him was as old and complicated as the look Delilah had once given to Samson. It was a look that said Kate had seen inside his skin, had seen through the veneer of his humor to the very unamusing truth of why he’d left. She might have seen how desperately he needed to retain a shred of control over himself … and how close she came to taking it all away.

      His wife had been a threat when he’d married her. She’d been a confusing mix of directness and obfuscation, a mystery that had dangerously engrossed him. He’d found himself entertaining all sorts of lofty daydreams. He’d wanted to slay all her dragons—he’d have invented them, if she lacked sufficient reptilian foes. In short, he’d found himself slipping back into the youthful foolishness he had forsworn.

      He’d run away. He’d left England, ostensibly to look into Blakely investments in the East. It had been a rational, hardheaded endeavor, and he’d proven that he, too, could be rational and hardheaded. He’d come home, certain that this time, he would leave off his youthful imaginings.

      “Are you planning to play the fool for me?” And in her face, turned up to his, he saw every last threat writ large. He saw the sadness he’d left in her, and felt his own desperate desire to tamp it down. And he saw something more: something stronger and harder than the woman he’d left behind.

      He had come back to England, planning to treat his wife with gentlemanly care. He would prove once and for all that he was deserving of their trust, that he was not some stupid, foolish boy, careening off on some impossible quest.

      Kate made him want to take on the impossible.

      When she smiled, the warmth of her expression traveled right through his spine like a heated shiver. It lodged somewhere in the vicinity of his breastbone, a hook planted in his ribs, pulling him forward.

      For one desperate second, he wanted to be laid bare before her. He wanted her to see everything: his struggle for stability, the hard-fought battle he’d won. He wanted to find out why she sat as if she were not a part of this group.

      And that was real foolishness. Because he’d worked too long to gain control over himself, and he wasn’t about to relinquish it at the first opportunity to a pretty smile. Not even one that belonged to his wife.

      “No,” he said finally. “You’re quite right. I’m done playing the fool. Not even for you, Kate. Not even for you.”

      THE SMELL OF HAY and manure wafted to Ned as soon as he stepped inside the stables. The aisle running down the stalls was clean and dry, though, and he walked carefully down the layer of fresh straw. The mare he had pulled from the mews in London for the journey here put her dark nose out over the stall, and Ned reached into his pocket for a small circle of orange carrot. He offered it, palm up; the horse snuffled it up.

      “If you’re looking for that new devil of a horse, he’s not in here.”

      Ned turned at the sound of this ancient voice. “You’re talking about Champion, then?”

      Richard Plum scrubbed a callused hand against an old and wrinkled cheek. It was the only commentary Ned expected the old stable-master would make on the name he’d chosen. Ned could almost hear the man’s voice echo from his childhood. Animals don’t need fancy names. They don’t know what they mean. Names are nothing but lies for us two-legged types.

      “I’ve seen a great many horses,” the man offered.

      Ned waited. Plum spent so much time around animals—from the horses in the stables to Berkswift’s small kennel of dogs—that he sometimes forgot that ordinary human conversation had an ebb and flow to it, a certain natural order of statement and response. Plum seemed to think all conversations had only one side, which he provided. But if left unprompted, he usually recollected himself and continued.

      “This one, he’s not the worst I’ve seen. Not the best, neither. Conformation leaves a lot to be desired, and even after we’ve put some flesh on his bones, he’ll likely always be weak-chested. But his temperament … He’s as wary as if the devil himself were pissing in his grain. I don’t trust him near my mares.”

      Technically, they were Ned’s mares, but Ned wasn’t about to correct the man. He’d hoped this morning’s equine tantrum had been nothing more than an aftereffect of Champion’s earlier mistreatment.

      “That sounds bad.”

      “Hmm.” Mr. Plum seemed to think that bare monosyllable constituted sufficient answer, because he put his hands in his pockets and looked at Ned. “An animal needs to know some kindness in its first years of life, Mr. Carhart. If your, ah, your horse—” Ned noticed that Plum carefully eschewed the name of Champion “—has never known good from people, that’s the end of it. It can’t be fixed, not with a day of work. Or a week. Or a year. And if that’s the case, there’s nothing to be done for it.”

      “When you say ‘nothing,’” Ned ventured gently, “you don’t literally mean nothing can be done. Do you?”

      “Of course not.” Plum shook his head. “Always something to be done, eh? In this case, you load the pistol and pull the trigger. It’s a mercy, doing away with a one such as that. What an animal doesn’t learn when young, it can’t find in maturity.”

      Ned turned away, his hands clenching. His stomach felt queasy. He hadn’t saved Champion only to have him put down out of some sense of wrong-headed mercy. An image flashed through his head: a pistol, tooled in silver, the sun glinting off it from every direction.

      No.

      He’d not wish that end on anyone, not even a scraggly, weak-chested horse.

      “How far gone is he?”

      Mr. Plum shrugged. “No way to know, unless someone gives it a try. Have to make the decision out of rational thought, sir. Me? I doubt the animal’s worth the effort.”

      He paused again, another one of those too-long halts. Ned began to drum his fingers against the leg of his trousers, an impatient ditty born out of an excess of energy. Another bad sign.

      “Very little use in him, sir.”

      “Use.” Ned pressed his palms together. “No need for an animal to be useful, is there?”

      Plum met his gaze. “Use is what animals

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