Chapter 18
Sterling snapped the newspaper he held out in front of him and cast a quick glance toward the arched entrance to the dining room.
Earlier that morning, he had ridden out to check the perimeter of the castle estate. Afterward, he’d come here to partake of one of Cook’s hearty breakfasts, washed it down with several cups of coffee, and read half the paper, and still Lady Annabelle had not put in an appearance.
If she thought to skip this morning’s meal, she could think again. He wouldn’t have her return home a half-starved waif.
Why he cared, who could say? Whether or not she chose to eat was her affair.
On the cusp of that thought, she glided into the entryway. She bloody glided like some ethereal creature. He was almost sure she put no conscious thought into her elegant, graceful, and maddeningly captivating affectations.
Vexed at himself for noticing—again—he folded the section of newspaper, cast it onto the table with an impatient flick of his wrist, then rose and inclined his head in greeting.
“Good morning,” she murmured.
Helpless to resist the impulse, his gaze drifted over her. Her blond hair, twisted into a simple chignon today, gleamed in the morning light streaming in from the windows.
She wore another of Caroline’s dresses. A baby blue day dress, slightly paler in color than her eyes, trimmed with white-as-snow eyelet lace. Babette had certainly been busy catering to the lady. By the time Caroline deigned to visit the castle, she’d find herself absent a wardrobe.
Not that he expected her any time soon. Thank God.
She’d be horrified to find Lady Annabelle residing here without the benefit of a chaperone.
If she knew the two of them had been alone on the rooftop, twice, he’d get an ear lashing he’d never forget, and that would be only for starters.
She’d have them engaged before he could make the first excuse.
Plate in hand, Lady Annabelle approached the table.
Sterling assisted her with her chair, then resumed his own seat.
She’d put a few more morsels on her breakfast plate today than she had yesterday—not that he cared. But she had missed dinner last night—thanks to him and his inability to school his tongue in her presence.
In truth, he’d considered delivering a light dinner plate to her chamber last night before turning in.
He’d refrained because he hadn’t wanted to risk disturbing her at that late hour.
Nor had he wanted the vision of her in her nightclothes as she opened her chamber door to be the last thing he saw before bed.
“Did you sleep well?” he asked, slanting her a glance as he picked up the newspaper and opened it to the page where he’d left off.
“To be honest, no.”
“No?” He saw the faint smudges under her eyes, then. “Probably because you went to bed hungry,” he muttered. “I can afford to feed you, you know.”
Her white teeth flashed as she sliced into a small piece of ham, and his pulse kicked up.
Good Lord. He was ridiculous where she was concerned. God help him if she ever figured out how much power she held over him. No woman alive had ever enthralled him the way she did without even trying. Why? She was beautiful, but many women were.
She was also difficult, headstrong, overly confident.
Except when she wasn’t.
He shook his head to clear it. No good would come of meditating on Lady Annabelle’s intriguing blend of attributes.
“I dream here,” she said, before sliding a forkful of food into her mouth. Chewing, her gaze turned contemplative, as if recalling her dreams, right then and there.
He set the paper aside and propped his chin on his hand to study her. “Is that unusual for you? Dreaming?”
She eyed her plate. “I suppose I do dream at home. But I don’t recall them, and I don’t find myself waking from them repeatedly. And…never mind.” She huffed out a seemingly self-conscious laugh and, using the edge of her knife, slid more eggs onto her fork.
She had a very pretty way of eating, sitting straight and erect and carrying tiny tidbits to her lovely lips on her fork. She didn’t hunker over her plate as a man might, shoveling food into his mouth like some kind of animal. No, she ate as if performing the measured steps of a dance.
Did all ladies eat that way? He could not recall. But here, now…He could practically see her practicing, a heavy tome balanced atop her head.
And he was staring again. Snap out of it, man.
“And?” he prompted, his voice brusque, though he suspected that had more to do with his annoyance at himself. He didn’t know who he was around Annabelle.
Her gaze snapped to his face, blue eyes startled.
Hardly surprising. He tried again, this time, composed. “I would like you to go on. Please.”
Her expression softened, for lack of a better word, as if she found the notion of his interest in hearing what she had to say, alien, and nice.
“Very well. I dreamt of when I was young. My governess, Miss Jenkins, was there, and I was…like before.” Her wispy brows furrowed, and she began cutting her ham into tiny bites with intense concentration, as if the task required all of her focus.
“Like ‘before’?”
Her face flushed a deep crimson. “That’s not important,” she muttered, sawing away at the pork. “The main thing is that the dream was not at all pleasant.”
“In other words, you had a nightmare?”
“Not so much a nightmare, but definitely unpleasant. I awoke in the night, relieved to be done with it, but when I resumed sleeping, the dream persisted.” She blew air out her cheeks and shifted her gaze to his.
Wide, guileless, bottomless pools of blue.
“Have you ever experienced the phenomenon, Lord Randall?”
He shook his head.
“It’s like…Oh, I know. Say, you have a ball to attend, and everyone awaits you in the foyer, but you’ve misplaced your dance slippers. You look, and you look, and suddenly hours have gone by, and still, no slippers.”
“Sorry, I can’t relate,” he said dryly.
She scowled at him. “Very well. A constellation of stars is due to arrive, and someone’s removed your precious apparatus.”
“Removed my apparatus?” he choked out on a burst of laughter. Good God, his apparatus. He poured himself more coffee. “Yes, now that I would find disastrous. Even a missing telescope would be cause for alarm.”
The look she sent him was equal parts confusion and suspicion, as if she sensed he teased her, but couldn’t work out precisely how.
“So, you dreamt you were late for a ball last night?” he asked, redirecting her thoughts.
A shuttered look crossed her face. “No. I was…searching for someone. I’d won at marbles—”
“Marbles?”
“I was quite good at marbles,” she said, sounding pleased with herself, then muttered under her breath, “because of the patch, no doubt.”
“Patch?”
She huffed out a breath. “Do you want to hear this or not?”
“Sorry. Won’t interrupt again.” He mimed buttoning his lips, and she sent him a look of silent rebuke—or tried to. He saw the glint of humor in her eyes before she lowered her lashes.
Then her expression turned somber. “I’d won, but not fairly.
I’d cheated. Instead of triumph, remorse filled me.
I thought, if I could just give the winnings back—the marbles,” she explained.
“But I couldn’t find anyone, and they were so heavy.
I searched, and I searched, wanting to make it right. But I never could.”
His humor faded. “It was just a dream, Annabelle.”
She nodded, scooting her eggs and now-decimated pork around on her plate.
He didn’t like seeing her like this. It caused an ache in his chest he didn’t care for in the slightest. “I still say you brought it on yourself, skipping dinner,” he said, mostly to distract her.
She appeared not to hear him. A moment later, she set her cutlery aside, squared her shoulders, and faced him, her expression resolute. “Lord Randall, I’ve come to a decision.”
“Oh? What is that?”
“I shall return to London.”
“Of course, in due time, when your chaperone arrives.”
“I think it best if I depart sooner. I wonder,” she mused aloud, narrowing her eyes in a contemplative manner, “if perhaps Babette could fashion a netted cap for me.”
Somehow, he’d lost the thread of the conversation. “I beg your pardon?”
“A black netted cap would conceal my identity, should anyone happen to notice me.”
He frowned at her. What was she playing at now?
She picked up her fork and resumed eating, if one could call it that. His mother would call it playing with one’s food.
“Do you not care for the breakfast?”
Her hand stilled. “It’s more than adequate.”
“Then, I wish you would eat some of it.”
Her delicate brows furrowed into a bemused frown. She forked up a bite of eggs, chewed, and swallowed with a slight grimace. “Satisfied?”
“For starters. As for your outlandish notion—”
“I see nothing outlandish in the notion so long as I draw no attention to myself in the process.”
As if a world existed where she would not draw attention,
“I am perfectly capable,” she went on, warming to her idea. “I practically traveled here on my own. It’s merely society that prevents me from—”
“Out of the question,” he cut in.
Because it was. Never mind two days earlier he’d all but insisted she take herself off and cease darkening his door. But that had been when she had the benefit of a chaperone.
By God, she knew the risks. Why the sudden urge to leave? Unless…
“Lady Annabelle, perhaps I should ask if there is…er…a particular reason you feel you can no longer await your chaperone. Something which has caused you undue discomfort?” A distinct warmth crawled up his neck.
Confusion lit her gaze. “Discomfort, my lord?”
Damn it to hell. “Lady Annabelle, do you consider my behavior toward you, particularly my rooftop behavior, to have been grossly dishonorable?”
A lovely shade of pink flooded her cheeks. “No,” she answered, very definitively. “I merely looked at the situation from your point of view and realized…” She swallowed. “Well. My being here is not precisely fair to you, is it, my lord?”
The chit was using his own argument against him.
No, not against him, damn it. How did she keep scrambling his thought processes? He was not trying to make her stay. He was allowing her to stay for her own safety.
Chip appeared in the entrance. “I beg your pardon, milord.”
“Yes, what is it, Chip?”
The footman eyed Annabelle. “A matter of some…delicacy, my lord.”
He was not relieved by this interruption, he told himself. He shoved back from the table and rose. “Please, excuse me, Lady Annabelle.”
She arched her delicate brows. “I trust we will resume our conversation when your business concludes, my lord?”
He sent her a placid smile. “There is nothing to discuss. Rest assured, I have no complaints about your staying here”—he held up a hand, palm out when she opened her mouth, he presumed, to argue, probably by reminding him of his previous statements to the contrary—“until such a time as a proper chaperone presents herself to accompany you home.”
***
Stunned, Annabelle watched the man stride from the dining room.
She picked up her fork and poked at the remaining slivers of ham and eggs on her plate.
This morning, when she’d imagined having this conversation, this particular outcome had never occurred to her.
So certain was she in the outcome, she’d informed Babette of her imminent departure, likely on the ‘morrow at dawn, when the tide was out. No sense waiting for midday—when the high waters would leave her no option but to board another coble.
In doing so, she had risked heralding one of the girl’s breakdowns. But she’d hoped to save her the trouble of re-fashioning any more of poor Lady Caroline’s gowns—and for what? So that Lord high-and-mighty Randall could blithely reject her altruistic plan, out of hand?
Nothing to discuss, her left foot.
He was not her master. He did not have the right to decree what she could or could not broach, she thought, working herself into a good lather.
Better she focus on that, and not the tiny part of her that had warmed at him taking instant umbrage to her decision to leave. No, she would not think of that at all.
She pushed back from the table and rose, then hesitated.
She had no wish to cross paths with Babette, who’d all but run from the room this morning when she’d learned of Annabelle’s departure. Nor did she relish giving the appearance of waiting around—pining—for a scrap of his lordship’s attention.
She would do what she always did when she needed to think—or not think. She’d visit the stables. She’d brush that magnificent horse of Sterling’s and perhaps bribe him with a cube of sugar. To that end, she plucked one from the sideboard, then hurried to her chamber to gather her cloak and gloves.
A quick glance out the window at the domed grey sky and slanting foliage told her the weather had not improved, but neither did snow appear imminent.
Movement in the periphery of her vision drew her gaze to a cluster of men herding into the stables behind a wheeled cart.
They’d obviously transferred whatever they’d delivered from a similar contrivance, which stood empty and attached to a lone donkey.
A frowning Lord Randall, hands on his hips, took up the rear of the procession.
What had the townsmen—fishermen, she surmised by their rough-hewn clothing and weathered skin—delivered on that cart that had Lord Randall scowling? Surely not a load of fish.
“A matter of some delicacy,” Chip had said. If she hadn’t made up her mind to protect Lord Randall from scandal—not that he’d expressed an ounce of gratitude—she’d take herself down there this instant and assuage her curiosity.
As if he sensed her looking, he glanced up toward her window.
She skittered backward out of sight before he could spot her.
So much for her plan to visit the stables. A walk, then. Away from the main road, to prevent the men from sighting her on their way back to the village. She’d exit via the servant’s doors, through the kitchens ‘round back, and stroll the estate grounds.
Later, she’d get a look inside the stables.