“With you?” Arabella said as she looked down her nose at Dougless. Dougless knew how a grape must feel when it was being made into a raisin.
“A place must be made for her,” Nicholas clarified, smiling.
“I think we can find room,” Arabella said.
“Where? In the trash compactor?” Dougless said under her breath.
Nicholas clamped down on her shoulder painfully. “American,” he said, as though that explained everything. “We will be here for tea,” he said; then before Dougless could say another word, he pushed her out the front door before him. He seemed to know exactly where the stables were because he headed toward them.
Dougless had to hurry to keep up with his long strides. There were sometimes disadvantages to being five feet three inches tall. “What have you done now?” she asked. “Are we staying here for the weekend? You didn’t tell them you were from the sixteenth century, did you? And where do get off calling me an American in that tone?”
He stopped on the gravel path. “What do you have to wear to dinner? They dress for dinner.”
“What’s wrong with what I have on?” she said with a smirk.
Turning, he started walking again.
“Think Arabella will dress? Something with a cleavage to the floor, I’ll bet.”
Nicholas glanced over his shoulder, a smile on his face. “What is a trash com . . . ?”
“Compactor,” she filled in, then explained it to him. His laugh floated back to her.
At the stables two grooms stayed well back while Nicholas mounted Sugar. “Had I grooms that cowardly, I would have flogged them,” Nicholas mumbled.
Dougless couldn’t get a word of information out of Nicholas as they rode back to the rental stables. Thankfully, a man at the stables gave them a ride back to Thornwyck Castle, but he and Nicholas talked nonstop about horses, so Dougless couldn’t ask about what Nicholas had found out.
It was lunchtime at the hotel when they returned, and Nicholas, still sweaty, went straight into the dining room, where he ordered three entrees and a bottle of wine.
Only when the wine had been poured did he speak. “What would you know of me?” he asked, his eyes twinkling. Obviously, he’d been well aware that she was drowning in curiosity.
Her first thought was to not give him the satisfaction of asking him anything.
Instead, she’d blast him about the way he’d treated her. But, in the end, her curiosity won. “Who? How? What? When?”
He laughed. “A woman without guile.”
As the food began to arrive, he told her how Dickie Harewood was the same, not too bright, wanting only to hunt and tend to his gardens. “His gardens are not near as good as mine,” Nicholas said.
“Stop bragging and go on.” She dug into her plate of roast beef. English beef was one of the great wonders of the earth: tender, succulent, cooked perfectly.
Two months ago workmen were repairing the roof of Goshawk Hall and it seemed their hammering had knocked out a piece of a wall. “They do not build today as well as they should,” Nicholas said. “In my houses—”
He broke off at a look from Dougless. Inside the wall was a trunk full of papers, and when they were examined, they were found to be the letters of Lady Margaret Stafford.
Dougless leaned back against her chair. “That’s wonderful! And now we’re invited to their house to read them. Oh, Colin, you are beautiful.”
Nicholas’s eyes widened at the name she’d called him, but he did not comment. “There are problems.”
“What sort of problems? No, let me guess. In exchange, Lady Arabella wants you served on a platter to her every morning with her orange juice.”
Nicholas nearly choked on his wine. “Your language, madam,” he said primly.
“Am I right or wrong?”
“Incorrect. Lady Arabella is authoring a book on . . .” When he turned away, Dougless wasn’t sure, but she thought his face was turning pink.
“On you?” she gasped.