She smiled over at him as their horses walked out of the yard, the fleeting, shy, genuine smile that hinted at the girl she’d been. Her mood, it seemed, was improved for having eaten—or for having been given a respite from his company.
“We did get an early start. We will ride up to the trout pond and inspect the ditches used for irrigation along the way. Autumn can be as dry some years as it is wet other years, and then you end up with less grass the next spring, not even realizing how much you lost from drought rather than cold.”
“There is much to learn. I am feeling decidedly overwhelmed.”
“Good.” The dratted woman’s smile turned smug. “Taking responsibility for the land and the people on the land is a serious endeavor. Agriculture has become a rapidly changing science, and if the owner of the property doesn’t care to keep pace, why should his employees or tenants?”
“You make a valid point,” Douglas allowed, then fell to considering her point silently. After noting numerous locations where the lads would have to clear ditches and grates before winter set in, Miss Hollister drew up at a stand of trees, in the middle of which lay a sizeable pond.
“This is one of my favorite places on the estate. Let’s get down and let the horses rest a bit, shall we?”
Douglas’s weary fundament found that a capital notion. Before the lady could hop down on her own, Douglas was beside her mount, reaching up to assist her from her horse. She allowed it without comment, and even remembered to murmur her thanks. She slipped off her horse’s bridle and indicated Douglas should do the same.
“Your daughter is taking the air.” The pond, its copse of trees, and a small white gazebo sat in a high meadow overlooking the buildings and grounds of the Enfield manor house. In the distance below, Rose skipped out on the terrace, a large pad of paper in her hand, a nurse and a shaggy brindle mastiff trailing behind.
“She likes to be outside,” Miss Hollister said, “as do I.”
For several minutes they watched Rose settling in at a table, the dog arranging itself at her feet, then Miss Hollister walked off toward the gazebo. “Come,” she said, “we can sit in the shade, and I will explain to you about ponds.”
A riveting prospect indeed, though Miss Hollister’s retreating form also bore a certain charm.
What Douglas would have enjoyed most at that moment was taking off the boots he’d had on since sunrise and stretching out on a blanket in the grass, there to sleep for several hours in blissful solitude. He was not so tired, however, that he didn’t notice Miss Hollister was continuing on her way without him.
A bit of teasing was permitted. Just a bit, for form’s sake, surely?
“Miss Hollister?” She stopped, turned, and arched a brow at him. He winged his arm at her. She pressed her lips together and came striding to his side.
***
Gwen let the blighted man escort her to the small, white octagonal building at the edge of the pond and gestured for him to sit beside her. She began a discourse, explaining the benefits and burdens of trying to raise trout in a pond, about the evils of pond scum, and the trials of dry years versus the trials of wet years. When she had prosed on for a good five minutes—and again noted what a pleasant scent Amery wore—Gwen realized she had yet to hear a single question from his perishingly proper lordship.
Her companion had fallen asleep, wedged against one of the supports holding up the roof. For a moment she was insulted; then she reasoned a man of his exaggerated sense of propriety would not deal her such a slight intentionally. She watched him fall more deeply asleep, his head turning against the pillar, his hand going lax against his thigh.
To see a grown man fall asleep right before her eyes was novel and more interesting than it should have been. A muscle leapt along Amery’s square jaw once, his breathing evened out, and his hand slid off his leg to fall against Gwen’s thigh. On a soft sigh, he was gone into the arms of Morpheus.
In sleep, Douglas Allen was appallingly, surprisingly handsome. Waking, his features were schooled to a chronic pained reserve. The relaxed version of those same features was infinitely more appealing. Slumbering, his thin, disapproving mouth was fuller, his lips more sculpted. His blond hair, usually swept back in a queue, had come loose from its ribbon and spread over his shoulders in golden disarray.
After a few more minutes studying her companion’s sleeping visage, Gwen let the lazy quiet of the afternoon penetrate her senses, to the point where resting her eyes gained appeal. She wouldn’t fall asleep, of course, not in the presence of a man who was nearly a stranger to her—
When she awoke, the sun wasn’t much changed in its position, but she had changed her position.
“Steady,” her pillow said. “Rising too quickly can leave one dizzy.”
Mindful that the warning bore some merit, Gwen did not abruptly abandon her location. She was cuddled against a warm slab of male muscle, one bearing the pleasant, spicy scent of Douglas Allen. His arm rested loosely around her shoulders, and for an instant, Gwen battled an impulse to close her eyes and go back to sleep. Amery’s proximity should have felt distasteful and presuming, threatening even… Except, it didn’t.
“Beg pardon, my lord.”
“Now, Miss Hollister,” his lordship chided gently, “you weren’t contemplating abandoning me here when I was having such a lovely meditation, were you?” He retrieved his arm and shot his cuffs, not a hint of self-consciousness or hurry about him. “I do feel somewhat refreshed, but I confess I missed some of your profundities regarding the care and feeding of pond trout, for which I heartily apologize. For my penance, I suppose you must harry me off on yet another lesson?”
Gwen watched him, knowing she regarded him with the look he detested, the wary, careful appraisal that anticipated mischief. His expression was more relaxed though, as if he really had needed a nap to restore his spirits. He rose and extended a hand toward her, a hint of challenge lurking in his eyes. She braced her free hand on the back of the bench and let him assist her to her feet.
“Oh, blast and perdition,” Gwen muttered, glaring at the hand she’d rested on the wooden bench. A small drop of blood welled on the outside of her fourth finger. A splinter lodged there, but the angle of penetration made it hard for her to examine, much less extract with her teeth.
“Allow me,” Amery said, reaching for her hand.
“No thank you.” Gwen snatched her hand back. “I can tend to it when we return to the manor.”
“Of course you can,” Amery agreed pleasantly. “And ride all that way without gloves—because you surely don’t intend to put a glove on over that—and blister your fingers for no reason other than your abundant pride.”
Was he laughing at her? Gwen thrust her hand under the arrogant length of his nose.
He grasped her hand and slowly turned it to bring her finger against his mouth. With his tongue, he traced the side of her finger, finding the sliver of wood and acquainting himself with its angle of entry by virtue of explorations that made Gwen’s insides leap.
Gwen turned her head, unable to hold his gaze while his tongue probed at her flesh. The wet, warm feel of his lips and tongue against her finger, the challenge in his eyes as he held her hand to his mouth… Hot, uncomfortable, complicated feelings spiraled up from her middle, made all the worse by her conviction that Amery found the whole business amusing.
His teeth gently scraped at Gwen’s finger just as her insides nearly collapsed from an answering mortification—it had to be embarrassment causing those odd sensations—and then his mouth was gone.
“There.” He held a mean little dagger of wood on the end of his finger for her to see then flicked it into the weeds. “No wonder it hurt.” He withdrew a handkerchief and wrapped it around Gwen’s finger, applying a snug pressure while she submitted to his assistance.
“Wouldn’t you do the same for me?” he asked quietly. When Gwen mutely g
azed out over the water, he sighed and answered his own question. “I see you would not, which is just as well. I relish asking for help no more than you do. Shall we be on our way?”
He offered his right arm, and Gwen accepted it, wondering at the significance of his last comment. They made the journey back to the manor house in thoughtful silence until they were walking up the driveway, their horses side by side.
“You will spend the balance of the afternoon with Rose?” he asked her as they approached the stable yard.
“She might be napping, but from when she awakens until she goes down tonight, I will be more or less with her.”
Amery dismounted and came around his horse. “What is more or less?”
This had nothing to do with stewardship of the land, and yet Gwen answered him. “If I have accounting to do, she might play in the library while I work at the books. She might come with me if I need to visit the home farm or the propagation houses. I reserve tasks near the manor for the end of the day, and if it’s safe, she comes with me.”
He lifted her off her horse and likely would have stepped back in the next instant, but Gwen pitched a bit forward on landing, so his hands lingered on her waist a moment longer.
“Thank you, my lord.”
“Most welcome,” he replied, taking that step back and offering her his arm. The horses were led away, and the idiot man remained standing there, his elbow winged out until Gwen took his arm and he started a sedate progress toward the house.
“You don’t have to do this, you know.”
“I beg your pardon?” His tone wasn’t begging anything and suggested he never would.
“You don’t have to make it your personal mission to return me to the land of gentlemanly manners,” she bit out. “I concede defeat, your lordship. I will acquiesce in your displays of civility, but you need not be so willing to put your hands on my person.”
“Are my hands on your person, then?”
“You know to what I refer.”
“I do,” he allowed. “You referred to it as manners and civilities. Let me ask you a question, though, Miss Hollister.”
He paused on a slight rise offering a view of the autumn gardens. Asters and pansies bloomed in colorful abundance, and the chrysanthemums were coming into their glory.
“Your question, my lord?”
“Have I at any point touched you against your will?”
“No. No, damn you, you have not.”
***
Miss Hollister dropped Douglas’s arm and strode away into the house. From the set of her shoulders, she was crying again, which was understandable. She’d had much to cry about, and unless he missed his guess, she’d probably allowed herself very few tears.
They were similar in that regard, he and this fallen, knowledgeable woman who loved both her child and her land so fiercely.
He took himself back down to the stables and arranged to leave Regis in his shady paddock and ride his borrowed mount over to Willowdale. He would swap horses tomorrow, and Regis, at least, would get some rest.
This assumed, of course, Miss Hollister was willing to have him and his gentlemanly manners tagging along again the following day. Because such an assumption might well be faulty, Douglas retraced his steps to the house, using the kitchen door and finding both the cook and a scullery maid on hand.
“Your pardon, but where might I find Miss Hollister?”
The cook was elbow deep in bread dough but gave an awkward imitation of a curtsy, as did the scullery maid at the sink. “She be in the nursery, milord. Third floor, back o’ the house,” the cook replied.
“My thanks.” He went in search of his quarry, though the maid and cook exchanged a smirk as he turned to go, of which he was quite aware. All the women in this house were in want of proper guidance—or something.
The location of the nursery was easy to ascertain, because Douglas could hear a child’s voice from halfway down the corridor, singing an old folk song, something about not having wings to fly.
Rose sprang across a combination playroom and schoolroom. “Hello! Mama says you are our cousin. How do you do, Cousin?”
She hugged him around his thighs, stepped back to make a child’s curtsy, then held up her arms as if to be lifted into an embrace. When Douglas blinked down at her presumption, she gave her arms a little shake, suggesting he hadn’t noticed their upraised position.
Needs must. He hefted the child up onto his hip. “Hello, Miss Rose. How are you today?”
“I am all punished. Do you want to see?”
Douglas’s little backside would have been thoroughly striped for a misadventure such as Rose’s, but then his father had sought any excuse to discipline his sons, and his mother had never interfered. Surely Miss Hollister was of a more enlightened bent?
“I suppose you will not rest until you show me,” he said, setting the child down.
“Rose, who are you…?” Rose scampered past her mother’s skirts as Miss Hollister emerged from an adjoining room, probably the child’s bedroom. “Lord Amery.” Her greeting was a verbal cannonball fired across Douglas’s quarterdeck.
“Miss Hollister.” He gave her a bow worthy of the churchyard on Easter morning. “We parted before making plans for either the immediate or the near term. I am loathe to present myself on your doorstep only to find my company is an imposition.”
And he did not want to part from her in anger, though anger was probably much of what sustained her.
Rose came bouncing into the room, several sheets of paper clutched in her hands. “Do you still want to see my punishment?”
“Most assuredly,” Douglas said, letting himself be led to a low table surrounded by small chairs. As they passed Miss Hollister, he caught a bracing whiff of lavender and indignation. Rose popped onto one of the chairs, but Douglas, fearing to look ridiculous while he broke one attempting the same, sat cross-legged on the floor beside the child.
“This,” said Rose, “is my first one.”
Her work was surprisingly expressive as she described in images one nasty possible outcome of her tree-climbing after another. She had caught with appalling accuracy the fear on her mother’s face, the horror on the stableboys’, and a grim determination on Douglas’s own visage. The final picture was of Miss Hollister sitting next to a gravestone, over which a huge bouquet of pink and purple flowers had been placed.
“’Cause I could be dead.”
“But you are not,” Douglas countered softly.
“I’m not!” Rose bolted for the next room. “I’ll be back!”
“She draws amazingly well,” Douglas said to her mother as he got to his feet. Miss Hollister leaned against the doorjamb, arms crossed, her expression hard to read.
“She enjoys it. Do you like children?”
“I hardly know. Miss Rose is the first child with whom I’ve any acquaintance, unless you count her little cousins at Willowdale and Oak Hall. And they, thankfully, are still quite in the nursery.”
“Mama, I’m ready!” Rose careened back into the room, a small bonnet in her hand. “Can we go now, and will Mister… Cousin Douglas walk with us?”
“He will,” Douglas said, deliberately cutting off any objection Miss Hollister might have made and silently excusing the child’s faulty grammar—and use of familiar address.
The girl chattered incessantly down two flights of stairs, through the house, and out onto the back terraces. She reported on what she saw, what she thought, what she felt, and what she would have felt if various contingencies—such as a wild unicorn from Mongolia galloping into the garden—were to occur. When they reached the gardens below the back terrace, Rose galloped off to see if a certain bush still had any flowers, abandoning her mother to Douglas’s company.
Had Rose’s mother ever been so voluble and carefree?
“Managing a few thousand acre
s must seem a lark after trying to manage that one child.”
“Sometimes,” Miss Hollister replied. “Not always. An estate can’t love you back.”
Douglas gave her a curious look, but she said no more on this topic, and he did not ask her to elucidate particulars, though elucidating particulars was one of her strengths. Miss Hollister had walked off a little way to sit on a stone bench with a clear view of her cavorting daughter.
“She’ll come back from time to time, then go off, then come back,” Miss Hollister explained. “We might as well have that discussion about our calendar, my lord.”
Douglas gestured to the bench. “May I?”
She swished her skirts aside. “Of course.”
“I foresee a complication, Miss Hollister,” Douglas said, his gaze on the child as she systematically sniffed each rose in a blooming bed. “You have apparently instructed your daughter to refer to me as Cousin Douglas, and yet you, who would be my closer relation were I Rose’s cousin, are still referring to me as my lord, and Lord Amery, and so forth.”
“Children are often permitted less formal address.”
He certainly hadn’t been as a child. “Will it not confuse Rose if you address Heathgate and Greymoor by their Christian names, and yet I remain a title to you?”
“It’s time Rose learned something of proper address. You might as well be the example.”
He expected stubbornness from her on this matter—on every matter thus far and for the foreseeable future as well—and because he, too, was stubborn, he liked it about her, for the most part.
“When we travel to Sussex,” Douglas said, “you have assured me you will do so only as my relation or something of that nature. You do not refer to your familial relations formally, though both of your cousins hold titles. Rose knows this much and will surely remark on your inconsistency at some point when others are in her hearing.”
Children were demons about adult inconsistency. Even Douglas knew that much of their natures.
Douglas: Lord of Heartache (The Lonely Lords) Page 4