Lady in the Mist - Laurie Alice Eakes [5]
Dominick managed not to snort. “And now that you mention appearances,” he said, “I’ll just go up and change into my livery.”
“Yes, that coat you’re wearing looks like you slept in it.” She narrowed her eyes so they skewered him like emerald blades. “Next time you sneak out at night, at least remember to tie your hair back before you come home.”
“Why, Mrs. Robins,” Dominick drawled, giving her a wide-eyed stare, “I have no id—”
“Don’t try to bamboozle me with those pretty brown eyes of yours.”
“Pretty?” Dominick’s cheeks warmed.
“With those lashes, yes, but handsome if you prefer. Handsome is as handsome does, and if you’re playing the tomcat and get caught, your lady won’t find you so good-looking with the stripes of a whip across your back.”
Dominick flinched. “No tomcat acts, I assure you, ma’am.”
But there had been a lady, a lady who would likely wield the whip herself for nothing more than his country of origin.
“I needed air,” he added.
“Then take it in the garden.” Letty returned to her eggs. “Mr. Kendall is a kind and generous master if we do our work and mind his curfew. But if we break the rules, the law is on his side to do about anything short of killing one of us.”
“Perhaps I should have risked life on my uncle’s Barbados sugar plantation instead of here.”
Dominick spoke the truth. Life in the Caribbean sounded harsh, even deadly, but there he’d have been a free man. Free so long as he didn’t set foot in England. But here, his signature marked papers that made him little more than a slave to Thomas Kendall for four years. Still, he was in America, where he could do the most good and make up for, if not clear, his name.
“But I’m here now.” He injected cheerfulness into his voice. “No sense regretting what I can’t undo.”
“Hurry yourself up. If you’re down in a quarter hour, I’ll have time to powder your hair for you.”
“Thank you, madam.” Dominick bowed, then raced up the back steps with such a light step, his feet barely made a sound on the treads.
He’d practiced the art of flying up and down stairs with little noise since boyhood. He and his brothers entertained contests to see which of them could sneak out of the house most often without getting caught. He won every time. Francis, older by three years, grew broad in the shoulders but without Dominick’s height, and never mastered the ability to skip every two steps. Percival, the eldest, with Dominick’s height, possessed no grace at all.
Second nature to Dominick now, the skill had served him well the night before when he made his first move to abide by his uncle’s dictates. No one else had noticed his departure. Of course Letty would, sleeping in a room off of the kitchen as she did.
Next time he’d be more careful. Next time he’d exit somewhere else. And when he prowled the beach, he’d keep an eye out for mermaids who weren’t watching where they were going.
Not that he could wholly blame her for running into him. Gazing into the mist as though he could see England floating on the edge of the horizon, he’d paid no attention to anything else but the ache in his heart. For those few minutes, he’d forgotten four years of banishment, loved ones left behind, and a mission that could make him wish for a whip as the least of his difficulties.
She wasn’t a charmer. Her very lack of artifice appealed to him after five years of parading through the drawing rooms, dining rooms, and ballrooms of London, sought after as an eligible bachelor to even out numbers at a dinner table, and provide shy young ladies with dance partners and bold women with someone to boost their self-assurance. She didn’t seem to care what he thought of her. She was forthright and unique, if she truly was a midwife and her lack of wedding ring proclaimed an unmarried state.
He didn’t know if she was pretty in face or form. She had been as shadowy to him as he must have been to her. But he did know that she possessed the most elegant hand he’d held since the last time he saw Mother alive.
And he knew the lady in the mist could prove dangerous to him if she talked.