The Heir - Catherine Coulter [27]
“Sorry, ma’am, but I am always early. Do sit down. My beef is getting cold.” He grinned, noting her riding habit, and said, “Not only do I eat early, I always like to ride early as well. Just after my breakfast. It would seem, ma’am, that you are in the same habit. Does that, perhaps, presage good things for the future? For us, I mean.”
No way around it. “Probably so,” she said. She accepted his assistance into her chair and began to dish eggs and bacon onto her plate before he had again eased back into his place. Her strawberry jam sat beside her plate. But how did Mrs. Tucker know where she would be sitting? Ah, he’d told her, naturally. She began to spread the jam on her toast.
“Don’t you think it would be a mite more polite if you were to contain your enthusiasm for eating until your host was seated?”
Her hand tightened involuntarily about the handle of her spreading knife. Host? Surely the fork would slide easily into his heart. No, he didn’t deserve for her to kill him for that bit of gloating. No, stabbing him in the arm would be the appropriate thing. “You really aren’t the host, sir,” she said finally. “You just happen to be the lucky male who was born of the right parents at the right time. Nothing more, nothing less.”
“As were you, ma’am.”
“But I don’t claim to be the hostess. I am merely the poor sacrifice, tossed onto the marital altar by my own esteemed father.”
He was, he supposed, pleased to hear some wit from her rather than curses rained down upon his head. “In that case,” he said, seeing her fork halfway between her plate and her mouth, “wait a moment while I take a bite of my toast. There, now continue with your eggs. Ah, you do like that jam, don’t you? Is it special?”
“Very. Cook began making it when I was a child. I used to sneak into the kitchen and she would spread it on scones, on cucumber biscuits, on anything in sight.”
He ate a thick slice of the rare beef, picked up his paper, and lowered his head.
“Would you please pass the coffee?”
The earl looked up from the newspaper.
“If, of course, a host does such things.”
“Certainly, ma’am. I begin to believe that a host does everything to keep the ship afloat. Now, I wonder if you will also consider me the master? Here you are.”
The master? Curse his gray eyes, that were also her gray eyes. She said, “Ah, and a page or two of the newspaper, if you please.”
“Of course, ma’am. I understand that it isn’t really the done thing for ladies to read newspapers, other than the court pages and the society pages, but, after all, you are Lady Arabella of Evesham Abbey. As your gracious host, it would be impolite of me to give you guidance. Is there any particular page you would prefer?”
“Since I would not wish to deprive you, you may give me a page that you have already read.”
“Here you are, ma’am.” As she twitched the pages from his outstretched hand, he noticed angry scratches on the back of her left hand. And there was that scruffed-up chin of hers and the long scratches on her cheek. He wondered what other damage there was beneath her clothes. And there was a thought. He could easily imagine that her breasts were really quite lovely, and a handful. His hand cupped around his coffee cup inadvertently. As for the rest of her, he swallowed his coffee and choked. She just stared at him with vague disinterest until he stopped coughing.
“If you had turned blue in the face, I promise I would have done something,” she said, her voice as bland as the yellow draperies on the windows.
“Thank you. I am fine now. I was just thinking rather disconcerting thoughts. I hope you are feeling better this morning? Here, have some more eggs. You need to gain flesh.”
“My papa always said that a woman should never gain flesh. He said it was displeasing.”
“Displeasing to whom?”
“Why, to gentlemen, I would think.”
“And should gentlemen gain flesh?”
“I believe,” she said very clearly, “that gentlemen can do whatever pleases them without fear of much or any retribution. What lady, after all, is going to tell her husband that she