The Heiress Bride - Catherine Coulter [9]
Where was he? Hadn’t he believed her? Had he just realized that she wasn’t to his taste and didn’t intend to come?
Just before she was on the edge of incoherence, she saw him cantering up, astride a magnificent black barb. He pulled up when he saw her, leaned down just a bit, and gave her a lazy smile.
“Aren’t I to be allowed in your house?”
“I don’t think so. It’s too soon.”
All right, he thought, he would accept that for the moment. “Where is your horse?”
“Follow me.” She walked around the back of the house to the stables. Her mare, Fanny, was standing placidly, calmly accepting the caresses bestowed on her neck by a doting Henry, one of the stable lads. She waved him away and mounted by herself. She arranged her skirts, knew in her heart that she wasn’t physically capable of presenting a finer picture, and prayed. She gave him a tentative smile. “It’s early. Shall we go to the park?”
He nodded and pulled alongside her. She didn’t say a word. He frowned as he neatly guided his stallion around a dray filled with kegs of beer and three clerks dressed in funereal black. The streets were crowded with hawkers, shopkeepers, wagons of all sorts, ragged children from the back streets. He stayed close, saying nothing, keeping a lookout for any danger. There was danger everywhere, naturally, but he realized that she could deal with most anything that could happen. If she couldn’t, why then, he was a man, and he could. Whatever else she was, she was an excellent rider.
When they reached the park, he said as they turned into the north gate, “Let’s gallop for a bit. I know a lady shouldn’t so indulge herself, but it is early, as you said.”
They raced to the end of the long outward trail and his stallion, strong as Douglas’s horse, beat Fanny soundly. She was laughing when she pulled her mare.
“You ride well,” Colin said.
“As do you.”
Colin patted his stallion’s neck. “I asked Lord Brassley who you were. Unfortunately he didn’t see you speaking to me. I described you, but to be frank, ma’am, he couldn’t imagine any lady, particularly Lady Joan Sherbrooke, speaking to me as you did.”
She rubbed the soft leather of her York riding gloves. “How did you describe me?”
She’d gotten to him again, but he refused to let her see it. He shrugged and said, “Well, I said you were reasonably toothsome in a blond sort of way, that you were tall and had quite lovely blue eyes, and your teeth were white and very straight. I had to tell him that you were brazen to your toenails.”
She was silent for a moment, looking over his left shoulder. “I suppose that’s fair enough. But he didn’t recognize me? How very odd. He’s a friend of my brother’s. He is also a rake but good-hearted, so Ryder says. I fear he still tends to see me as a ten-year-old who was always begging a present off him. He had to escort me once to Almack’s last Season, and Douglas told me in no uncertain terms that Brass wasn’t blessed with an adaptable intellect. I was to remain quiet and soft-spoken and on no account to speak of anything that lay between the covers of books to him. Douglas said it would make him bolt.”
Colin chewed this over. He simply didn’t know what to think. She looked like a lady, and Brass had said that Lady Joan Sherbrooke was a cute little chit, adored by her brothers, perhaps a bit out of the ordinary from some stories he’d heard, but he’d never noticed anything pert about her himself. He’d then lowered his voice, whispering that she knew too much about things in books, at least he’d heard that from some matrons who were gossiping about her, their tones utterly disapproving, and she was indeed tall. But then again, she’d been waiting on the front steps of the town house for him to arrive, certainly not what the young lady of the house would do, would she? Wouldn’t an English