years ago?
“It lies in Kent,” she said, resting her cheek against his chest. “You’ll not overtax yourself today? You’ll warm your feet before you do lasting damage to them?”
“I will warm my feet.” He kissed her cheek and stepped back, lest he fall to his knees and start begging her to reconsider his proposal of marriage. She’d made her position gently but firmly clear, preferring the independence of her employment over what a stranger might offer her on appallingly short acquaintance.
“Sophie, if you need anything, anything for you or Kit, you’ll send to me?”
She nodded but did not give him her word.
He would never hear from her again.
He kissed the top of the baby’s fuzzy head and turned to check the girth on the makeshift saddle adorning the massive horse’s back.
“Thank you.” Sophie kept her voice low and her features from view by virtue of nuzzling the baby.
“For?”
“I made some Christmas wishes, foolish, extravagant wishes. You have made many of them come true.”
“Then I am content.”
It was the most resoundingly false lie he’d ever told.
***
Down the barn aisle, Miss Sophie was pretending to groom her remaining precious, the one-eyed Sampson. What she was really doing was crying, crying like her heart would break, crying on the great beast’s smelly neck, and hiding it like she always hid it.
“Don’t pay no mind, nipper.” Higgins grinned at the baby in his arms. “Lady Sophie is due a few tears, unlike some wee people who have their every need met before it needs meeting. She’s spoiling you proper, she is.”
“Miss Sophie said the nipper has taken to crawling already,” Merriweather observed from where he was cleaning a muddy girth across the snug little tack room. “Best day of the lad’s life was when that worthless Joleen went haring off.”
“Spare the girl a prayer. That Harry was none too steady.”
“Horny bastard. Bet he had her breeding again, and the nipper not even a year.”
Which would explain why Joleen had taken the desperate and shrewd step of abandoning her child in Miss Sophie’s care.
“Miss Sophie will do right by the lad.”
Merriweather glanced up from the girth. “Be a bit of a surprise when her brothers show up and find her sporting a bebby on her hip.”
Higgins used a gnarled finger to chuck the baby’s wee chin. “Be some surprises all around before the sun sets this day. Mark me on this, nipper.”
Merriweather winked, and they shared a grin while Kit chortled gleefully and grabbed for Higgins’s nose.
***
“You’ve grown ominously silent,” Val observed.
Westhaven rode to his brother’s left, because it was St. Just’s turn to break the trail ahead. The merchants along The Strand had done what they could to clear a path, but with so much snow on the ground, there was simply nowhere to put it all. Two horses could pass comfortably most places, but not all.
“I’m trying to decide which part of me is the most frozen,” Westhaven replied. “It’s a toss-up between my bum-fiddle and my nose.”
“I lost awareness of my nose before we hit London.”
Westhaven glanced at Val’s gloved hands. “Your fingers are not in jeopardy, I trust?”
“Heaven forfend! Ellen would be wroth, which I cannot allow.”
“I cannot allow much longer in this perishing saddle.”
“We’ve little enough light left.” Val glanced at the sky, which was turning a chilly sunset turquoise. “The Chattells will likely be sitting down to dinner, and didn’t Their Graces give the staff at the mansion holiday leave?”
“I gave them holiday leave.” Which was an idiot notion when compared with imposing on the neighbors for hospitality. “They get four weeks off, we pay them for two, and everybody has pleasant holidays. The crew at Morelands takes leave in late summer, before harvest.”
“I’ll have to implement something like it at Bel Canto, assuming I don’t turn into an icicle before spring. I don’t relish being Chattell’s uninvited guests.”
“You’re married,” Westhaven said, lips quirking up. “You’re safe, Valentine. Of no interest to the debutantes at all.”
“Yes, but they all come with mothers and aunts and older sisters… St. Just, halt if you please.”
St. Just twisted in his saddle, his horse coming to a stop without a visible cue. “We’re going to take in the fresh air, are we? It grows dark soon, in case you were too busy composing tunes in your head, Baby Brother.”
“I want to drop off this violin. The repair shop is just down that alley.” Val swung a leg over his horse’s back and climbed down into the snow. “I won’t be but a minute.”
“Might