Wasn’t the man listening? “And my intention was to train horses with my brother, but no one wanted to hire someone so young on nothing more than the reputation of our father. Perhaps they’d hire a stable boy, but not a girl, and not one bringing her own horse.”
“Is this the same brother you last saw sleeping in an abandoned cottage?”
A chill shot through her. She didn’t remember telling him that. What else had she told him while babbling nervously across the countryside? If she couldn’t remember, she couldn’t continue her tale. She might contradict herself, or unwittingly give more away. “Abandoned cottages are lovely finds when you don’t have anywhere else to call home.”
She quickly added, “I don’t know where my brother is now.” That was technically true. She didn’t know exactly where he was.
Mr. Whitworth’s eyes traveled over her face, jerking from point to point as if trying to see past her words to the truth beyond.
Wind blew outside the cottage, wailing past the openings and rattling the loose, broken edges. A chunk of roof fell into the cottage and broke into pieces on the floor. Rhiannon jumped sideways, pushing Sophia into the cottage wall. Air rushed from her lungs as Sophia braced herself against the horse.
Then Mr. Whitworth was there, squeezing in beside her and forcing Rhiannon to shift over and press against the other side of the stall.
She was now snugly trapped between the heat of the horse and the warmth of the man. She didn’t know what to do with her hands or even her feet. Should she turn toward him? Face the horse and stand shoulder to shoulder with him? Duck down and crawl between Rhiannon’s legs so she could escape?
Ultimately, she did some awkward blend of none of those and stepped on the man’s foot. She tried to scramble away and made the entire business worse by tripping over her own toes and kicking him in the shin as she grabbed the lapels of his jacket to keep herself from falling.
“Are you quite finished? I’ve never seen you this clumsy.”
Would it kill the man to allow a little emotion into his voice? She couldn’t tell if he was still mad or had moved on to somewhat amused.
She placed her feet carefully on the ground and straightened. “I am not clumsy.”
“Not normally, no, though it seems you’re expending all your dexterity on your tongue at the moment and have none remaining for your feet.”
She opened her mouth to answer, but he didn’t let her. “You do realize this is someone else’s property.”
She nodded because she could hardly deny it.
“Miss Fitzroy—I assume that is your real name?”
“Yes.”
He gave a short nod. “Miss Fitzroy, you are hardly the first person I have met to whom life has been less than kind. Nor are you the first I have employed, though you do have the distinction of being the first woman—a distinction, I might remind you, I never intended. I am no stranger to aiding the less desirable, and my reputation suffers none for it, but I will not tolerate being lied to, used, or manipulated. You have two minutes to convince me not to haul you out of here and let the local magistrate sort out your claims.”
Two minutes? She couldn’t produce a convincing argument in two minutes, not with his imposing presence looming over her. She wasn’t even sure she could formulate something in two hours.
Her heart squeezed and breath rushed in and out of her lungs until her lips began to tingle. Her mouth opened, though she wasn’t entirely sure what she meant to say, and the words spilled out without any consideration.
“Jonas tried getting work as a horse trainer, but the men who hired him either refused to let me come with him or were all too willing for him to bring me along. We moved from place to place. I tried to get work as a maid a few times, but I always got in trouble for being too rough with the cleaning or staring out the window daydreaming, and it was . . . hard . . . being away from Jonas and the horses.”
Mr. Whitworth was a horseman. Surely he understood the need to be around the animals in order to feel alive.
“We lived in the woods sometimes, saving what little money we had for food and letting Rhiannon and Prancer graze in a field. I suppose we were stealing the grass, but it wasn’t as if it wouldn’t grow