Lady Lilias and the Devil in Plaid - Julie Johnstone Page 0,7

to the trousers she’d borrowed from the stable master’s son, Lucas, so she could climb down the tree at her bedchamber window and teach Owen to swim with ease.

“Thus the trousers,” Nash said, seemingly amused. He pressed his lips together in a knowing smirk.

She returned the look. “Yes. I’m rather a good climber. My father encouraged me, to my mother’s dismay, when I was younger. I don’t suppose he ever considered I might use the ability to leave the house at night when I was not supposed to. Or maybe he did.” She shrugged, pushing back the sadness of her father’s loss, which was always at the edges of her happiness. “I can go about rather freely since my father passed, my chaperone fled, and my mother—”

She stopped herself from confessing that her mother took laudanum nearly daily and locked herself in her room for most of the days and nights. Even Lilias had boundaries of propriety she would not cross, and one did not confess such scandalous secrets. Well, at least not until one knew someone better.

He arched lovely, dark, expectant eyebrows at her.

“And my mother’s preoccupation since my father’s death,” she added lamely.

“I see,” Nash said, his deep voice filled with understanding, and she truly felt he did understand. Somehow he knew what she had not said, and in that moment, it seemed as if an unspoken bond formed between them.

“I’ve been wondering how you flitted about the countryside with me,” Owen piped up, breaking the spell.

Lilias offered her friend an indulgent smile. He had not asked, not once since she’d met him, and it had always bothered her. She didn’t know why, but it seemed he should have at least asked. Nash had asked. It made her want to sigh happily.

“As to being ruined,” she continued, wanting to finish answering Nash’s questions with the hope that eventually he’d answer some of her own, “you two are our nearest neighbors. The others are so far away that being seen in your company and then ruined is hardly a concern. So don’t fret that you might have to wed me.”

“It’s you who would need to fret if you had to wed me,” he responded, then chuckled.

But to her, the laugh was forced. It covered the truth of his words. He found himself unworthy of marrying. How fascinating. He was most assuredly a Gothic hero in the making.

“I feel I’ll make an excellent husband,” Owen blurted.

“Of course you will,” Nash replied.

Nash’s kind words to Owen were quite endearing but not yet true, and it would not do for Owen to fool himself. “You’ll make excellent husband one day,” she assured her friend with a friendly pat on the arm. “But you are only five and ten summers,” she added.

“I’m the same age as you!”

She nodded. “Yes, and I’m not ready to wed yet, either.”

What she didn’t say was that he needed to become a lot less stuffy before he tried to find a wife. Romantic heroes were not supposed to be so concerned with propriety. Though, to be fair, she knew Owen’s obsession with being proper had to do with the fact that his mother had run off with their horse trainer. Lilias suspected Owen was trying to make up for his mother’s shocking lack of decorum by having so much of his own.

“I do believe I’ve answered all your questions,” she said to Nash. “Shall we get started teaching Owen to swim?”

“Why at night?” Nash asked instead of agreeing to begin.

She bit her lip, not wishing to admit the truth of the matter, but there didn’t seem to be hope for avoiding doing so. “Several reasons. One is that I cannot very well strip down to my unmentionables in front of the two of you to teach Owen to swim.”

“I’d say not!” Owen exclaimed.

Nash, however, shockingly said, “I’ve seen girls in their unmentionables before.”

“Well, of course you have!” Owen guffawed, which irritated her.

Apparently it irritated Nash, too, for he scowled at Owen, but she pressed her lips together on intervening. He’d been the one who wanted to shock Owen. It served Nash right that Owen had readily thought him a rogue.

But she did need to ensure he understood that just because she did not care for the fact that girls were bound by different rules than boys were, she did have a proper upbringing and plenty of self-worth. “I am not the sort of girl who will be showing anyone but my husband my unmentionables,” she stated, giving him