Marrying Mr. Darcy (Love Manor #2) - Kate O'Keeffe Page 0,46

I hop up and straighten out my clothes.

“Well, it can’t be any worse than falling in a loo,” he teases, and I narrow my eyes at him.

“Very funny.” I extend my hand. “Keys, please.”

“Drive on the left side,” he reminds me.

“I know,” I reply, pretending to be offended. Although I admit I do need to remind myself every time I get in the car. “Catch you later.”

I give him a quick kiss and head down the hallway. Making the assumption the word “muck” is quite literal, I sneak into Zara’s room and borrow her most serious looking raincoat. It’s an oilskin that almost reaches the floor on me but is probably only thigh length on her. Okay, I’m exaggerating here, but she was genetically gifted the most fantastic pair of long legs. They make mine look like stubby fingers in comparison, thanks to my feeble five feet and three inches.

Not that I’m in any way jealous, of course.

To be extra careful, on my way out the door, I grab a pair of Sebastian’s rubber boots—or Wellingtons as they’re referred to here for reasons unknown to me—and although they’re a gazillion sizes too big and come up to my knees, I throw them in the trunk of the car.

Once at Jilly’s stables some forty-minutes' drive later, I slip on the boots and stomp over the cobbles, my feet bouncing around as though they’re trying to escape from their roomy rubber incarceration. The distinctive aroma of hay and horse pee hits me between the eyes as I venture inside the stables.

“Jilly?” I call out when there’s no sign of her.

A couple of horses’ heads poke out of their stalls to check out who’s disturbing them.

“Hey, horses,” I say to them, their liquid brown eyes watching me. “You’re all looking very…horsy today.”

“Well, I would expect they’d look ‘horsy’ everyday, what with being horses. Wouldn’t you?” Jilly says with a laugh as she walks toward me. She’s dressed in a pair of riding pants and a black slim-fitting T-shirt, a pair of fitted boots on her feet. “Oh, Emma. What are you wearing?”

I glance down at my oversized coat and boots. Next to Jilly, I look like a toddler playing dress-up in her mom’s clothes. “You said ‘muck out,’ so I thought I’d come prepared.”

“You look like you’re expecting the deluge of the century. Come on, take off that ridiculously large coat. You’ll boil over.”

I do as instructed, folding Zara’s coat over one of the stalls.

“And the Wellies?”

“Seb’s.”

“I suppose they’ll have to do. Now, pop into the empty stall here and help me move some things. I’ve just put Basil out to graze.”

“You called a horse after an herb?”

“Oh, they all are. We’ve got Basil, of course, and these darlings are Rosemary and Tarragon down at the end.” She points down the stalls at the horses who are still watching us.

“That’s cute.”

“Help me with the food tub.”

As we set to work removing the items from the stall and then cleaning it out, I complain to Jilly about how I embarrassed myself once again in front of Geraldine.

“Do you mean when you fell into the toilet or when you referred to the Dadaist Marcel Duchamp as Marcel Marceau, the famous mime?”

“Marcel Marceau was a mime? Huh. I didn’t know. I just knew his name.”

“Oh, yes. Did all that stuck in boxes thing people seem to like so much.” She flays her hands around, doing a very poor impersonation of a mime stuck in a box, and I let out a giggle.

“You’d make a great mime, Jilly.”

“Maybe I could give up the law and pursue a life on the stage? Silently and dressed in a Breton shirt, of course.”

I smile at her. Jilly is quirky and more English than the English, and her heart is in the right place. I’m so lucky to have her as a friend here.

“Did Geraldine say anything to you?” I ask.

“Nothing of any consequence.”

Her tone tells me she did.

My heart sinks. Of course she did. The girl you don’t want your grandson to marry made a public fool of herself. She must be enjoying every moment of this.

“Give it to me straight, Jilly.”

“Only that you’d made a bit of a spectacle of yourself, and it was a little worse than the whole giggling fit at the opera thing.”

My heart sinks. I know she’s dulling Geraldine’s words to soften the blow. “Oh, no.”

She leans the broom she’s been using to sweep the floor with against the wall of the stall. “But that’s