lantern and carried it along the aisle toward Blaze’s stall. His pulse jumped when a dark figure rose from a stack of hay bales “Who’s that?” He raised the lantern high to show the man’s face. “Ethan?”
“Yes, sir,” came the heavy answer.
“What are you doing out here at this hour?”
“Nothing, sir. Just… thinking, like.” His luck was right out tonight, Ethan thought. He’d been sure no one would look for him here, it being his father’s domain and everyone knowing their history. Now, unbelievably, here was the master himself, and he was in trouble. He held the evidence behind his back, and of course the thrice-damned bottle clinked on a button on his coat. Now he was for it. First Lucy; and maybe he would lose everything else, too.
“What have you got there?”
Half blinded by the lantern light, Ethan just gave up. “It’s a… a bottle of rum my cousin Jack brought me, from Ja… Jam… someplace in the Indies.” Not wanting to ask in the kitchen for a drink, and be told no anyhow, he’d fetched the bottle from his attic room. First time he’d even opened the cursed thing! He’d wanted just one quiet drink. All right, maybe he’d had two. But he wasn’t drunk, and he wasn’t on the job, anyway. Not that that’d matter if Sir Alexander chose to object. Ethan saw his dreams keeling over like a felled tree.
Alec’s heart had slowed down again. He lowered the lantern. “Jamaican rum, eh? Can I try a taste?”
Startled, and almost hopeful, Ethan drew the dark bottle from behind him. “O’ course, sir.” He wiped the mouth on his sleeve and held it out.
Alec set the lantern carefully on the dirt floor, well away from the hay. He took the rum and tilted down a healthy swallow. Raw fire lit his throat and roiled in his already uncertain stomach. “Ah, that’s… hah… that’s done it.” He had to sit. He moved to the stack of bales next to his footman and hit it with a thump. The stable wheeled about him for a moment. “Oh, Lord.” Definitely an error of judgment.
Ethan watched the master slump on the hay and wondered what to do. Should he call someone to help get him to bed? He didn’t want to be caught here with the bottle. Sir Alexander thrust it at him. “You’d better take this.” Ethan took it. “Sit, sit,” he added. Uneasily, Ethan sank down beside him. This was a wonder, and no mistake, side by side with the master on a hay bale, and him deeper in his cups than Ethan could ever remember. “What were you out here thinking about?” he asked.
Why had he said that? Why had he been such a fool as to come out here in the first place? He tried to think of a safe answer, but his brain didn’t seem to be working. The unvarnished truth popped out of his mouth. “Love.”
“You too? Is it contagious?”
Ethan kept his mouth shut this time. He didn’t want to be asked about Lucy.
“Do you believe in love then, Ethan? Do you believe one can marry for love and not face disaster?” Alec heard himself slur a word or two and found he couldn’t care.
Had he learned about him and Lucy somehow? But no, he couldn’t have. “I’ve seen it in my own parents, sir. They’re right happy together, after thirty years.”
“Are they? And how do they manage that?”
“Well…” He didn’t know what to say. He’d never considered the matter. They just were. “I… I reckon they respect each other, sir.” The thoughts came to him as he voiced them, surprising him, from some unsuspected store of experience. “And they… it seems to me they like each other as well as loving. Uh, friendly, I mean. They’re not much alike, maybe, but… at bottom they… they agree on really important things.”
“Hah.” This sounded rather sensible, not the airy-fairy nonsense people often talked about love.
Ethan, heart in his mouth, his own happiness in the balance, dared everything. “Was… were you thinking of Miss Charlotte, sir?”
“Miss…? Ah, her maid still calls her that, doesn’t she? It’s rather endearing.” There was a word he never used, observed some distant part of Alec—the part that kept informing him he was drunk and should get himself inside and to bed. He continued to ignore it. “I was thinking of her. Yes. Do you remember my grandparents at all, Ethan?”
He blinked at this change of subject. “No, sir. Not really. I’ve heard…