advanced his king’s bishop.
Jago frowned and deliberated, his hand hovering over his queen’s knight. Perhaps it was time to try something different? He lifted the piece.
“I shouldn’t do that, my lord, or it will be over in four.”
Jago squinted at the board, playing out the moves until he saw what Ben meant. “Dammit,” he muttered. “What would you do?”
Ben bent low, squinting over the top of his spectacles, rather than looking through them.
“Lord, Ben. How the devil can you even see through those filthy lenses?” Jago demanded, frowning at the other man’s grubby glasses. “Here, give them to me.”
Ben sat back in his chair. “Oh, you needn’t—”
Jago held out his hand and wiggled his fingers.
“You needn’t sir. I can—”
“I can’t bear to look at them—I’m not sure how you can. Don’t worry; I won’t break them,” he assured him, “I’ve worn spectacles since before I was breeched and I know how to handle them properly.”
Ben hesitated and Jago swore it was actual fear that flickered across his normally impassive face. What the devil was that all about?
“Ben, what is—”
Ben yanked off the glasses and handed them over.
Jago pulled out one of the small squares of cotton he always kept in his pocket and held it up. “I’ll give you this cloth when I’m done,” he said, fogging the lens and then drying it. “It’s especially soft cotton and I have at least a dozen of them.
When the boy didn’t answer, he glanced up. “Lord, are you feeling ill, Ben? You suddenly look quite peaked. Perhaps something you ate didn’t agree with you.” Jago raised the glasses and glanced through the lens he had just cleaned.
And then he glanced through it again.
He frowned.
“I’m sure that is good, my lord. May I have them back, now?”
Jago ignored the boy’s outstretched hand and raised the spectacles higher, until he could look though them at Ben’s tense, pale face.
“These are glass,” he said, after checking the second, still-grubby lens and finding the same unmagnified image.
Ben reached out and snatched them from his hands.
“Careful—you’ll break them,” Jago cautioned. “Not that you appear to need them.”
Jago stared at the boy as he replaced spectacles, his face now flushed rather than pale.
“Why would you wear clear glass spectacles, Ben?”
Ben’s mouth opened, and then closed. Finally, he shrugged. “They make me look older.”
Jago studied his face, trying to decide if that were true.
No, Ben still looked young, just young with glasses.
The boy was lying—Jago could see that in his guarded eyes. Besides, nobody wore spectacles if they didn’t have to. Not only were they a nuisance, but they were damned expensive.
He stared at Ben; just what was it about him that—
The truth hit him with all the subtlety of a mallet.
“Bloody hell,” Jago muttered. His gaze froze on Ben’s brow—the little bit he could see that wasn’t covered with a sheaf of light brown hair. “Your supraorbital ridge—how is it that I didn’t notice?”
“I’m s-sorry sir, my super what?”
“Your brow, Ben—” Jago gave an abrupt bark of unamused laughter. “Ben? I think not. What’s your real name?”
“I don’t know what you mean, my lord?”
Jago looked into eyes he’d once thought honest and true. “Please, don’t make the mistake of believing me a fool, even if you have been fooling me,” he said, coldly. “Now, who the devil are you and why the hell are you working as my bloody stable master?”
Chapter Nine
Ascot
1814
Three Years Ago
Benna pulled out her pocket watch and scowled.
Bloody Geoff. At this rate he’d be late. And this after he’d been so insistent on coming to Ascot and working the swells who flocked to the races.
If he thought that dragging his heels was somehow going to force Benna into changing her mind and helping him tonight, he was delusional.
She glared at the door to his bedchamber; she would give him five more minutes and then she would march into that room—regardless of who he was with and what they were doing—and drag him out like a beagle hauling a rabbit from its burrow.
Benna smiled at the imagery, but her amusement was short lived.
Thanks to Geoff’s inability to plan any further than the length of his cock all the decent hotels in town had been packed to the gunnels by the time they arrived. That meant they’d needed to hire this shoddy little cottage, which came with no servants, leaving only Benna to wait on her extremely demanding employer.
Six days of serving as Geoff’s footman, valet, maid, boot boy, and all-around dogsbody were taking their toll. Usually