Page 84 of Dick Stone, Regency Stud
“Mad…” he said, his voice rising at the end. He felt positively barking mad; that was certainly true!
“Do you think they’d have me back?” she asked, looking over his shoulder.
“Have you back?” asked Edward, feeling the last rope mooring his self-restraint break. “Did those men seem like they wanted to bid on you tonight?”
“Maybe if I’d lifted my nightdress higher—”
“They didn’t want you,” rasped Edward, tightening his hold on Tabitha as he marched home. “At least for a purpose other than hurting you. Why, the auctioneer slapped you. Blast it, Tabby, why aren’t you tearing at your hair and crying? That was hell to watch!”
She went still in his arms, and her little mouth hardened. “Mayfair misses get to cry over a needle prick, but us? We get told to dodge out the way faster next time. Be happy it wasn’t harder. Haven’t you heard? There are sumpt’y laws on tears.”
“Sumptuary.”
“That too.”
Edward sighed. “What in the devil’s name has got into you, Tabby? As a lad, you were the cleverest little shit. Tobias would never get entangled in something like this!”
“Well, I’d go back to being him, but I haven’t got his clothes!”
“You traded them away. For what? What would possess you—?”
“I was trying to keep up my end of the bargain!”
“What bargain?” he cried, kicking aside something that crunched under his boot.
“I told you: I’ll become your equal, and then we can be friends, even if your wife decides she hates me,” said Tabby as if everything she said was reasonable.
After his brother died last year, Edward went from scoundrel second son to scoundrel heir-to-the-marquessate — without the allowance typically associated with such a rise in consequence.
“For the last time, I don’t have a wife!” he roared into the London night.
“Nor will you if you go about yelling like that, young man!” shouted a voice from a nearby window before it closed with a bang.
“Sorry,” he called up, continuing on their way.
“I know how to be a lad, but I don’t know nothing about being a girl.”
“I could have told you that,” muttered Edward.
“You don’t have to be so mean about it,” she said.
“I don’t think you understand who those men were.”
“Toffs? Lords? A few cits?”
“Toffs, lords, and citswho would hurt you.”
“I suppose that’s part of getting rogered the first time, isn’t it?” she asked.
“No, but these men…they’d draw it out. They’d make it worse.”
“First time never feels nice from what I hear.”
“Who said that?”
“Just what people say.”
“I need to put you down for a moment,” he said, spotting church steps where she could stand without ending up covered in muck.
