Page 105 of My Deal with the Wrong Duke

“She bit me.”

“The mare?”

“On the shoulder. Without provocation. I was merely standing beside her, admiring her conformation, and she turned her head and bit me as though I had blatantly offended her.”

“Perhaps you had,” Oliver said.

Sebastian scoffed. “Horses do not take offence.”

Oliver laughed naturally. It had been coming easier lately. “That horse did.”

“She bit me, Oliver. On the shoulder. Through my coat.”

“And yet you are telling this story with a fondness that suggests you are going back for her.”

Sebastian paused. “I am going back for her on Thursday.”

Louisa laughed. Oliver watched her across the table, candlelight catching the copper in her hair, and thought: tomorrow. He would ask her tomorrow.

By the time the household retired, it was past eleven. He found Louisa in the library chair, asleep, a novel open across her lap. The book was upside down. She had been reading it wrong side up for at least ten pages before surrendering.

He crossed the room and eased the book from her hands. She stirred.

“Go to bed,” he said fondly, as he looked down at her.

“Stop giving me orders.” She stood, retrieved the book, and left the room in her stockings without looking back.

He found her in the garden after breakfast, standing near the stone wall where honeysuckle climbed in open defiance of every attempt to train it. She was reading a letter from Eleanor, her lips moving faintly over the words.

“Eleanor says I am to write her immediately if you do anything interesting,” Louisa said, folding the letter. “She finds the countryside intolerably dull by report and is relying on me for entertainment.”

Oliver laughed softly at this. “I shall endeavor to be interesting.”

“You have not managed it so far this morning. You were very quiet at breakfast.”

“I was thinking.”

“Dangerous habit. About what?”

“About you.”

She glanced up. He held her gaze a beat longer than the sentence warranted, and a faint color rose along her cheeks.

“Walk with me,” he said.

She tucked Eleanor’s letter into her sleeve and fell into step beside him. They followed the path along the garden wall, past the potting shed and the greenhouse, past the sundial with its cracked gnomon, past the oak tree where a thick fork in the branches still held the shape of a hiding place.

“I was ten,” Oliver said, pointing. “The offending subject was Greek. My tutor assigned Xenophon to a boy who wanted only to ride.”

“How long did you last?”

“Four hours. I was discovered only when I sneezed.”

“Four hours in a tree. You must have been miserable.”

“I was triumphant. Four hours without Greek is four hours well spent.” He paused. “My mother found me first. She was walking the grounds and heard me sneeze from the path. She looked up, and I looked down, and she stood beneath the tree for a full minute deciding whether to be angry.”

“Was she?”