Page 127 of An Inconvenient Vow

His brows lifted. “You think I would be better employed elsewhere?”

“No, of course not,” Sabina mumbled, casting down her comb and starting her first braid in a haphazard fashion. So rattled was she that the result fell far short of her usual standard. She had just fastened the loose braid and started on her second when she heard Jeffree’s sharply indrawn breath.

“What are you doing?” he asked in an annoyed voice.

“What does it look like?”

“Extremely untidy!”

Sabina shrugged a shoulder. “No one will know as they won’t see them under my headdress.”

He practically vibrated with annoyance at her answer. “I will know!” he retorted tersely.

Again, Sabina shrugged, reaching for a ribbon to secure the end of her second braid. He strode across the room and practically snatched it from her hand.

“Give that to me!” He tutted. “Sit down on that trunk.”

Sabina lowered herself onto the flat surface and sat watching his face as he picked up the comb and ran it through the length of her hair. He was fully absorbed in his task, his expression intent and curiously reverent as he dressed her hair, separating it into three equal strands and carefully weaving them together. With each pass, he adjusted the tension to keep it as he wanted it until he reached the very tips of her hair. Then he fastened the end and ran his thumb up and down the thick braid.

“That is something more like it,” he said at last. “Now turn around, so I can do the other side.”

Obediently, Sabina turned about and faced the opposite direction while he repeated the process on the left side of her head. When he had finished, he stood there a moment, before reaching out to run his hand up and down the back of her head. Sabina closed her eyes at the slow caress. She would not cry.

She felt suddenly desperate that he should not see Sir Charles and let their tenuous happiness be destroyed. His hand slid about her jaw and tipped her chin up. He gazed down at her with such a strange expression in his blue eyes that Sabina caught her breath.

When he spoke, however, his tone was down to earth. “You will have to pin it about your ears yourself,” he said gruffly. Sabina nodded and his thumb stroked absently across her jaw, as he frowned down at her. “What is it?” he asked suddenly making her draw in her breath.

She shook her head. “Nothing, I am just a little tired.” She thought he would take his leave then, but he lingered in the doorway as she coiled and pinned the braids.

“Does that not hurt?”

“No.”

“People say horses have no feelings in their mane and tail,” he replied. “But that is not so. They feel well enough when someone pulls their hair about.”

“Maybe some are just used to ill-treatment. When we were children, we had one old servant who used to comb our heads so roughly she would jerk our heads right back. Isemay used to wail.”

“And what about you? What did you do?” he asked curiously.

Sabina paused in the act of draping her veil over her head. “What makes you think I did anything?”

“Just a suspicion. Tell me.”

“Very well. I put a frog in her bed.”

He smirked. “Of course you did.”

Sabina’s throat closed over. “No one hurts my sister when I am around,” she said thickly, but Jeffree had already departed.

As soon as she heard the door slam, Sabina ran down to the stables and had Osborn saddle up Blitha.

“I only just took the saddle off her,” he protested.

“I am not going far and I will return soon.”

Osborn tutted but did as he was bid. “Tells me to unsaddle ‘em, then they both goes tearing off again!” she heard him mutter under his breath. She supposed it made a sort of sense that Jeffree’s servant should also have such a dreadful attitude. They would neither of them put up with the other if not so.

A quarter of an hour later she was slipping up the backstairs at Tipton Hall and knocking softly at her sister’s bedchamber door. “Isemay?” she called softly, for she did not wish to go through the rigmarole of a visit with her parents just now. “Are you within?” She thought she heard movement, and after pausing to give her sister a few moments’ grace, she pushed the door open and got the shock of her life.