Total pages in book: 78
Estimated words: 75705 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 379(@200wpm)___ 303(@250wpm)___ 252(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 75705 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 379(@200wpm)___ 303(@250wpm)___ 252(@300wpm)
Instead, she ate this. On purpose.
The thought made him viscerally, irrationally angry.
He pulled the shilling from his waistcoat pocket and tapped it against his thigh. “I don’t know why I’m bothering to explain. You wouldn’t understand. Can’t understand. You’ve never known true deprivation.”
“You’re right,” she agreed.
Gabe didn’t want her to agree. He wanted to stay angry.
“I haven’t known that kind of hunger. I choose not to eat animals, and I know it’s a luxury to have that choice. It’s a luxury to have any choice. And I also know people find me ridiculous.”
“Not ridiculous.” He flipped the shilling into the air and caught it one-handed, his fingers trapping the coin against his palm. “Sheltered. Trusting and naïve.”
“I’m not so sheltered and naïve as you imagine.”
He could only laugh.
“I’m being sincere.” She picked at a blade of grass. “My youth wasn’t idyllic, either.”
“Let me guess. Beau Brummell snubbed you at a party once. I can only imagine how the nightmares haunt you to this day.”
“You know nothing of my life.”
“So there were more trials, were there?” He flipped the shilling into the air again, catching it easily. “The milliner’s ran out of pink ribbon.”
“Stop being cruel.”
“The world is cruel. This world is, anyway. Tell me, Your Ladyship, what’s it like in your fairy-tale land?”
She snatched the shilling from his hand. As he looked on in irritation, she stood, cocked her arm, and winged the coin with all her strength.
He pushed to his feet. “You just tossed away a perfectly good shilling. I can’t imagine a better example of your pampered existence. That’s a day’s wages for a workingman.”
“You have millions of shillings, as you’re so fond of telling everyone.”
“Yes, but I never forget that I came from far less. I couldn’t forget that, even if I tried.”
“I have tried to forget. To forget where I came from, to deny the past. You don’t know how I’ve tried.” Her voice crumbled at the edges. “I may not have known poverty, but that doesn’t mean I haven’t known pain.”
Gabe pushed a hand through his hair. He recognized the ring of truth in her voice. She was being honest, and he was being an ass.
Her character was finally coming into focus. He didn’t know who or what had hurt her, but the blade had sunk deep. The world didn’t hold enough kittens to fill that wound—but that hadn’t stopped her from trying.
Gabe gentled his voice. “Listen . . .”
“Oh, no.” She wheeled around. “Hubert’s missing.”
“Who’s missing?”
“Hubert! The otter. The only reason we’re stranded here in Buckinghamshire, remember?”
Oh, yes. That Hubert.
“How could I have been so careless?” She shaded her eyes with one hand and searched the area. “Where could he have gone?”
“Considering that he’s a river otter, I’m going to take a wild guess and say the river.”
She’d apparently come to the same conclusion. Gabe followed her as she raced toward the stream’s edge.
“Hubert!” She cupped her hands around her mouth like a trumpet. “Hyoooo-bert!” She plopped down in the damp grasses and began tugging at her bootlaces.
“What are you doing?”
“I’m going to look for him.”
Once she had the boots kicked off, she hiked up her skirts, untied a beguiling pink garter, and began rolling the white stocking down the tempting contours of her leg.
Sweet glory.
Gabe shook himself. This would be the moment to avert his gaze, he supposed. Actually, the gentlemanly moment would have been several seconds ago—but he didn’t play by gentlemen’s rules, and peeling one’s gaze from that sort of beauty wasn’t so easily accomplished. He was drawn to the sight the way an otter was drawn to the river.
Once she’d divested herself of both stockings, she stood and gathered her skirts in one hand, holding them above her ankles as she picked her way down the riverbank.
Gabe sighed. He should go after her. Not because he cared about catching Hubert, but because she was likely to stumble on the rocks and break her neck.
“Let him be.” He caught up to her and offered his hand as a means of balance. “You wanted them to have good homes. He’s saved us the trouble and found one for himself.”
“He’s been living with me since he was a pup. He can’t survive in the wild.”
“The wild? We’re in the English Midlands. This is hardly the wild.”
Her demeanor brightened. “I see him. Over there.”
Over by the opposite riverbank, a slinky brown tail disappeared beneath the water’s surface with a splash.
She tugged him by the hand. “We have to rescue him.”
“He doesn’t need rescuing.”
Ignoring him, she lifted her skirts to the knee and dipped her toes into the river.
“No.” Gabe planted his foot on the muddy bank and held her back. “Absolutely not. We are not going into the water.”
She lunged forward.
They were going into the water.
Goddamn, it was cold. By his second step, the river had swallowed him to the knee, sending water rushing to fill his boots. His new, finest-quality-outrageous-sums-of-money-could-buy boots.