Page 91 of Lessons for Marquesses
It was not as if she would break down and sob in front of him, but she hurried through her tasks, toweling Wild Squire, brushing him, picking out his hooves, feeding, and watering him.
Wild Squire never wished for pets like Minion. In fact, he seemed wholly enthralled with Mr. Wolf, nickering several times. Unlike his aversion to her, Mr. Wolf walked willingly toward Wild Squire, eased a big hand to the stallion’s nose, and lovingly caressed his blaze.
“Your nemesis is a fine horse,” Mr. Wolf offered.
Tomorrow she might feel improved but this very minute, she could not stomach the desire she still possessed to linger with him, to bask in his presence, to not be him, but to bewithhim.
She said nothing. She might not exist at all. Which was nonsense for she only had to look at Mr. Wolf to know she existed. She wouldn’t feel so awful, wouldn’t know explicitly where she hurt, couldn’t describe her pain down to the smallest degree.
She sketched a bow and left.
She walked through the garden. The grass springing beneath her feet, the looming house soon to be lost, the scent of horse and hay and peonies, they were real.
“I am real,” she whispered.
Horses and the work supporting them had been the one thing that satisfied before Mr. Wolf. If she wasn’t exhausted when she fell into bed, she couldn’t sleep. So she returned to the stables and swept the cobwebs from the splendor of the soaring rafters and oiled the steel box locks. She nailed two loose box boards and squished her face at the stupid tears that arose for no reason in particular.
“Bloody hell. What are you doing?” Julian called from the junction of the stallion wing and the saddle room.
Should she confide in Julian? Cry on his shoulder? It was a broad shoulder. But the head attached to it might laugh at her sheer idiocy—for falling in love with a man when she was a female but not really a woman.
She put a face on her reply. “What does it look like? Hammering a board.”
He held out two letters which Georgiana took, and yanking the hammer from her hand, he lobbed it aside and dragged her from the box. “I’ve been waiting three hours to hear about the Evil Leprechaun.”
“Oliver says you slept in his bed for weeks terrified it followed you home.”
Julian hooked an arm about her neck, shoved her down and knuckled the back of her head. “All lies.”
Georgiana retrieved her fallen hat and tucked it under her arm. To genuinely smile like Julian was her wish. To be who she was before Mr. Wolf had come into her life. No maudlin affliction, no fascination, no needling sense of incompleteness.
The only retaliation that would serve her was to return to who she had been and show Mr. Wolf that she was unbreakable.
“Did you actually place Mr. Wolf in the Green Chamber?” Julian asked.
“Yes. He wished to become acquainted, and as he survived the night”—she laughed over the ache in her chest—“we can assume he has no heart.”
Julian opened the front door and stepped through before her. “Then,” her cousin mused, “he will be a perfect, heartless, match.”
“For?”
“Caroline.”
Georgiana was outside herself, watching as she halted in the reception hall and locked her knees. “She is here?”
“Mm-hmm. And not a quarter of an hour in Wolf’s presence and she’s planning her next meal. And he, well, let’s just say he appears willing prey. Care to join the wager on how many days before Mr. Wolf picks her lock? Twenty guineas to enter.”
“I don’t follow.”
“Poor choice of terms. Caroline’s is never locked.” Julian ticked off on his elegant fingers. “Join faces, lift a leg on, make the beast with two backs, wag a tail, give her the stiff and stout…”
Despair cut her at the knees.
She was going to have to watch Mr. Wolf fall for Caroline, imagine them kissing, imagine him whispering words he would never say to her. Her suffering was beyond tears.
She didn’t want to ask, but she had to. “How would you know if he did?”
“Georgie, really? They are called servants, which you have few, but they are always ready to earn a few extra coin.”
