Page 6 of Too Scot to Handle
“Shite,” he whispered, pulling the window swiftly closed. “Hitchings is off somewhere.”
“Whyn’t he go out the front door like usual?” Dickie asked, crowding in on Tom’s right. “Likes to be seen strutting down the walkway, showing off his finery, does our Mister Hitchings.”
Joe snatched up his Latin grammar. Tom, Dickie, and John did likewise—Joe’s hearing was prodigious good—and a moment later, footsteps sounded in the corridor. By the time the door swung open, all four boys were absorbed in the intricacies of circum porta puella stat…or portal. Possibly portam.
What did it matter, unless the puella was pulchra and amica?
“He’s gone,” MacDeever said, holding the door open. “You have an hour of liberty, but don’t let Cook see you. One hour from now, you’re to be back here, looking sullen and peckish.”
“Thanks,” Tom muttered, hustling through the door. John and Dickie followed him, Joe left last, bringing his grammar.
MacDeever looked fierce, and he had the most marvelous Scots growl to go with his white eyebrows and tidy mustache, but he frequently foiled Hitchings’s worst excesses, probably risking his own post in the process.
“One hour,” the groundskeeper said. “And if I see anybody climbing down the drainpipe in broad daylight again, I’ll deliver him in to Hitchings myself. What would Miss Anwen think if one of her boys were to break his head on the cobbles, eh?”
What would Miss Anwen think if she knew that, every so often, her boys broke into Hitchings’s strongbox and took a detailed inventory of the contents?
Chapter Two
Anwen loosened her bonnet ribbons and nudged her millinery one inch farther back on her head, the better to enjoy the beautiful day.
“Why don’t you take off your bonnet?” Lord Colin asked.
He drove with the subtle expertise of one who knew his cattle and his way around London. Both horses were exactly the same height, build, and coloring, and they moved with the unity of a team raised and trained together.
Anwen’s cousin Devlin St. Just, a former cavalryman who’d come into an earldom, would say these horses had an expensive trot. Muscular, rhythmic, closely synchronized, and to a horseman, beautiful.
“A lady doesn’t go out without her bonnet, Lord Colin.”
“Balderdash. My sisters claim to forget their bonnets when they want to enjoy the fresh air without wearing blinders. I have a theory.”
“Are you the scientific sort, to be propounding theories?”
He was the fragrant sort, though his scent was complicated. Woodsy with some citrus, a hint of musk, with a dash of raspberry and cinnamon. Parisian would be Anwen’s guess. Her sister Megan claimed Lord Colin was quite well fixed.
“I’m the noticing sort,” he said, lowering his voice conspiratorially. “I suspect you are too. A younger sibling learns all the best ways to hide and watch. My theory is that women wear bonnets so that men cannot be certain exactly which lady they approach unless the gentleman is confronting the woman head-on.”
He halted the horses to wait at an intersection before turning onto Park Lane, so heavy was the traffic. For a moment, Anwen simply enjoyed the pleasure of being out and about on a sunny day. Helena Merton and her mama passed them, and Helena’s expression was gratifyingly dumbstruck.
Anwen wiggled gloved fingers at the Mertons, the grown-up equivalent of sticking her tongue out.
“Maybe, your lordship, the ladies wear their bonnets so they are spared the sight of any men but those willing to approach them directly.”
Lord Colin gave his hands forward two inches and the horses moved off smoothly. “You would not have made that comment if any of your sisters were with us. Your sister Charlotte would have offered the same opinion, but you would have remained silent. If you were to pat my arm right about now, I’d appreciate it.”
“Whyever—oh.” Anwen not only patted his arm, she twined her hand around his elbow. “Helena fancies you?”
“That is the question. Does she fancy me, my brother’s title, my lovely estate in Perthshire, or any man who will get her free of her mother’s household? Your uncle is a duke, you’ve doubtless faced a comparable question frequently. How do you stand it?”
Even for a Scotsman, Lord Colin was wonderfully blunt. “I love Uncle Percy. There’s nothing to stand.”
That was not quite true. The social season was an exercise in progressive exhaustion, and each year, Anwen wished more desperately that she could be spared the waltzing, the fortune hunters, the at homes, the fittings, the…
The boredom.
“So every fellow who bows over your hand and professes undying devotion means it from the bottom of his pure, innocent, financially secure heart?”
Anwen had not endured a profession of dying devotion from a bachelor for at least three years, thank heavens.
