At least, he assumed it was shock that made her choke on the pint of ale she was in the process of drinking in one long series of gulps. She pulled the mug from her lips, sloshing ale down her front as she set it to the table with enough force to knock it over and spill the rest of the drink across the tabletop, where piles of playing cards were spread out, as though a round of faro had just been finished.
She stood quickly, two other men shooting out of their chairs to avoid the liquid as a small glass rolled out of the mug and fell off the table, miraculously not breaking as it continued on its journey along the boards of the stable floor to stop, quite theatrically, at King’s foot.
He looked up from the glass, her earlier words echoing through him. It doesn’t seem like it would taste very good.
They’d been teaching her how to drink—a shot of whiskey in a mug of ale—the drink of men who wished to sleep well, and quickly.
It hadn’t been the other thing at all.
King cleared his throat.
“I’m sure we didn’t hear you correctly, King,” the Duke of Warnick rumbled in his Scottish brogue. “I could have sworn you called the boy a lady.”
Of course Warnick was in the stables. The man had spent a lifetime away from polite company. If ever there were someone for whom a title was a burden, it was the duke. But, disdainful of Society or no, a duke was not the ideal witness of Lady Sophie’s mad disguise and misguided plan.
Why in hell hadn’t she found her bed as soon as she realized the duke was in the stables?
Sophie’s gaze snapped to his, cheeks already flush from her alcoholic experience turning red with obvious embarrassment. He could read the pleading in her wide blue eyes and ignored it. He’d had enough of this woman and her trouble. He wanted her far, far away from him. “You didn’t mishear. She’s a woman. Anyone with eyes can see it.”
From the jaws gaping around the table, it seemed that anyone with eyes could not, in fact, see such a thing.
But they heard it, he had no doubt, when she opened her mouth and tore into him. “How could you?” she said, frustration edging into fury as her hands fisted at her sides and she faced him, stiff as a board. “You’ve ruined everything!”
“I’ve ruined everything?” he repeated, more than a bit outraged himself. “You’re the one who thought you could get away with this idiocy.”
“Wait. He’s a girl?” one of the other men at the table asked.
“Good that you’re catching up,” the duke drawled, all amusement.
“But he’s wearing livery,” the drunken man insisted.
“Indeed he is,” Warnick said with a lingering inspection. “However, now that I take a good long look . . .”
“Enough!” Sophie cried, lifting a burlap bag from the floor, slinging it over her shoulder, and storming past King to the exit.
King turned to the duke. “No more long looks.”
“But I’ve only had the one.”
“You’ve had hours to look. You didn’t even realize she wasn’t wearing boots.”
The duke’s brows shot up as the other men in the stable offered a chorus of disbelief.
“We would have noticed that!” one of them said with a laugh.
“Clearly not,” King pointed out. “It seems you lot see what you wish to see.” Though he couldn’t for the life of him imagine how they’d missed the fact that Lady Sophie Talbot was just that . . . a lady.
“Who is she?” Warnick asked.
King wasn’t about to tell him. “She’s no one of consequence.”
The duke smirked. “I doubt that.”
“Well, you shall have to accept it as fact nonetheless.” King didn’t have time for verbal sparring with a Scot. He turned on his heel and left the stables, heading in search of the girl.
He caught up with her on the road, a dozen yards from the entrance to the inn. She did not hesitate in her march, shoulders straight, head high. “Go away.”
“It’s the dead of night. Where do you think you’re going?”
“I should think it would be obvious,” she said. “Away from you.”
“And you’re going to walk there?”
“My feet are in fine working order.”
“They shan’t be after a quarter of an hour on this road. Why didn’t you take the boots, too?”
She did not reply.
“Not enough money?”
“I had enough money,” she grumbled.
“So?”
He would not discover the answer, as she chose that moment to step on a rock and gasp her discomfort.
“You see?” he said, unable to keep the smugness from his tone. Or, perhaps, uninterested in doing so.
Either way, she turned on him then. “In the span of twelve hours, you’ve called me unintelligent and insane, suggested that I am trying to trap you into marriage, declared me uninteresting, and pointed out the flaws of my physique.”
What? “I never pointed out your flaws.”
She crossed her arms. “The livery, my lord. It doesn’t fit.”
He blinked. “It doesn’t fit.”
She let out a frustrated sound and slashed a hand in the air. “It doesn’t matter. All of that said, I cannot imagine why it is you feel it necessary to follow me as I do the one thing you’ve been asking me to do from the beginning of our acquaintance—leave you.”
Honestly, he couldn’t imagine why it was necessary, either. But it was, somehow. “Also, I never declared you uninteresting.”