“Better than I,” Rafe corrected.
Bruiser arched one eyebrow and lifted the quizzing glass.
Rafe finished hanging his tack on the hooks. “Let’s just go inside.” Together, they walked out of the stables and toward the castle. A few paces from the door, he stopped. “One more thing. You don’t kiss her hand.”
“She didn’t seem to mind it.”
Rafe wheeled on his boot and grabbed him by the shirtfront. “You don’t kiss her hand.”
Bruiser lifted his own hands in a gesture of surrender. “Very well. I don’t kiss her hand.”
“Ever. At all.” When he thought his message had sunk in, Rafe released him.
Bruiser pulled on his waistcoat. “Do you fancy this girl?”
“She’s not a girl. She’s a gentlewoman. One who will soon be a lady. And no, I don’t fancy her.”
“Good,” Bruiser said, “because that could become awkward. Seeing as how she’s engaged to your brother and all.”
“Believe me. I haven’t forgotten it. That’s the reason we’re here.”
“I know you have a liking for those fair-haired, buxom types. But you usually don’t like them quite so wholesome,” Bruiser said. “Nor so . . . What’s the word?”
“Taken. She’s taken.”
Piers would marry Clio. It was a truth they’d all grown up knowing. The match just made sense. It was what their parents had wanted. It was what Piers wanted. It was what Clio wanted, even if she’d forgotten it temporarily.
And it was what Rafe wanted, too. What he needed.
“It’s not a concern,” he said. “To her, I’m a coarse, barely literate brute with few redeeming qualities. As for her . . . She’s so innocent and tightly laced, she probably bathes in her shift and dresses in the dark. What would I do with a woman like that?”
Everything.
He’d do everything with a woman like that. Twice.
“I’m not going to touch her,” he said. “She’s not mine. She never will be.”
“Indeed.” Bruiser rolled his eyes and dusted off his hat. “Definitely no years of pent-up lusting there. Glad we have that sorted.”
Chapter Three
For once, Clio was grateful for her sister’s choosy nature.
As Anna had predicted, Daphne and Teddy didn’t care for either the Blue Room or the larger chamber across the corridor. Instead, they preferred an apartment in the recently modernized West Tower.
Clio couldn’t understand how papered walls could ever trump ancient character and a superior view, but at least she had two available rooms for her unexpected guests.
She showed Mr. Montague into the north-facing room. “I hope you will be comfortable here.”
The man pulled a quizzing glass from his pocket, lifted it to his eye, and made a great show of surveying the space—from the tapestry wall hangings to the Louis XIV armchair rescued from a French château.
“It will suffice,” he said.
“Very good. If you need anything at all, you’ve only to ring for the maids.” Closing the door behind them, Clio directed Rafe across the corridor to the Blue Room. “I trust this will—”
“Wheeee!”
The faint cry came from behind the closed door of Mr. Montague’s room. It was promptly followed by a springy sort of thud. The kind of sound that one might expect to result when a man leapt into the air and dropped his weight onto a mattress.
Followed by more bouncy noises. And something that sounded like a chortle of glee.
Clio tilted her head and looked at Rafe. “Where did you say Mr. Montague hails from?”
“I didn’t.”
She paused, listening to new sounds. The sharp reports of cupboards opening and closing.
“Look at all this storage.” The muffled words were followed by an appreciative whistle. “Good Christ, there’s a bar.”
She raised her eyebrows at Rafe.
He gave a defensive shrug. “He’s one of Piers’s diplomatic associates. Probably last stationed in some remote, godforsaken outpost. You know how it is.”
Declining to question it further, she showed him into the bedchamber. “This is the Blue Room. I trust it will suit you and your dog.”
“I told you, he’s not my dog.”
The dog that wasn’t his tottered all of three feet forward before dropping flat to the carpet. A thick puddle of drool spread from his jowls.
Rafe was more thorough in his appraisal of the space. He prowled the chamber, pinging from one piece of furniture to the next. His gaze skipped over every surface, never lingering.
“There’s a lovely view of the gardens and countryside, if you’d care to have a . . .” Clio watched as he ducked and peered under a wardrobe. “My lord, is something wrong?”
“Yes.” He’d stopped beside the carved rosewood bed, frowning. “There are twenty pillows on this bed.”
“I don’t think there are twenty.”
“One.” He plucked a tasseled, roll-shaped cushion from the bed. Then he cast it aside. It bounced onto the floor and rolled to a stop just short of Ellingworth’s drool.
“Two.” He reached for another and flicked it aside. “Three.” Another. “Four.”
One by one, he tossed the pillows from the head of the bed toward the foot of the mattress, where they mounted in a haphazard heap.
“Fourteen . . . fifteen . . .” Finally, he held the last pillow in his hand and shook it at her. “Sixteen.”