Mr. Felton put down his fork. “There is a race at Silchester in a few days. I intend to run two horses. I generally bring my horses down a week before a race and allow Rafe’s stable master to baby them.”
“Rafe? Rafe?” Lady Clarice said querulously. “Oh. You mean His Grace. I am afraid that I simply cannot accustom myself to the easy manners of this generation.”
“I’m afraid it is my idiosyncrasy rather than Lucius’s lack of manners,” Rafe said. “I abhor being addressed by my title.”
“Lucius? Ah, our dear Mr. Felton,” Lady Clarice said.
Tess watched, rather surprised. She had formed the impression that Lady Clarice would have nothing to do with those who were untitled.
Rafe bent his head close to hers. “Lucius is blessed with an income the size of the Prince Regent’s. There’s always the chance that she’ll be led astray by his estate and let go her dreams of being a duchess.”
“Stop funning!” Tess whispered. “She might hear you!”
“The excitement of being able to make sisterly confidences has likely gone to my head,” Rafe told her, not even bothering to hush his voice.
“That, or the brandy you’ve tucked away,” Mr. Felton put in.
So Rafe was drinking brandy! He had finished the glass given him when they sat down, and he was well near down in the next glass. But to Tess’s mind, the only sign that their guardian might be the slightest bit daffy was that his voice was even more growly than earlier, and he’d stopped flinging back the hair from his eyes. Instead, he just sat back, long legs spread before him, a lock of brown hair over his forehead, pushed back from the table in a most unducal fashion.
Lady Clarice leaned closer to him and smiled in a way that set Tess’s teeth on edge. “You poor man,” she cooed. “You’re holding up under the strain of this invasion of females so well.”
“Females never bother me,” Rafe growled, “only ladies.”
Tess swallowed a grin.
“Do you know your guardian well?” came a voice from her left.
“Not well,” she said, turning reluctantly to Mr. Felton. “I gather you have been friends for years.”
“Yes.”
Tess could see out of the corner of her eye that Rafe was waving his glass in the air, just a trifle unsteadily.
The butler, Brinkley, was making his way toward the top of the table with a decanter in hand and a disapproving expression on his face.
“He handles his liquor well,” Mr. Felton said coolly, “but you might as well understand immediately, Miss Essex, that Rafe is not one to greet the evening without a copious draught of brandy.”
Tess’s eyes narrowed. Felton’s voice had the slight edge that she recognized; just so did the local nobility talk about her father’s ever-failing stables. It made her bristle all over. “I myself find abstemiousness remarkably tedious,” she said, picking up her champagne and finishing the glass.
“Your guardian will be euphoric to learn of your compatibility.” Felton was obviously the sort of man who thought a sardonic expression was good enough for all occasions. He was overly large as well. Why, he must be all of fifteen stone and it looked to be pure muscle. He likely rode a stallion. Even his shoulders were a third again as wide as their guardian’s.
Thanks to being reared in a house cluttered by gear and periodically swept by groups of horse-mad gentlemen, Tess could spot a horseman at ten paces. When the dibs were in tune, and the horses were running sweet—well, then a horseman’s life was beautiful. But when a horse had to be put down, or the downs were too mired for galloping, or—
She shook off the memory of her father’s fits of despair. The shortest way to inoculate herself against this Adonis—nay, any man—was to ask him about his livestock. There was nothing more tedious than a man in the fit of equine adoration. “Do you have a large breeding program, sir?”
“Small but select. I fear I give my stables far too much importance in my life.”
Precisely. “I would adore to hear about your stables,” she continued, giving him a dewy-eyed glance. Now he would launch into a fetlock-by-fetlock description and—
“Seven horses,” he said. “Would you like them categorized by color, by year, or—” and he paused—“by gender?”
“By all means, use whatever convention you wish,” Tess retorted, forgetting to look dewy-eyed.
“The females first, then,” he said. “Prudence is a filly of two years: nicely built with a graceful neck. Chestnut. Her eyelashes are so long that I wonder if she can see to race.”
Tess blinked. His descriptions were certainly different from her father’s, which would have run along the lines of the filly’s parentage, markings, and breeding. She doubted Papa had ever noticed a horse’s eyelashes in his life.
“Minuet is a filly too,” Mr. Felton continued, his eyes on Tess’s face. “She’s a beauty, sleek and black, with one of those tails that flows behind her when she runs, like water going downhill. She’s a thief, and likes nothing better than to steal a bit of grass or corn.”
“Do you allow her to eat grass, then?” Tess asked.
In reply, he asked, “Did your father have a specific eating program for his horseflesh?”
“They were only allowed to eat oats,” Tess said. “Oats and apples. We used to make apples into apple-mash because the horses got so tired of plain apples. Papa was convinced that apples were key to good digestion, and that would make the horses run faster.”
Lucius thought that diet was absurd, if not abusive. Miss Essex might have agreed; she had lowered her eyes and was picking at her food with all the interest of an overfed sparrow.
For his part, Lucius had now distinguished Rafe’s wards one from the others. Annabel sparkled; she dazzled the eye and ear with her honey voice and honey hair. Imogen was like a shock to the system. Her beauty was paired with a pair of eyes so ardent that he was uncomfortable even looking at her and felt more than grateful that he wasn’t Maitland. That much emotion directed across the table must make a man queasy.
But Miss Essex—or Tess, as Rafe was calling her—had as much beauty as the other two, and it was paired with a dry sense of humor that hid itself behind propriety. He couldn’t quite decide whether her humor or her mouth was the more remarkable. She had the look of the others about her; the sisters shared retroussé noses, high cheekbones, pointed chins, and thickly fringed eyelashes.
But Tess’s mouth was unique. Her lips were plump and of a lush, deep red. But the outrageous detail, the thing that made her mouth like no mouth he’d seen before, was the tiny, scandalously sensual black mole that marked just where a dimple might be. Hers was a hussy’s mouth, though not that of a common dasher. No, obviously virginal and obviously proper Miss Essex had the mouth of a woman who would become coquette to a king, a mouth by which a courtesan could make herself celebrated on two continents.
Lucius shifted in his seat.
Thank goodness Derwent hadn’t unpacked those bags. He was no sacrifice to be offered at the altar of Rafe’s obligations to his wards. Although, in the presence of Miss Essex, one could almost imagine—
Lucius came to himself with a start. What in God’s name was he doing? Hadn’t he decided, after last year, to forgo the dubious pleasures of marriage?