Once Upon a Tartan

hands. She’d held one of those hands, if only briefly. “I do not enjoy train travel, though it serves well for long distances. I rode out from Aberdeen over the course of the past two days.”

Fee sat up. “You rode Flying Rowan clear out from Aberdeen? That is miles and miles. Surely, your fundament—”

Hester put her hand over the girl’s mouth. “Fiona MacGregor, you know better than to mention such a thing before a gentleman.” Though sixty-some miles was quite a long way to ride when the train was readily available.

Aunt placidly sipped her tea. “One can wonder about such things, Fiona, my dear, but one doesn’t ask at table, and not of a gentleman guest. Some jam, my lord?”

He was not afraid of good, hearty fare. In fact, he ate with the casual gusto of a man who had never known hunger or want, a man whose family hadn’t weathered potato famines, clearances, or decades of outlaw status forbidding them use of their very name.

“You’re quiet this morning, Miss Daniels. Did you sleep well?” He paused long enough to put down his utensils and take a sip of his tea while he considered Hester from across the table.

“I’m a sound sleeper, my lord. Thank you.”

Fee seized on the minute silence following Hester’s comment. “Will you picnic with us, Uncle? We could bring Flying Rowan if he needs to work out the kinks too.”

“Rowan will work out his kinks ambling around a grassy paddock, but I will tell him you extended a cordial invitation. Perhaps tomorrow we might take him for a short hack.”

“Does that mean I can go with you?” Fee fairly bounced in her seat with anticipation. “Can we leap the walls again and go really, really fast?”

Spathfoy set down his teacup. “I am guessing permission for such an outing will depend on your excellent deportment in the intervening hours, Fiona, and of course upon the Scottish weather.”

He tossed a glance at Hester, as if making some clever implication about the weather, or Hester herself.

“He means you have to behave, Fee,” Hester said.

“I’ll behave. Aunt Ree, may I please be excused? I want to tell Rowan we might go on another adventure.”

“You may be excused, but Fiona?” Aunt’s countenance remained serene. “You are not to go into that horse’s stall, my girl. You can visit with him perfectly well from outside his door.”

“Yes, Aunt.”

Fiona scrambled off her chair, remembered to bob something resembling a curtsy at the door, and departed in a patter of small feet.

“She is a wonderfully lively child,” Spathfoy remarked. “And it appears her injury is healed overnight. More tea, Miss Daniels?”

He managed to imply that lively was a distasteful quality in a child—in anybody. “No thank you, my lord. I was wondering if you’d like us to post some letters for you. Surely your family will want to know you’re safely arrived?”

“And here I thought I was among family, at least in the general sense.”

Well, good. Sniping was far preferable to charm.

Aunt beamed him an angelic smile. “Of course you’re among family, dear boy. You must prevail upon Balfour to take you shooting while you’re with us, and fishing, though Hester is quite the sport fisher herself.”

Hester put aside her irritation with this disclosure long enough to wonder what Aunt was up to.

“Ian knows the woods well, and a haunch of venison never goes to waste,” Hester said. “I doubt his lordship wants to idle along the Dee with a fishing pole and a book.”

“On the contrary, Miss Daniels. While I’ve been on many a shoot, I can’t say I’ve had much opportunity to fish.”

Bother and damnation. “It would be my pleasure to take you, then.”

As soon as the words were out of her mouth, she realized he’d hooked her with only a few words. Plucked her from the current of her intentions and left her flopping on the verge of his own plans.

The last thing she wanted to do was spend time idling about with this spoiled, overgrown exponent of English aristocracy.

“I shall look forward to it, then,” his lordship said. “Maybe tomorrow, after we take out the horses?”

Aunt clapped her hands together gently. “Oh, excellent! Hester so enjoys a good gallop, and she hasn’t had a riding companion since she got here. What a pity Fiona has no mount of her own.”

Hester tried not to let her consternation show: by some legerdemain of manners, she was now accompanying Spathfoy both riding and fishing.

“Perhaps I shall get the child a pony.” Spathfoy looked intrigued with the notion. “My sisters all had ponies before they had tutors.”

“Fiona’s parents might have something to say about such an extravagant gift, my lord. I believe Matthew wanted to be the one to teach his daughter how to ride, though the thought is most generous of you.”

Hester fired off a smile to go with her scold. Spathfoy smiled back, all even white teeth and genial condescension. “An uncle, particularly one newly introduced to the child, must be allowed to dote, Miss Daniels.”

“I’m off to the kitchen,” Aunt said, laying her folded serviette on the table. “I will alert Deal to the need for a picnic today, and likely one tomorrow as well, though you won’t catch any fish if Fiona comes along.”

Before she could put both hands on the table, Spathfoy was on his feet and poised to shift her chair. He waited with every appearance of solicitude while Aunt scooted to the edge of her seat, bounced a little on her backside, then heaved up to a standing position.

“Shall I escort you to the kitchen, my lady?”

“Lord, no. Deal would have kittens to think of such a great man among the scullery maids and potboys. If you’d hand me my cane, my lord, I’ll toddle along under my own steam.”

Deal might also be tempted to take a carving knife to the great man’s self-importance, though Hester kept that thought to herself when Spathfoy resumed his seat.

“Our elders present us with a puzzle.” He poured himself more tea and gestured with the pot at Hester’s cup.

“Please.” When tea was one’s only source of fortitude, it would be silly to refuse another cup.

“I never know with my father whether he’s being irascible out of habit, or whether he’s provoking me into some display of dominance over him so he might retire from the duties of the marquessate, satisfied that I have sufficient pugnacity to step into his shoes.”

That sentence was long, even for him. Hester searched through it for plain meaning while she drank half her tea. “Your father is too proud to ask for your help.”

Spathfoy peered at his teacup, and it was a satisfying moment, both because she’d flummoxed him and because his father apparently flummoxed him. Spathfoy had mentioned sisters, too—in the plural—which boded well for Hester’s spirits.

“It is perhaps more the case my father and I don’t know how to ask for help from each other.” He sounded unhappy to draw this conclusion, the honesty of the sentiment ruining Hester’s gloat entirely.

“What help would you request of him, my lord?”

Spathfoy dabbed a bite of eggs onto a corner of toast the way an artist might add paint to a canvas. “Interesting question, though I don’t seek the help he proffers enthusiastically. The man is forever tossing prospective brides at me. He has a good eye for horses, though.”

“And the two don’t correlate? An eye for a bride and an eye for a horse?”

Too late, Hester realized she’d left him worlds of room for sly innuendo about mounts, rides, and other vulgar jokes. Jasper would have been smirking lasciviously at the very least. She took refuge in draining her teacup.

Spathfoy wasn’t smirking, though humor lurked in his green eyes. “My mother and my sisters would skin me alive did I intimate a connection between brides and horses, but if there is one, it likely has to do with tossing a man aside when his attention lapses and giving his pride a hard landing.”

A polite, even friendly rejoinder, damn him, and yet Hester wished she could leave him to his own company at breakfast, even though he was a guest newly arrived.