He’d suddenly turned the coward over a few innocent inquiries but in this confined space, he had nowhere to run, nowhere to hide from her bright, prying eyes. He wouldn’t have the matter brought up only to have to shut her down. Telling her about his mother and sister or his brother and father would get him nowhere. In fact, she would be less inclined to play the part of his hostage, he was sure.
“You should see to Mrs McDougal,” Daniella pointed out with an irritated flick of her hand.
As soon as James jumped down from the carriage he looked around for Hobson, but the man was nowhere to be seen.
“Willie?” he called up to the driver.
The carriage tilted and then Willie’s bald head popped over the edge. “Milord?”
“What happened to Hobson?”
“Oh, he got sick a mile or so back and jumped off for a spell.”
“Why was I not informed?”
“Begging your pardon, milord, but you was sleeping. He didn’t want to disturb you.”
Damn that blasted innkeeper for feeding them all bad food. He wouldn’t countenance the sickness to have come from his own kitchens since Mrs McDougal herself prepared most of the meals when he was in. And there was the fact that he felt absolutely fine. Well, his irritation beggared belief but apart from that, he was fine.
“Daniella? Do you feel as though you might be ill?”
“Not at all. I would need more provocation than a bouncy carriage to see my breakfast again, thank you.”
He wanted to point out that she hadn’t partaken in breakfast. In fact, he hadn’t yet seen her eat much at all. He lowered his tone to a better measure of gentle and addressed his retainer. “Mrs McDougal, are you going to be all right?”
She didn’t answer for a long moment and he found himself looking away lest he begin to feel queasy after all. Blood and innards he could deal with; vomit was another matter.
“Hurts like the devil it does,” was followed by a low moan and yet more bad pie.
They could not go on like that but neither could they linger by the roadside. James searched the road behind them but there was no sign of Hobson. They couldn’t turn the carriage around on the narrow road and he was fairly sure they were closer to a village ahead than they were to those they had passed. They would have to press on.
Raking a hand through his already mussed hair, James went to the rear of the carriage and emptied a small bucket that hung on a hook there. He was no stranger to travel sickness since his sister suffered on long journeys.
His hands stilled. God, he hoped she was all right.
“James?” Daniella’s voice reached him and he shook away his distracting thoughts.
“I didn’t give you leave to address me so personally, madam.” He sounded like a schoolgirl. Did she witness his moment of vulnerability?
“You insist on calling me by my Christian name; am I not allowed to do the same, James?”
Her smirk as she enunciated his name almost made him smile in return. She tried to irk him on purpose and he actually appreciated the sentiment in that moment. “Trelissick is my name. Only my mother calls me James.”
“So stuffy. Not Lasterton? Since that is your title?”
“I ask them not to.” He still didn’t feel like Lasterton. Like a toffy gentleman. The genteel, poor child, soldier and second son in him were still far more present than the titled man.
“I think I’ll call you Jimmy. I knew a Jimmy once.”
“You will do no such thing.”
“Very well: James it is. What says your perfect plan about all of this?” She gestured to the still-retching Mrs McDougal.
He held up the bucket.
“I’ll ride up the top then,” Daniella said, her suddenly not-so-bright green eyes switching from the bucket and back to Mrs McDougal.
“You will do no such thing,” he said again as he turned back to the carriage and used the lip of the bucket to scrape the mess from the floor. Would he keep having to say those six words to her all week? “You will ride in the carriage with me and Mrs McDougal will ride up top.”
“What if she falls?”
James’s gaze never left Daniella’s as he called over her shoulder, “Mrs McDougal, would you ride up top with Willie? We’ll stop at the first inn we happen across.”
“I would appreciate that, my lord.”
James raised a brow and waited for any more protest or bright ideas from Daniella.
“Let us be off then,” she called.
“I give the orders around here, Miss Germaine.”
“Aye aye,” she said with another salute. How he hated that salute. He began to get the impression she really wanted to stick up only one of the two fingers she held to her forehead.
Chapter Seven
As night drew in, poor Mrs McDougal at last fell asleep in a cot at the end of the bed where Daniella now lay at a small posting inn known as the Black Sheep. Hobson had arrived an hour after them, looking the worse for wear but not quite as sick as Mrs McDougal. It was decided that the pie was definitely to blame since Daniella and James were feeling fine.
The emotion Daniella did not feel was relief. She just wanted something to happen. Anything really. She wanted one of her father’s spies to make himself known. She wanted to get to Scotland already and be done with the nervous butterflies taking up residence in her stomach. She hated uncertainty almost as much as she hated London.
As if summoned by her frustration, the lock turned and the door opened a fraction.
“May I enter?”
Daniella smiled at the hesitation in Lastert—no, Trelissick’s voice. She’d thought his titled power and self-importance ran too deep for such courtesy, as she had already witnessed in so many blustering dukes and earls of the ton, but James was different. Only just, but there was enough disparity to draw a comparison. She pulled the bedcovers up
