Portrait of My Heart by Patricia Cabot Read Free Book Online Page B

she’d played on him in their childhood … .
    But in the meantime he was content to just look at her, since she looked very nice indeed, sitting amidst all the slanting rays of sunshine that spilled through the open stall doors, her long hair loose and soft-looking, shimmering down her back. It was good luck he’d managed to coordinate his homecoming with teatime. All of the grooms and stablehands were indoors, enjoying some of Cook’s famous seed cake. He and
Maggie were alone in the stables, except for the horses, and a few birds that had built nests in the rafters, and twittered irritatedly at them for invading their privacy.
    Maggie, for her part, was feeling more at ease. Jeremy had toned down the lusty glances to such a degree that she was beginning to think perhaps she’d been mistaken about them. After all, the Duke of Rawlings could have any woman in the world. Why would he want her ? She was just the daughter of his solicitor, a knight who lived a few estates away. Her sister had happened to marry his uncle’s best friend, and her mother was very fond of his aunt, and so they’d been thrown together quite a bit as children, but that was all. Surely all of this marked friendliness of his was just for old time’s sake. He couldn’t possibly see her as anything else but an old friend. This reminder went a long way toward soothing her somewhat jumbled nerves.
    “So,” she was saying, as he went about the business of unsaddling King, “Evers senior is still here at Rawlings Manor, while his son is at the town house in London, and his son, if I understand correctly, is attending some kind of butlery school, in hopes that his grandfather will retire someday soon, and he can take over the post. Only according to your aunt, Evers senior says he’ll retire when he’s dead, and he still insists upon doing all the decanting himself, even though his hands shake terribly whenever he picks up anything heavier than a fingerbowl.”
    Jeremy, who’d removed his coat while he brushed out his horse, now thought he might as well take off his cravat, and he tried to do so casually, laying the simple piece of linen over the coat he’d thrown across the stall door.
    “Really,” he said, bending down to give King’s forelocks a good rub.
    “Yes. And your aunt’s maid Lucy had another baby girl, and that makes four, but she says she won’t be happy until she has a boy, though you’d think four girls would be enough, for God’s sake.”
    “I see,” Jeremy said. He straightened, and threw the brush aside, fixing Maggie with a stare she couldn’t see,
since the sun was full on her face, and his back was to the light.
    “And Mrs. Praehurst is turning sixty-five next fall,” she went on, happily filling him in on the details of the private lives of his servants, “and your aunt and uncle are sending her on a trip to Italy, but Mrs. Praehurst hates Italians, and says that cuisine that depends so heavily on the tomato can’t be good for the digestion, so somebody ought to warn them—”
    “Maggie,” Jeremy said. Something in his voice warned her that he wasn’t interrupting her because he had a question about his housekeeper’s attitude toward Mediterranean cooking. He had opened the stall door and then shut it again behind him, and now stood just a few feet away from the hay bale upon which she sat. She couldn’t read his expression at all, but she supposed, from the way his voice had sounded, that it wasn’t particularly composed.
    “Ye-es?” she said slowly.
    But when he stepped close enough for his shadow to fall over her face, she was able—though she had to crane her neck to do so—to see that he didn’t look nervous or upset at all. In fact, he looked downright teasing.
    “You’ve told me everything about everybody remotely connected to Rawlings Manor,” he said, sitting down beside her on the hay bale, without so much as a by-your-leave. “But you haven’t said a word about