Page 25 of Gentleman Jim

“How was your nap, Aunt?” Jane asked.

“What’s that?” Aunt Harriet slowly lowered herself into a wing chair. “My cap?” She touched a blue-veined hand to the delicately beribboned bit of lace tied over her thinning locks.

“Your rest!” Jane said a little more loudly.

“Yes. Quite right. It is the best of all my caps.” Aunt Harriet leaned her head against the velvet-upholstered wing of her chair. “I shall close my eyes for just a moment until tea. You must rouse me when the tray comes, Elizabeth.”

Maggie cast a bewildered look at Jane.

“Elizabeth is my mother,” Jane whispered, stifling a grin. “Did I not tell you my aunt Harriet would be the best chaperone in the world?”

At promptly four o’clock, before the drawing room clock had even finished chiming the hour, St. Clare arrived in Green Street driving a dashing black curricle drawn by a pair of glossy, temperamental-looking match-bays. Maggie had been watching for him, and as he pulled up in front of the Trumbles’ townhouse, she hurried down the front steps to meet him.

At the sight of her, St. Clare ordered his tiger to go to the horses’ heads and jumped down from his curricle. “Miss Honeywell,” he said solemnly, making his bow.

“Lord St. Clare.”

He surveyed her fitted blue kerseymere pelisse and matching bonnet with an appreciative eye. “You look very well.”

“As do you.” And it was true. St. Clare’s figure was marvelously displayed, from the crown of his beaver hat to the mirror shine of his Hessians, and all the powerfully muscled, expertly tailored acreage in between.

He gave a sudden, slightly sheepish, grin. “I’d intended to come to the door and call for you properly.”

“Had you?” She was a little chagrined. Why had she run out to meet him so impetuously? So eagerly?

It was just the sort of thing she was used to do when Nicholas would call at the front entrance of Beasley Park, begging her company on a drive into town in the gig. “I’ve been charged with delivering these preserves to the vicarage,” he would say. “Pray come with me, Maggie, and lend me a bit of countenance.”

At the memory, Maggie felt the same sense of bewilderment and uncertainty that she’d felt when she read St. Clare’s note. “Well, it doesn’t matter, in any case. My chaperone, Miss Trumble’s aunt Harriet, is fast asleep and you’ve already made the acquaintance of Miss Trumble herself. So there’s really no need to go inside. Unless…you don’t feel as if you must, do you?”

“No,” he answered after a moment. “As you say, there’s really no need.”

Maggie walked ahead of him to the curricle’s step and waited. When he stopped beside her and didn’t immediately offer his hand, she looked up at him inquiringly. And she had to look up, up, up, for he was infuriatingly tall. How had she not noticed before how diminutive she was when compared to him? She scarcely reached his shoulder!

As if to illustrate their vast difference in size, he didn’t simply hand her up into the curricle as any other gentleman might do. Instead, he clasped his large hands lightly round her waist, and without the least visible effort, lifted her up onto the seat.

Maggie’s cheeks flushed at the intimate contact.

St. Clare gave no sign that anything was out of the ordinary. He leapt into the curricle beside her, and before taking the reins, paused to spread a rug over her knees. “Comfortable?”

Maggie wasn’t comfortable. St. Clare’s muscular thigh was brushing against her leg. And her waist was still tingling from the pressure of his hands. “Yes, thank you.” She was mortified by the squeak in her voice.

St. Clare gave a curt nod. His own smile had faded. His gray eyes were a bit more watchful. Perhaps he was feeling the effects of her closeness just as she was feeling the effects of his? “Stand away from their heads, Enzo,” he called to his tiger. And taking up his whip, he gave the horses the office to start.

The tiger, a thin, dark-haired boy with obsidian black eyes, ran behind them for a few strides and then hopped onto his perch.

Maggie hadn’t been for a drive in an open carriage in many years. Her own phaeton had been sold long ago, and at Beasley Park, since her illness, she’d been restricted to riding in a closed coach lest she overexert her lungs. She’d missed the freedom of it most dreadfully, and as St. Clare put the bays through their paces, her embarrassment at being so close to him was rapidly replaced by exuberance.

She sat up tall in her seat, the wind whipping the curled feathers in her bonnet and playing havoc with her carefully pinned hair. “Oh, is it not glorious!” she exclaimed. “To be up so high and going so fast!”

“You’re not afraid?” St. Clare asked, expertly maneuvering his team through the streets.

“Why should I be? Your curricle is well sprung and you seem skilled enough with the ribbons. And your horses…” She gazed at them in frank admiration. “What sweet goers they are. Devilish quick and not a bit choppy.”

“At this speed, most ladies would be holding white-knuckled to the side.”

“Would they indeed, my lord? What poor-spirited ladies you’ve been driving with.”

St. Clare’s bays chose that moment to take exception to a passing carriage pulled by four matched chestnuts. They skittered and danced, ears flattened and teeth bared. He steadied them easily, guided them past the carriage, and then, with awe-inspiring expertise, feather-edged a corner as he turned toward the entrance into the park.