Page 10 of The Milliner and the Griffin Rider

The captain’s head whipped around, his eyes shifting from his griffin to stare at Chloe. “What was that?” he asked, his voice sharp.

Chloe’s eyes narrowed. “I know you don’t like me, Captain, but not even the king himself would refuse the invitation of a griffin.”

His brows shot up. “Invitation? Ranger spoke to you?”

“You needn’t sound so surprised,” she said sourly, but her words faltered in the face of his expression, her features crumpling in confusion. “Does he not normally do that?”

The captain stared at her in silence for so long that she thought he didn’t mean to answer. But he finally spoke, his words barely more than a whisper. “I’ve never known him to do so before.”

“Never…?” Chloe stared back at him, unable to think of anything to say, Ranger’s final cryptic sentence echoing around her head.

When she felt warmth creeping up her cheeks, she decided it was time to go. Whirling to the hedge, she pushed herself through, making the passage more quickly than was wise.

Reaching the other side and freedom, she turned back and held out her hand for her hat. The captain extended it through the hedge to her, moving quickly, although she noticed that the hat stayed free of any branches.

When it was safely in her hands, she met his eyes through the leaves. “Farewell, Captain.”

Once again she thought he meant to remain silent, but he finally dipped his head in the shallowest of gestures, his voice barely audible and his expression unreadable.

“Farewell…Chloe.”

Five

“It’s not as if I gave him permission to use only my name,” Chloe muttered, stabbing her needle into the hat in front of her more viciously than was necessary. “That was Fletcher. And Ranger is, of course, welcome to call me whatever he wants.” She smiled reminiscently at the memory of the griffin.

She had regaled Maddie with endless praises of the creatures on her return, although her friend had been more interested in her failure to come anywhere near the Duke.

“I suppose it’s something that you saw the griffins themselves,” she said, although she didn’t sound convinced of her own words.

Her discouragement had brought Chloe straight back to the ground, and she had been strategizing ever since. Approaching the Duke while he was socializing had seemed the simplest option, but clearly it wasn’t going to work. When he was outside his home, he kept his guards too close, and when he was hosting an event, he clearly set them to patrol the grounds.

“The only option left is to approach him while he’s home but not entertaining,” she told Ammy, who was napping in a cocoon of material scraps and leftover ribbon. The vendrillon didn’t stir.

“Yes, merely that,” she said, voice heavy with irony. “An easy task when we’ve never been introduced, and I have no reason to seek him out.”

She had been trying to think of potential approaches for the last several days without success. And on every one of those days, she’d had to talk herself out of returning to the griffin mews to see the griffins again. But it wasn’t the griffins she needed to win over as Maddie kept reminding her. She needed to focus on their goal. The days allowed to them were rapidly ticking away.

But it wasn’t her mission with the Duke that kept her away from the mews on his property. Thoughts of her interaction with the Duke’s handsome captain—his warmth as he talked about the griffins, his subsequent coldness, and the final, unsettling emotion in his face when they said goodbye—occupied far too much of her mind. Captain Harrison was dangerously attractive. Despite all her irritation at his interference in her plans, she only had to think of how he had looked when he spoke of the griffins, his eyes alight with warmth, to admit that much.

If Chloe was going to feign being enamored of the pompous Duke, she couldn’t afford to be truly enamored with the captain of his griffin squad. She wasn’t a good enough actress to achieve that feat—as she had already proved given how often she forgot herself around Captain Harrison.

However strong a pull she felt toward the griffin mews, she had to remain focused on their goal. If she couldn’t convince the Duke to gift her a griffin egg, her sisters would lose their whole futures. Cousin Gertrude would wear them down until they grew old enough for her to bully them into marrying men as awful and controlling as herself. And then they would be lost to Chloe forever. It didn’t bear thinking of.

“At least you don’t seem worried,” she said, once more addressing her remarks to the sleeping Ammy. “So that’s one of us.”

The vendrillon promptly opened one eye. Gannon is a bad, bad man. She ruffled her feathers as she resettled. But Maddie says you’re taking care of it.

Chloe’s heart melted at the sweet creature’s belief in her.

And I don’t like storms, Ammy added, sending Chloe’s eyes toward the one window in the store’s back room.

Sunlight streamed through the glass, and the small sliver of sky she could see looked blue. She sighed anyway. Vendrillons were never wrong about the weather.

“There’s something especially depressing about spring storms,” she agreed. “They come on so suddenly.”

She bolted upright, her eyes fixed unseeing on the far wall as an idea unfurled inside her mind.

“You’re sure there’s a storm coming?” she asked Ammy unnecessarily. “How long?”