“Yes, but…” She trailed off when his face blurred before her eyes.
“I’ve tired you,” she heard Whit murmur.
“No, I’m not tired.” Oh, but she was. Suddenly, she was very, very tired.
“Your head is drooping.”
“Isn’t,” she countered, and was still lucid enough to recognize how childish that sounded. She willed her head to clear. “Mrs. Hanson put something suspicious in my tea.”
Whit took the cup and sniffed at it. “Sweet,” he commented. “Laudanum, I’d wager.”
“Laudanum?” She jerked herself awake—relatively, at least. “She put—?”
“No more than a drop.”
“But I don’t want—”
“It’s too late to do much about it now.” He reached over to pull the blankets up to her shoulders. “Go to sleep, imp.”
“Later,” she muttered.
“All right, later.”
She was vaguely aware of movement in the room, of hushed voices and the door opening with a creak.
“Mirabelle?”
“Mm-hmm?”
“Your hair’s not drab.”
“All ri—” Her eyes snapped open again. “What’s that?”
“It’s the color of the chestnut tree we saw today. I find it to be rather nice.”
Before she could even begin to respond to the comment—and really, how did one respond to having one’s hair compared to a tree—he was gone, and she was asleep.
Those persons who spend an above average portion of their time attending secret meetings in the dead of night—for reasons other than a pleasant tryst—often prefer to hold said meetings in varying and out-of-the-way places, so as to keep their secrets, secret. As such, the two gentlemen whispering to each other now were not doing so in the library, but rather the currently vacant nanny’s quarters, where even the nosiest guests were unlikely to visit.
“Is this it?” the younger gentleman asked as an older man held out a brown package.
“It is.”
“And where do you want it?”
“In the study if you can manage it. Anywhere it can be found, but not stumbled upon.”
“Easy enough.” The younger man turned the package over in his hands. “Are you certain you want the both of them involved in this?”
“Of course. There’s no reason for her not to be. It would defeat half the purpose, really.”
“If something happens to her—”
“You’ll break my nose,” the older man interrupted with a much put-upon sigh. “I know.”
“Whit will break your nose,” the younger corrected. “I’ll break your legs. And the women will take turns breaking everything else.”
Ten
Was there anything more lovely, Mirabelle wondered, than spending a lazy day in Haldon’s library, curled up in a window seat with a good book, while the warm sun played against one’s skin?
She pondered that for several minutes before being forced to admit that, yes—yes, there certainly was. In fact, there were any number of more appealing things to do on a warm and sunny day.
One could go for a picnic, for example. The picnic most of the guests were even now gathering in preparation for, outside. At least, one could if one wasn’t surrounded by overprotective worrywarts.
She gave up trying to make the best of her situation, snapped her book shut, and tossed it aside. She absolutely refused to acknowledge the shot of pain that movement caused her ankle. She considered it her own small penance for telling the worst of the worrywarts her injury might look a bit ghastly, but hardly hurt at all. She hadn’t cared for the lie, but there’d been nothing else for it. She’d simply had to get out of bed, or go stark raving mad.
At the insistence of Lady Thurston, Mrs. Hanson, and Kate—the traitor—she’d spent the whole of yesterday in that bed, resting. She hadn’t done it willingly, or even particularly gracefully, but she’d done it. And now she wanted to do something, anything, besides rest.
She wanted to go on that damnable picnic.
It was only a sprained ankle, for heaven’s sake, and she’d found she could get about well enough with the cane Whit had brought her. There wasn’t a single reason she could see for keeping her confined to the house.
“Ready to go, imp?”
Her head snapped around at the sound of Whit’s voice. A voice that sounded tremendously jovial at the moment, which, given her current circumstances and mood, she found tremendously irritating.
“Ready to go where? I…” She trailed off and narrowed her eyes at him. “If you think I’m spending one more second of daylight in that bed, you are utterly, utterly mistaken.” To emphasize the point, she reached for the cane and grasped it as one might a weapon.
“This is quite a reversal from the last time I saw you.” He studied her with concerned eyes. “Is your ankle paining you? Let me see—”
She lifted the cane and sent him a scowl she very much hoped came off as menacing. “My ankle has never felt better,” she bit out. “But my patience has suffered irreparable damage.”