“You should be grateful I did ruin your boot. I could have left you to freeze in the mud.”
“But you didn’t,” he said softly, “and I’m ever so grateful.”
There should be a law against a voice like that. His coat lay on the bed beside him. She picked it up and hung it on a hook. It was bound to pull it out of shape, but did she care? Serve him right if he had to wear a shapeless rag when he finally left her house. She didn’t own a wardrobe, a chest of drawers, or even a hanger. But the vicar did.
“It would do you a great deal of good to be prayed over. Ah, here are the children. If you need help getting that boot off, ask John or Henry to help you. I’m busy.”
Ten
“Is there any hot water?” Nash asked before dinner. “I’d like a shave.” She’d been perfectly polite to him all afternoon. So polite he was catching a chill.
He didn’t enjoy Maddy keeping him at a distance, as if they were chance-met strangers—be damned to the fact that they were. They weren’t strangers anymore. He’d tried several times to break through her courteous veneer. Without success.
“Yes, of course,” she said pleasantly. She fetched his shaving kit and brought him hot water and towels.
“Thank you.” With a smile, he held out the shaving brush. “Would you care to do the honors?” The ultimate gesture of appeasement, he thought, to trust her, in the mood she was in, with a razor at his throat.
“Your hands are no longer shaking; you don’t need my help,” she observed, and called John to come and hold the mirror for Mr. Rider.
Henry came, too, and what Nash had hoped would be a reconciliation turned into a shaving lesson for two young boys while Maddy bustled about getting dinner ready.
He didn’t mind it, though. He hadn’t had much to do with young boys before, and initiating these two into the peculiarly masculine practice of shaving gave him a sense of . . . he wasn’t sure what.
He’d never once watched his own father shaving. The man who’d taught him and Marcus to shave was the valet hired for them when they reached that age. Shaving should be, he decided as he showed the boys how to use the strop to sharpen the razor, something a man taught his sons. A small thing, but important.
He’d planned to join them at table for dinner, but almost immediately after they’d packed his shaving things away, the little girls arrived with his dinner on a tray.
He’d opened his mouth to suggest he might get up when he caught Maddy’s eye.
“Is there something you wanted, Mr. Rider?” she asked so politely he decided it was better policy to stay in bed. Any more of her politeness and he’d end up with indigestion.
After dinner, when the table was cleared and the dishes done, she said to the children, “Mr. Rider has been very bored, stuck in bed with nothing to do. Why don’t you show him some of your favorite card games?”
He sighed. Further punishment.
Within minutes all five children were on the bed and he was playing a game called Fish, which involved collecting pairs.
“Won’t you join us?” he called to her at one stage.
“Thank you, Mr. Rider, but I have work to do.” She Mr. Ridered him with every sentence now, treating him with pleasant indifference, as if he really were a lodger instead of . . . whatever he was.
“Mr. Rider, have you got a queen?” Jane said in the sort of voice that meant she’d said it before and that Nash wasn’t paying attention. Nash meekly handed over his queen. Jane took it with a smug smile and Nash bent at least half his attention to the game. His pride had taken some beating in this cottage already, but he wasn’t prepared to let himself be fleeced by small children—not without a battle.
While they played cards, Maddy brought out a large bucketful of straw and some coiled strips of some vine and sat herself on a low stool, a wicked-looking knife in her hands. He could smell damp straw and beeswax.
What the devil was she doing?
“Your turn, Mr. Rider!” Said with exaggerated patience.
Nash bent his mind to the game at hand. It was a simple game but surprisingly enjoyable. Nash didn’t usually have much to do with children. He occasionally saw his brother Gabe’s boys on visits to Zindaria, but they were mad about horses and most of their interaction had been on horseback or in the stables.
He’d never experienced anything like this noisy, happy informality. The children started off being carefully polite to him, but soon they were hooting with triumph as they sent him to fish, or squawking with glee as they relieved him of a card. They sprawled over him and his bed like a tumble of puppies.
Lucy, being too small to play, had, with a propriety air, claimed a place in Nash’s lap. She watched each play with fierce concentration, crowing at each card he won and jealously guarding the pairs he—they—amassed, reluctant to give them up, even when the game was over.
From time to time he glanced at Maddy. She’d made some kind of disc from the straw and was coiling it round and round, first hammering it with a wooden mallet to flatten and shape it, then binding each coil with long springy strips of some vine that she’d dampened, and sewing it tight with a bodkin and twine.
It looked like difficult work, threading the strips through coiled bundles of straw and pulling the twine tight. From time to time she’d wince and suck her hand.
