Page 43 of Mr. Cavendish, I Presume

“Do I need a reason?”

“You—”

“’Course, I have a reason. Don’t really care to share it with you, but I do have a reason.”

“I need to get you home,” she decided.

“Home.” He nodded, tilting his head and looking terribly philosophical. “Now there’s an interesting word.”

While he was talking nonsense, Amelia looked up and down the street, searching for something—anything—that might indicate how he’d gotten there the night before. “Your grace—”

“Thomas,” he corrected, with a rather wiggly sort of grin.

She held up a hand, her fingers spread wide, more in an attempt to control her own aggravation than to scold him. “How did you get here?” she asked, very slowly. “Where is your carriage?”

He pondered this. “I don’t rightly know.”

“Good God,” she muttered.

“Is He?” he mused. “Is He good? Really?”

She let out a groan. “You are drunk.”

He looked at her, and looked at her, and looked at her even more, and then just when she’d opened her mouth to tell him that they needed to find his carriage immediately, he said, “I might be a little bit drunk.” He cleared his throat. “Still.”

“Wyndham,” she said, adopting her sternest voice. “Surely you—”

“Thomas.”

“Thomas.” She clenched her teeth. “Surely you remember how you got here.”

Again, that moronic silence, followed by, “I rode.”

Wonderful. That was just what they needed.

“In a carriage!” he said brightly, then laughed at his own joke.

She stared at him in disbelief. Who was this man?

“Where is the carriage?” she ground out.

“Oh, just over there,” he said, waving vaguely behind him.

She turned. “Over there” appeared to be a random street corner. Or it could have been the street that ran around the corner. Or, given his current state, he might have been referring to the whole of Lincolnshire, straight back to the Wash and on to the North Sea.

“Could you be more precise?” she asked, followed by a rather slow and deliberately enunciated: “Can you lead me there?”

He leaned in, looking very jolly as he said, “I could…”

“You will.”

“You sound like my grandmother.”

She grabbed his chin, forcing him to hold still until they were eye-to-eye. “Never say that again.”

He blinked a few times, then said, “I like you bossy.”

She let go of him as if burned.

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