Page 20 of To Treasure an Heiress
Sheridan tried on that too-long blink, though he suspected he didn’t pull it off quite so well. “Have you met me?”
It won him a breath of a laugh. “I have. Which is why Idid.” And like a magician worthy of Merlin himself, he opened the wardrobe, moved aside something or another, and produced Sheridan’s favorite pair of sturdy leather boots.
He seized them with glee. “You’re getting a raise.”
“Mm. I would settle for you rethinking this morning’s outing. It’s too dangerous.”
“Hardly. She knows these islands inside out.” Sheridan sat on the chair beside the wardrobe so he could take off his house shoes and put his feet in their happier home.
“And locals who know it just as well nevertheless end up caught out and losing their lives far too often.” His face a mask of sobriety and sorrow, Ainsley held out a hand for the rejected pair of footwear.
Sheridan handed them over and tugged on the first boot. “Bully. The shoes, I mean. Not you. Although now that I mention it...”
Ainsley shook his head. “The Tremaynes’ parents died on these seas. And they were hardly the first victims of a capricious current.”
“I’ll say a prayer to the sea gods.” He tied the first boot’s strings.
Ainsley said nothing. Justbreathed.
Sheridan sighed. He really was a bully. “A joke. I’m not a heathen. Abbie and Millicent wouldn’t stand for it.” He might not be quite as vocally devout as his sisters—or his valet, for that matter—but he was far from a pagan. Which Ainsley ought to have known, given the daily reading of Scripture they always had as a group whenever they were on a dig, in which Sheridan took part with no complaint. And he barely even fidgeted at home anymore when Millicent held morning prayers with all the staff. He enjoyed learning about the Druids and ancient Britons, true, but that was only because they’d left such interesting artifacts behind that he enjoyed puzzling out—standingstones and burial cairns and the like. He didn’t actually believe as they had.
He put on the second boot. Tied it. Stood. And blustered out another sigh at Ainsley’s continued silence. “Look, Ains, I appreciate your concern. Truly, I do. But Beth Tremayne has asked me to join her, and I’m not about to let her go alone, which she would. Gentlemanly, right?”
Ainsley cocked his head and blinked. Again. Though this time he spoke too. “You like her.”
Sheridan’s neck went hot. Blasted complexion. “Of course I do. She’s a fine young lady.” Adventurous. Spirited. Intelligent. Tempestuous. And beautiful too. “Much like Lady Elizabeth and Lady Emily. I like them all.”
“Somehow I doubt you’d be beside Lady Elizabeth in this fog if she was insisting upon a search for some flora or fauna.”
Sheridan’s face screwed up at the very thought. “You have a point. All right then, I admit it. It’s the treasure hunt too. And nearly all the islands have cairns. I’ve been wanting to explore some of them, and the fog will keep other tourists away.”
“Thatshouldbe what it is. But it’s not all, is it?” Ainsley folded his arms over his chest and shook his head. “Youlikeher.”
It wasn’t the proper word for it. Though the ones he’d listed last night when she’d about given him an apoplexy, asking his opinion on love at first sight, didn’t seem right either. Infatuation sounded so ... juvenile. Attraction—true, but far too simple. There were scads of beautiful girls in the world, after all. And it wasn’t as though Telly—who usually had fine taste in women—reacted to her as Sheridan had. So it had to be more than pleasing features and neither-blue-nor-grey eyes.
Maybe it was thatknowinghe’d tossed out just to see if she denied the possibility of it. An instant recognition.
“My lord. No.”
No?How washeto know if Sheridan’s soul had recognized its perfect match or not? Though come to think of it, how was he toread his mind either, to know that’s what he’d been debating? “I beg your pardon?”
“It isn’t a good idea to direct your attentions that way.”
Not a mind reader, but a decent Sheridan reader nonetheless. Not that he had any right to dictate Sheridan’s choice in a wife, as he did his choice in shoes.
Though, blast it, he didn’t look dictatorial, just concerned. “You’re a marquess. You own the largest estate in the Lake District. You can trace your lineage back to King James the First.”
“I know my pedigree, Harry.”
Ainsley winced. So far as Sheridan had been able to ferret out, no one in all the world called Henry AinsleyHarry. Which was why he saved it for these moments when he most needed to poke at the chap.
Still, his valet decided to have his say. “The Tremaynes are a landed family, and I realize there will soon be an alliance between them and the Telfords. But they are not your peers in any sense of the word, and you know very well your sisters would not approve.”
Wouldn’t they? Sheridan had been reaching once again for his hat but paused. It had never occurred to him that they’d look at her family connections instead of herself. They were always so quick to make friends, both of them. Why wouldn’t they take to her as they did everyone else?
But he’d never introduced anyone else as a possible future marchioness and sister-in-law. Well, other than Libby, but she was obviously a fine match, from the society point of view.
But the Tremayneswerea fine family. Perfectly respectable. And if they dared say anything in opposition, he’d just liken her to Elizabeth Bennet and pray they wouldn’t point out that Mr. Darcy had no title he had to live up to.
