He gazed at her.
“Duke, my cat,” she explained quickly. “Not Azureford.”
He cleared his throat. “I imagined.”
Her lips curved. “That’s how Duke and I met. He lost a fight with a much bigger cat and I had to sew him back up from groin to sternum. We’ve been inseparable ever since.”
“That’s… one way to bond,” Theo managed.
She gave him an awkward pat on his shoulder. “Don’t worry. I have years of experience with strays.”
“I am not a stray,” he spluttered. “I am—”
Viscount Ormondton. An Army Major.
A man desperate to cling to anonymity and privacy for as long as he could.
He hiccupped.
Damn it. He clenched his teeth and pressed his lips tight to try to hide the spasms.
The next hiccup nearly bounced him out of his seat.
Her expression gentled. “Would you like a cup of water?”
Theo glared at her. He had developed his infamous cutting glance specifically because sometimes when emotion got the best of him, so did the hiccups. He could not always trust his mouth to respond as he wished. But his eyes… Those were always more than capable of slaying their victims with a single glance. He turned their full force on Virginia.
She patted his shoulder. “I’ll get you some water.”
The moment she left his line of sight, he closed his eyes and willed his hiccups to cease using the only trick that had ever worked. Holding his breath, he recited his favorite poem in his head. Either the hiccups would go away, or he would pass out.
Anything was better than having a slip of a girl pat him on the shoulder as if he were a child in leading strings.
When Virginia returned with the water, Theo’s hiccups were gone. He gave her his haughtiest glare, as if to say a lord of his stature could not fathom why anyone would think him in need of a cup of water.
She thrust it into his hand anyway.
As she took her seat across from him, she motioned toward his ruined knee. “Let me see your leg.”
“No.” He nearly crushed the cup of water in his hand, so swift and adamant was his response.
“I can see that it is swollen. Is the wound internal, external, or both?”
He glared at her. “Internal.”
His leg had taken a horse hoof right to the kneecap. The fractures had fused back together, but not in all the right places. It was not the kind of break that could be reset. And he definitely did not want anyone looking at it.
“Clearly you can bend your knee,” she said as she considered him. “Can you straighten it?”
“Yes.” Any time he wished to pass out from pain, all he had to do was straighten his leg. Come to think of it, it wouldn’t be a half-bad cure for hiccups.
“Can you put weight on it?”
“Not for long,” he hedged. Not even a full second. Bullets to the cheek hadn’t felled him as quickly as his knee now could.
She reached toward it.
He nearly jumped out of his skin.
