He raised a brow. “Don’t you have something to say to me? An apology as well, perhaps?”
“For what reason would I need to apologize to you?”
“You cannot be serious.”
“I am. I may have been wrong in assuming that you might have meant Dorothea any harm. It is obvious now that you know each other well. But I didn’t regret being overly cautious. It was always better to be safe than sorry.”
The scowl was back with a vengeance. “Is that the logic you Scots tend to hold?”
Catriona’s spine stiffened at the assumption. She’d spent years trying to rid of her Scottish accent to no avail, knowing that it would only set her apart from everyone else. Having it thrown in her face felt like a betrayal of some sort.
“It is my logic,” she argued.
“Your logic is flawed,” he countered with ease. “But I thank you for saving my daughter when you did. Come, Dory.”
He took Dorothea’s hand and immediately began leading her away before Catriona could muster up her response. She watched them walk away, slowly at first before the stranger picked Dorothea up with ease, quickening their pace. She didn’t move until he’d disappeared behind a copse of trees, and her racing heart did not slow until she finally decided to turn and head back home.
A curious range of emotions washed over her in their departure. As Catriona trekked back home, Nina trotting at her side, she didn’t know what to think. Perhaps she had been a little too forward in her responses. The English place courtesy above all else after all. Perhaps she should not have been so willing toargue with a man she did not know. Perhaps she truly was not ready for the London Season if that was how she interacted with gentlemen. She may not care to marry herself, knowing good and well that she was on the shelf, but she had to maintain propriety if her sisters ever stood a chance.
“Oh heavens, Nina, I do hope I did not make a mess of things,” she murmured as she trekked back into the house. Nina simply ambled in behind her in silence.
Catriona made her way back to the drawing room to find her uncle still there, this time his nose buried in a book about botany. Her sisters and their dogs were nowhere to be found.
Frederic didn’t look up at her until she sat across from him. Then he snorted before returning his attention back to his book. “If you wished to go swimming, you could have told me so, and I would have planned a trip to Bath.”
“I did not intend for this to happen,” she explained with an exasperated sigh. “I had to jump into the river to save a little girl from drowning.”
“Is that so?” He slowly turned a page. “How gallant of you. Historians will sing of your good deeds.”
She rolled her eyes. “Do you happen to know who the little girl was?”
At last, he looked back up at her. Then he closed the book and made a show of looking around the room.
Catriona sighed heavily. “She is not here. But I assume there aren’t many little children that live nearby, so perhaps you would know of her.”
“That, my dear serious niece, is where you are wrong.”
“Then perhaps you know her father. I did not get his name, but he is a tall fellow with dark hair and broody blue eyes. He has a sharp jawline with a strong chin. His nose has a slight crook in it as if he?—”
“Got a good look at the gentleman, did you?” Frederic observed with a chuckle.
Catriona scowled at him, ignoring the way her cheeks heated at the underlying suggestion in his words. It wasn’t that she had been studying him. It was simply hard to forget a man with such strikingly handsome features, especially one who you had been arguing with just minutes before.
“It sounds like you had a run in with the Duke of Irvin,” her uncle went on. “I cannot imagine that was very pleasant.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Because he is notoriously reclusive and ill-tempered.” Frederic’s white brows, which had gotten quite overgrown in thepast two years, knitted together. “Come to think of it, I had never gotten the fence between our houses repaired. Perhaps that is how his daughter made it to our side of the river. Usually, you would not see hide nor hair of either one of them. I was even beginning to wonder if the daughter was a myth.”
“What else do you know about the Duke?” she heard herself ask before she could stop herself.
Frederic raised his brows at her, and Catriona immediately regretted it. Her uncle never gave up the chance to poke fun at her, more so than he would her sisters. She believed it had something to do with how serious her countenance was, and his mischievous behavior only made it that much stronger.
“Never mind,” she said immediately before he could respond. “It does not matter.”
“Seems as if it matters quite a lot to you,” he observed, humor steeped in his tone.
Catriona ignored it. “What matters is that I get out of these wet clothes before I catch a cold. I cannot afford to be ill tonight.”
