“Bacon?” Adam finished for her. He looked alarmed.
“How did you know?”
Adam rose from the bed. Persephone wished he hadn’t. He’d been touching her fingers, the gesture immensely comforting and pleasing in a way she needed at that moment. He’d told her only the night before that he didn’t care where she went or what she did. When he touched her so gently and tenderly, she couldn’t help thinking he wasn’t entirely indifferent.
“Was it a faint aroma?” Adam’s face was set in a look of concentration.
“No.” She remembered with a wave of nausea the almost repugnant smell that had met her when she’d stepped onto the mounting block. “At first I thought perhaps he’d been helping in the curing house or had slipped in a lard spill in the kitchen. The scent was so strong I could still smell it—”
“—while you were riding.”
“Exactly.”
“Anything else unusual?” Adam paced the room.
Persephone took a difficult swallow. Her suspicions mounted. Something had happened, something deliberate. She didn’t like the idea of someone setting out to hurt her. “Atlas never spooks,” she said. “We were riding along fine. I shifted in the saddle a little, and suddenly he bolted. It was so unlike him. I can’t help thinking something must have been wrong.”
“Most likely,” Adam muttered.
Persephone watched him pace. His was not the look of a man at ease.
His expression grew suddenly very contemplative. “The groom who helped you mount, does he assist you often?”
“Occasionally.”
“Do you know his name?”
Persephone shook her head. It had never seemed odd before, but it did then. She knew the names of everyone else in the stables who regularly assisted her. “He wears a green handkerchief around his neck,” she remembered out loud. “None of the others do.”
“John Handly will know who it is.” Adam sat on the edge of Persephone’s bed, facing her.
“You are going to talk to him? That groom, I mean?”
“If he had any hand in this, I intend to do far more than talk.”
The thought of Adam brangling with a potential murderer sent a chill through her. “But what if he’s dangerous?”
“No one is as dangerous as the Duke of Kielder.”
“WouldIhave to talk to him?” She shrunk at the idea of confronting someone who might have deliberately sabotaged her ride.
“Of course not. I’ll not allow him within several counties of you again.”
Persephone had always dreamed of marrying a man who would take some of her burdens away. Papa had never been good in difficult situations, often too preoccupied with the distant past to deal with the here and now. Adam couldn’t have been more different from Papa in that respect.
“Thank you, Adam.” She smiled up at him.
He actually smiled back. Her heart flipped over inside her chest.
“How is your leg?” he asked.
“It hurts terribly.” The throbbing grew just at the mention of it.
“And your head?” His eyes traveled to the wound of which he spoke.
She grimaced. Her head pounded, though the pain was not as bad as in her leg.
“Your eye is still swollen. Can you see out of it?”
