Chapter Seventeen
Percy stepped ontothe lawn, taking in the distant targets and the table laden with bows and arrows, their mistress nowhere in sight.
“Danny—Lady Daniella!”
“By the trees!”
Percy followed the muffled voice to the treeline at the far end of the field and stared up at a scraggly spruce in horror. “What the devil are you doing?!”
Reaching for a higher branch, Danny glanced down between her arms, her cheeks flushed and wisps of hair curling around her chin. “Percy, good. I’ll need you to catch her.”
“Catch her?” Seeing nothing in the immediate vicinity, Percy could only surmise she’d struck her head while climbing and was now hallucinating. His chest squeezed with panic. “You mustn’t move after a bump to the head.” He slouched off his coat and unbuttoned his cuffs to roll up his sleeves. “Wait there. I will come get you.”
“No time for that,” Danny called, stepping onto a higher branch. “If Lord Pickles is startled, we may lose our footing. I’ll reach up and guide her down to you.”
Her injury was worse than he feared. Lifting his hands, he approached her at the base of the tree as if she were a frightened animal. “I understand, Danny. Whoever this Lord Pickles is, I will see to his care.”
One of the branches rustled and Danny’s face appeared in a hole in the foliage. “Can youbemore condescending? I am not out of my head. Lord Pickles is real and currently attached to my sleeve.”
Her face disappeared and a pained cry sounded before the ugliest cat Percy had ever seen made a blurred beeline for the trunk; indeed lost its gnarled, clawed footing, and dove out of the tree like a hawk on a mouse.
Percy caught the fuzz ball upside down—appalled at the missing tufts of orange fur along its spine—and proceeded to get his best shirt shredded by a pair of ungrateful hindquarters. Extricating himself, Percy held the wretched thing at arm’s length and deduced the puss was no worse for the wear, though the mentioned sleeve had taken damage if the long strip of blue linen in its mouth was any indication.
“Did you catch her?” she asked from somewhere above.
“Yes.”
“Is she unharmed?”
“I thought you said the cat was a lord?”
“Why can’t a woman hold a man’s title?” Her voice was growing closer. “You haven’t answered my question.”
Percy saw a muddied slipper peek out from a lower branch, along with a beautiful, bare ankle. Setting the feline down, he went to the tree’s base and harangued the influence of stupid poets.
Beautiful ankles, ha! Next, he’d croon over an exposed wrist. No, wait! What hark, a loose curl. Someone call the vicar because he was a besotted fool.
The woman was more than mad, rescuing cats from trees, groundskeepers from shoulder injuries. One of these days, she’d break her neck looking out for everyone else but herself.
A fact he’d change today if he had any say in the matter.
“Percy!”
He focused on the hem of her skirt that followed her exasperated voice. “Aside from an unfortunate shearing by the tree, your Lord Pickles is discomposed but whole.”
“Oh, she always looks like that. She wrestled with a vulture a few years ago and the fur never grew back when the cuts healed.”
Percy bowed his head to the cat at his feet with new appreciation. “My apologies, Lord Pickles. I had no idea you were a veteran.”
The cat’s tail flicked superiorly.
“She likes you,” Danny said.
Percy eyed her hemline as it made a slow descent onto the next lowest branch. “You can’t even see us.”
“I can tell.”
Of course she could. “May I assist you down?”
