“You forgot your riding habit.” He came around to the front of the stables, a cloth in his hand, and a heavy saddle slung over one arm.
Hyacinth stared at him, a peculiar sensation fluttering in her belly. He wasn’t wearing a hat or a coat—just a white linen shirt open at the neck, and pair of buckskin breeches so snug, she fancied a closer inspection would reveal…well, the sorts of masculine things a lady was obliged to overlook.
Not that she intended to get any closer.
Except she couldn’t help but notice the dark bristles shadowing his cheeks and jaw, or the tousled mass of thick hair falling over his forehead. It was damp with sweat, and his shirt was so transparent she could see the muscles in his back ripple as he tossed the saddle onto a rack at the end of the front row of stalls, as if it weighed no more than a handkerchief.
Goodness. She’d never seen a more, ah…manlysort of man in her life. He put her in mind of a coiled spring just before it exploded into action. His entire body hummed with restlessness, and he looked as if every inch of him was about to burst through the seams of his clothing. He was all long legs and undulating, flexing bits—
“You’re staring at me, Miss Somerset, as if I were the elephant at the Royal Menagerie.”
The elephant? What nonsense. If he were anything, he’d be the Bengal lion, prowling about his cage, stalking his prey.
“Should I duck into one of the stalls?” he asked. “That way you could peer over the edge, and it would be more like the Menagerie.”
Well. It seemed Lachlan Ramsey did know how to tease, despite what his brother had said. But this wasn’t a friendly tease. He wasn’t smiling, and there was more than a little mockery in his voice.
She jerked her gaze away from the hint of his chest revealed by the loose neck of his shirt. “No, I, ah—no, of course n-not. I didn’t c-come to stare. I mean r-ride. I didn’t come toride. I w-was looking for y-you.”
Hyacinth cringed as the words caught on her lips, then flushed with humiliation when they stumbled in fits and starts from her mouth. She didn’t often stutter these days, but when she did, it was always at the worst possible moment.
If he noticed her embarrassment, he didn’t show it. He simply stared at her, his face devoid of expression. “Well, what do you want?”
Hyacinth twisted her fingers in her skirts, flustered at his clipped tone. “Well, I-I thought I’d…t-t-that is, I just w-wanted to…” Dash it, must she stutter through the entire thing? Lachlan Ramsey no doubt already thought her a hysterical half-wit.
She drew a deep breath to calm herself, and get her mouth around her syllables. “I came to beg your pardon, for…”
She fell silent again, her mind going blank as she struggled to find a way to say it without inflaming the situation further. How did one apologize for such a thing?
I beg your pardon for my unjustified murder accusation? I regret I called you a killer in front of all of London?
Neither seemed quite the thing, so Hyacinth settled on the blandest words she could think of. “I apologize f-for the misunderstanding last night. I sincerely beg your pardon, Mr. Ramsey.”
This was met with a long, tense silence, until at last, one of his eyebrows rose. “Misunderstanding?Is that what you’d call it?”
Dash it. She’d managed to spit out a word at last, and it was the wrong one. “Well, I thought—”
“I doubt the London gossips will call it amisunderstanding.”
His voice was cold, inflectionless, but his hazel eyes were flickering with some sort of suppressed emotion, and she’d seen for herself what a formidable temper he had…
She edged closer to the stable door. “No, I’m afraid they won’t, but—”
“No. When they repeat it to their friends—and theywillrepeat it—they’ll call it an accusation. But call it amisunderstanding, if it comforts you.”
Despite all appearances to the contrary, Hyacinth had a bit of a temper of her own. She never indulged it, of course—anger led to all sorts of unpleasantness—but a hint of irritation rippled up her spine at this cool speech.
He was awfully self-righteous for a man with a black eye.
The unfortunate truth was that Lachlan Ramseyhadengaged in a bloody brawl in a public inn-yard, where anyone could have seen him. It was cursed bad luck that she’d been the one who had, but given those circumstances, her assumptions about him hadn’t been entirely out of line. He wasn’t, after all, completely innocent in this.
Still, it seemed wiser not to dwell on sensitive issues like truth and guilt while she was trapped in the stables alone with him. “I can assure you, Mr. Ramsey, nothing about this situation is comfortable for me, but—”
“Why not? All of London doesn’t believeyouto be a murderer.”
“It wasn’tallof London. Lady Atherton wasn’t there, or Lord and Lady Herbert, or—”
“You managed to do enough damage, just the same,” he interrupted, with another arch of that infuriating black eyebrow.
