“Is your house infested by mice?”
“I expect so. It’s an old house, after all.”
“You would know. Mice are not silent companions,” Eugenia said. “They chatter and run in the walls; they endlessly plague the kitchen staff; they will eat the candles if they’re left out.”
“A mouse will eat a candle?”
She nodded. “As will a rat.”
“The only rat in our house is Jarvis, Otis’s pet.”
Eugenia gave a shudder. “I hate rats.”
“It’s hard to believe, but I have grown inordinately fond of Jarvis.”
“You haven’t!”
“I have,” Ward said, the corner of his mouth kicking up.
Eugenia shuddered again, involuntarily.
“I understand a lady’s hesitation to be around small beasties, but you seem particularly vehement.”
“I grew up in a house infested by rats.”
Ward absorbed that statement with shock. He had pictured Eugenia as a little girl with rosy curls and porcelain skin and a few freckles on the end of her nose. That child . . . grew up in a house with rats?
He kept forgetting that she wasn’t born into the gentry. Still, he’d assumed she’d grown up on the outskirts of society. The daughter of a vicar, perhaps.
A rat infestation implied a household fallen far below the gentry.
He suddenly realized he was scowling ferociously. “I don’t like to think of you in such conditions.” Had she ever been hungry? The thought bit into his gut like acid.
“I prefer not to remember the details myself.” Her voice had the perfect cadence of a lady’s, but that was part of her mask, the role she had assumed. “I was bitten at the age of eight.”
The acid spread through his veins. “Did you contact rat-bite fever?”
She nodded.
“It’s often fatal.” He was starting to understand her. As a child, all her energy, fierce intelligence, pure joy for life must have focused on escaping her circumstances. No wonder she hungered for the life of a lady.
“I came very close to dying,” Eugenia said. “My stepmother—whom I adore—later told me that she learned how to pray during my illness.”
Ward raked his fingers through his hair. Many houses in England were infested with rats. It was a fact of life.
The little whiskered face of Otis’s best friend leapt into Ward’s mind. Whether she wanted to or not, Eugenia was about to meet a rat.
“How far is it to your house?” she asked.
“Approximately four hours. We’ll be pulling into an inn to change horses in half that time.”
“Would you mind if I took a nap? This wine has made me terribly sleepy.”
She was clearly avoiding further intimacies, but he rejected the impulse to persuade her otherwise. He didn’t want to make love to Eugenia Snowe for the first time in a carriage.
“A good idea,” he said with a nod. “I shall sleep as well.” After all, he didn’t mean to sleep at night.
Though it wouldn’t be appropriate to leap on his guest the moment he had her over the threshold. He ought to ply her with . . . with flowers or something. He’d be damned if he treated her like a courtesan or a merry widow.
Her virtue was as spotless as any lady’s; he’d bet his honor on it. Still, she wanted him.
That was enough to stake his happiness on.
Chapter Seventeen
Some two hours later, the carriage drew into the courtyard of the Holy Cheese. He touched Eugenia’s shoulder to wake her. When she sat up, rosy and blinking from her nap, he had to swallow a groan.
Her hair had fallen from its pins again and her dress was on the verge of displaying her breasts to the open air. She would look like this after making love.
“Oh,” she said in a sleepy purr. “Have we arrived at the inn?” She pulled her thick hair over one shoulder and started twisting it, the way he imagined women did flax at a spinning wheel.
“Yes, we need to change the horses,” Ward explained. “I thought you might like to refresh yourself inside. We’ll still be in good time for dinner. And it will give the second carriage a chance to catch up with us.”
“Where are we?”
“The Holy Cheese.”
“The Holy Cheese? ‘Holy’ as in sacred, or ‘holey’ as in full of holes?” Her hands flew around her head until her hair was pinned in place as firmly as shingles to a roof. After her nap, she looked more relaxed, which he liked. Very much.
“Both,” Ward answered. “They take cheese very seriously in these parts.”
He pushed open the door and helped her down before the groom could take out that ridiculous mounting block. It was coming on twilight, and the air was fresh and clean as it never was in London.