The Savage Miss Saxon Read Free

For instance, a snappy recitation of your sums, or perhaps a short dissertation on the rule of Charles I? Or shall we dispense with these edifying transports of wisdom and discuss more mundane matters? Such as—where did you and your madcap partners in crime go last night? Which of my neighbors is to come calling today carrying either a bill for damages or a horsewhip he wishes to take to your hide? Or last but most certainly not least, do you by any chance have even the foggiest notion what a strange woman and her hulking male companion are doing in our mother’s bedchamber?”
    Throughout this long, deceptively soft-spoken diatribe, young Jeremy Mannering had been visibly shrinking before his brother’s sharp-eyed gaze, but at Nicholas’s last words the boy straightened up, looking momentarily blank, then seemed to become suddenly enlightened. A vivid red flush ran up his neck and into his cheeks.
    His brother saw all these easily read clues to Jeremy’s probable guilt and ventured, “Do you wish to tell me the whole of it now, or do you choose to wait for reinforcements?”
    Instead of giving an immediate answer, Jeremy lurched across the room to pour himself a cup of coffee, his badly shaking hands putting him in danger of scalding himself. He took several quick small sips of the steaming liquid in an effort to gain some control over his baser instincts (which were telling him to take to his heels just as fast as he could), and in the hope the coffee would have the double-barreled effect of easing the pounding in his head while making his mouth feel less like it was lined in uncombed wool.
    The entrance of his two friends caused him to sigh in relief. Surely Nicholas wouldn’t cut up too stiff with guests in the house.
    Cuffy Simpson was the first to enter the room, his trim figure and blond good looks seemingly unaffected by his night of cheerful debauchery. His cousin, however, was another matter. Billy Bingham, blessed with neither his relative’s physique or looks, had also missed out on the family strong stomach. His chubby body fairly dragged itself across the carpet, striving to reach the restorative coffee in an effort to stave off a complete collapse, and his normally sallow complexion looked positively green beneath his thatch of muddy brown hair.
    While Billy kept a two-handed death grip on his cup, drinking from it noisily like a large dog lapping up water, Cuffy, already reclining on the sofa, meticulously spread a napkin over one knee, took one or two delicate sips of his own coffee, and said amicably, “Beautiful morning, isn’t it? Sunshine, a blue sky, what more could one ask for in a morning? Does anyone care to go for a ride?”
    Nicholas, who had been watching all this little play with varying degrees of interest, humor, and disbelief, questioned Cuffy: “Tell me, if you were to ride out this morning, oh, let’s say as far as the crossroads, and then momentarily lose your way—in which direction would the fmgerpost for Linton Hall be pointing?”
    Billy looked at Jeremy, whose face was just then a very painful red, nudged his cousin in the ribs, pointed to their friend, and pronounced, “The cull is leaky, and cackles.”
    “Translate, Cuffy,” the Earl ordered, well accustomed to Billy’s propensity toward cant language.
    “A cull is a man—Jeremy—and Billy says he’s leaky, apt to blab, which,” Cuffy’s eyes turned accusingly on Jeremy, “he obviously has done, cackling just like a barnyard hen.”
    “I did not!” Jeremy protested hotly. “I never said a word, Nicholas guessed it, that’s all. I don’t know how, but he did.”
    His brother came over and draped a commiserating arm about his shoulder. “You aren’t ‘leaky,’ Jeremy,” he soothed him, “but then again I shouldn’t play at cards if I had your face—it speaks for you without your ever saying a word. Besides, do you think you three invented changing fingerposts as a lark? It was only a lucky guess on