Valentine Read Free

and take the right fork. Follow the footpath ’cross the fields, and it’ll bring you onto Belmont land be’ind the manor.”
    Lord Stoneridge nodded and turned his horse. He’d never seen his ancestral home, except in paintings, and for a reason he couldn’t identify wanted to familiarize himself with the house, its grounds, and its dependencies before he announced himself.
    He followed directions and found himself approaching the house from the rear. He broke through a spinney, and the long, low Tudor manor house faced him on a hill, across a swift-running stream, spanned by a narrow stone bridge.
    Stoneridge Manor. His home … and it would be the home of his children. Gilbraith children. A surge of grim satisfaction rose in his breast. In two hundred years a Gilbraith had not set foot in Stoneridge. Now it would be theirs.The Belmonts’ unfortunate tendency to produce female progeny had finally excluded them. Except …
    With a muttered oath he turned his horse to ride along the stream. The house and its immediate park were nothing. The wealth lay in the estate—its woods and fields and tenant farmers. Without access to those revenues, the house itself was merely a gentleman’s residence, and devilishly expensive to maintain. In fact, he couldn’t possibly maintain it with the mere competency he’d inherited from his own father.
    But what the hell did four chits and their mother know about running an estate, about managing the affairs of tenants? They might imagine they could rely on a bailiff, but they’d be robbed blind. The land would run itself into the ground in a few years.
    The fourth Earl of Stoneridge had been demented … whatever that idiot lawyer had said.
    He slashed at a gorse bush with a vicious stroke of his riding crop, and his horse whinnied, throwing up its head in alarm.
    “Easy.” Sylvester patted the animal’s neck as they moved through a stand of oak trees. As he emerged into the sunlight again, he saw a prone figure some way along the bank of the stream. There was something about the intent stillness of the figure that intrigued him.
    He dismounted, tethering the horse to a sapling, and approached, his footsteps soft and muffled in the damp mossy ground.
    He spotted the girl’s sandals a few yards from where she lay on her stomach, her bare feet in the air, the hem of her unbleached linen dress lying against her thighs, revealing slim brown calves. Two thick black plaits lay along her back. Her sleeves were rolled up and both hands were in the brown water of the stream.
    A gypsy tickling trout was Sylvester’s immediate conclusion.
    “We thrash poachers where I come from,” he observed to her back. The girl’s position didn’t change, and he realized that his approach hadn’t startled her. She must have heard his footsteps, soft as they were.
    “Oh, we ’angs ’em in these parts,” she said in a soft Dorsetshire drawl, still without looking around. “Less’n we’re feelin’ kind. Then we transports ’em to the colonies.”
    He couldn’t help smiling at this cool riposte. Clearly this gypsy wasn’t easily intimidated. He stood silently, affected by her intense concentration as she engaged in a battle of wits with the fish lying inert in the shadow of a camouflaging flat brown stone. Sunlight danced on the smooth surface of the water, and her hands were utterly still while her prey became accustomed to them. Then she moved. Her hands shot up from the water, flourishing a speckled brown trout.
    “Gotcha, master trout!” She chuckled, holding the thrashing fish in the air for a second before tossing him back into the stream. The fish leaped out of the water, an agile flashing curve, sunlit drops of water along its back, and then it was gone, leaving a widening circle of bubbles on the surface.
    “Why on earth did you throw it back? It looked big enough for a substantial dinner,” Stoneridge asked in surprise.
    “I’m not ’ungry,” she said in the same cool tone