“I was anxious about making a good impression at the Townsends.”
A perfectly valid explanation. “And I suspect, equally anxious about making a good impression on yourirresistiblyhandsome instructor?”
“Ah!” She groaned. “The insufferable duke returns.”
“Insufferable? Me?” He touched his chest. “I’m wounded.”
“You’re not,” she accused.
But his ruse had worked to dissipate the tension. She grinned as she took back the reins.
“Trusty,” she commanded, “walk on.”
The cart bounced along in relatively comfortable silence, except for the seat’s repeated smacks to his bum. He’d have to plan a future lesson on how to avoid the worst of the ruts. Right now, she simply needed to build confidence.
“I’ll tell you one secret,” he whispered confidentially, “if you promise not to let anyone know.”
“Yes?”
“The first time I attempted to drive, I held myself too rigidly, too.”
She smiled. “Was your teacher equally as patient?”
“The coachman helped me develop my skills.”
But the first time he’d driven someone else had been Viv.
After he’d stolen the cart, he’d accidentally driven into a ditch. She’d overtaken him just as he’d been peeling away his coat to work the wheel from the rut. Her scolds had quickly quieted. And, whenhe’d turned around, she’d shocked him by backing him up against a tree and then kissing him senseless.
The memory flitted through his mind, leaving only a twinge of embarrassment over the stupidity of his prank.
He hadn’t felt even a hint of nostalgia!
Perhaps that was because there wasn’t anywhere he’d rather be—in the present or in the past—than right here, teaching his wife to drive.
“My ambition was to become skilled in as short of time as possible,” he went on. “A gentleman should understand the expertise of those he employs, else he might be fleeced, you know.”
“Your father’s maxim?” Cassandra queried.
“No.” He shook his head. “My father couldn’t be bothered with the concerns of his underlings. The maxim came from our old coachman.”
“Were you close to him?”
“I was,” he replied thoughtfully.
He conjured the old coachman in his mind’s eye, heard the old man’s brogue, his booming laugh. Unlike his fleeting memory of Viv, this recollection left a strange, achy feeling in his chest.
My God.
Could he possibly be missing the coachman?
Coachman—that’s what they’d always called him, John Coachman…heaven only knew if he ever had another surname—had been gone for…
Well, since long before his father had passed.
He compared the sting he’d just felt with the heavy feeling he got whenever he summoned a specific memory of his father. He decided the heaviness he felt on those occasions was less grief than guilt for having fallen short of being the perfect son.
Which meant he missed John Coachman, and he missed him more than he missed his father.
