AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Three weeks ago, he’d finally taken action. If there was a traitor, he’d almost certainly dealt with the French. Who better to ask about the traitor than a Frenchman? He had a colleague in France, a man named Etienne LeFabvre, who he’d written and asked if he had heard any rumors about Spinner’s Falls. Since then, he’d been waiting impatiently for a reply from Etienne. He frowned. Relations with France were terrible, as usual, but surely—
His thoughts were interrupted by the opening of the tower door. Mrs. Halifax entered carrying a tray.
“What the hell’re you doing?” he rasped, surprise making his words harsher than he’d intended.
She stopped, her wide, pretty mouth turning down with displeasure. “I’ve brought you your breakfast, Sir Alistair.”
He refrained with effort from asking what she could’ve possibly brought him for breakfast. Unless she’d caught the castle mice and fried them up, there wasn’t much of anything to eat. He’d dined on the last of the sausages the night before.
She glided forward and made to set the tray on a rather valuable Italian tome on insects.
“Not there.”
At his command, she froze, half-bent.
“Ah, just a moment.” He hastily cleared a space, stacking papers on the floor beside his chair. “Here will do.”
She set the tray down and uncovered a dish. On it reposed two ragged slices of bacon, crisped within an inch of their lives, and three small, hard biscuits. Beside the plate was a large bowl of porridge and a cup of inky black tea.
“I would’ve brought up a pot of tea,” Mrs. Halifax was saying as she busied herself arranging the dishes on his desk, “but you don’t seem to have one. A teapot, that is. As it was, I was forced to boil the tea in a cooking pot.”
“Broke last month,” Alistair muttered. What scheme was this? And was he expected to consume this dreck in front of her?
She looked up, all rosy cheeks and sparkling blue eyes, damn her. “What did?”
“The teapot.” Thank God he’d put on his eye patch this morning. “This is most, ah, kind of you, Mrs. Halifax, but you needn’t have bothered.”
“No bother at all,” she blatantly lied. He knew full well the state of his kitchen.
He narrowed his eye. “I expect that you’ll want to leave this morning—”
“I shall just have to get another, shan’t I? A teapot, I mean,” she said as if she’d suddenly gone deaf. “The tea just doesn’t taste the same boiled in a cooking pot. I think ceramic teapots are the best.”
“I shall order a carriage—”
“There are people who prefer metal—”
“From the village—”
“Silver’s quite dear, of course, but a nice little tin teapot—”
“So you can leave me in peace!”
His last words emerged as a bellow. Lady Grey raised her head from the hearth. For a moment, Mrs. Halifax stared at him with large, harebell-blue eyes.
Then she opened her lush mouth and said, “You can afford a tin teapot, can’t you?”
Lady Grey sighed and turned back to the warmth of the fire.
“Aye, I can afford a tin teapot!” He closed his eye a moment, irritated that he’d let her draw him into her babble. Then he looked at her and took a breath. “But you’ll be leaving just as soon as I can—”
“Nonsense.”
“What did you say?” he rasped very gently.
She raised her impertinent chin. “I said nonsense. You obviously need me. Did you know that you have hardly any food in the castle? Well, of course you know, but really it will not do. It will not do at all. I shall do some shopping as well when I go to the village for the teapot.”
“I don’t need—”
