“It looks like you’ve fallen from your horse and landed on your face, Featherstone.” His lips quirked. “Or perhaps you asked rude, disrespectful questions of the wrong person?” His sky blue eyes were as hard as glass.

Featherstone swallowed at the unspoken threat and turned to her. “I apologize for my disrespectful comment, Serena.”

She nodded. “You should go, Sandy.” Serena couldn’t look away from Miles, whose smile could not hide the danger that rolled off him like waves of heat.

Sandy limped from the carriage house without another word.

Serena heaved a sigh. “I am always happy to see you Miles, but never quite as much as I am today.”

His lazy, amused look was back on his face, a mask he took off and put on so quickly she hadn’t even seen the switch. “I’m hoping it was you who did that to his face?”

Serena gave a weak chuckle.

Miles took her arm, “Come on, darling, I came by to scrounge some tea and a few of those lemon biscuits Mrs. Brinkley makes just for me. I had no idea I’d have to rid the place of rats first. I’m parched.”

She laughed and they went inside, but Sandy’s threats about Bardot continued to ring in her ears. He might have left today, but he was not gone for good.

Chapter Five

Oliver slept on the seat across from Serena, his curly brown head on Nounou’s lap, the old Frenchwoman’s head against the squabs, her jaw sagging as she snored. Although Oliver was too old to require a nurse Serena had kept the older woman on because she had nowhere else to go. Besides, she also served as a chaperone for Serena to those sticklers who thought such things necessary.

It had taken her son a good hour and a half to stop bouncing on the well-sprung, soft leather seat and pelting her with questions. Even three weeks had not been long enough for him to become jaded by the notion of a new home.

He had lived most of his ten years at the house on Albermarle Street, no matter how much the duke and duchess had tried to convince Serena to move into one of their houses, or, barring that, to let them raise their grandson. No, Oliver was hers. In spite of what her relations seemed to believe, she was not raising him in squalor, but with love in a perfectly stable home—albeit a bit more unconventional than most children of his class. He spent late summer every year and Christmas with his grandparents and family at Keeting Hall. But the rest of the year he lived with his mother. He was growing up too fast and she enjoyed his company too much to yield to their wishes to send him away to some barbaric English boarding school, where the other boys would taunt and torment him for his plebeian mother, a woman who actually worked for her living. No, he would stay with her until they, together, decided how he wished to spend his life.