“Your tender solicitude quite unmans me,” he returned, standing back up. “I might break into tears.”
Mary’s head bobbed back and forth between Kate and Anthony. She couldn’t hear what they were saying but was clearly fascinated. “Is something wrong?” she queried.
“Not at all,” Anthony replied, just as Kate gave a firm, “No.”
“Good,” Mary said briskly. “Then I’ll see you to the door.” At Newton’s enthusiastic bark, she added, “Then again, maybe not. I don’t really want to get within ten feet of that dog. But I’ll wave you off.”
“What would I do,” Kate said to Mary as she passed her, “without you to wave me off?”
Mary smiled slyly. “I surely don’t know, Kate. I surely don’t know.”
Which left Kate with a queasy feeling in her stomach and a vague suspicion that Lord Bridgerton might have been correct. Maybe Mary was playing matchmaker with more than just Edwina this time around.
It was a horrifying thought.
With Mary standing in the hall, Kate and Anthony exited out the doorway and headed west on Milner Street. “I usually stay to the smaller streets and make my way up to Brompton Road,” Kate explained, thinking that he might not be very familiar with this area of town, “then take that to Hyde Park. But we can walk straight up Sloane Street, if you prefer.”
“Whatever you wish,” he demurred. “I shall follow your direction.”
“Very well,” Kate replied, marching determinedly up Milner Street toward Lenox Gardens. Maybe if she kept her eyes ahead of her and moved briskly, he’d be discouraged from conversation. Her daily walks with Newton were supposed to be her time for personal reflection. She did not appreciate having to drag him along.
Her strategy worked quite well for several minutes. They walked in silence all the way to the corner of Hans Crescent and Brompton Road, and then he quite suddenly said, “My brother played us for fools last night.”
That stopped her in her tracks. “I beg your pardon?”
“Do you know what he told me about you before he introduced us?”
Kate stumbled a step before shaking her head, no. Newton hadn’t stopped in his tracks, and he was tugging on the lead like mad.
“He told me you couldn’t say enough about me.”
“Wellll,” Kate stalled, “if one doesn’t want to put too fine a point on it, that’s not entirely untrue.”
“He implied,” Anthony added, “that you could not say enough good about me.”
She shouldn’t have smiled. “That’s not true.”
He probably shouldn’t have smiled, either, but Kate was glad he did. “I didn’t think so,” he replied.
They turned up Brompton Road toward Knightsbridge and Hyde Park, and Kate asked, “Why would he do such a thing?”
Anthony shot her a sideways look. “You don’t have a brother, do you?”
“No, just Edwina, I’m afraid, and she’s decidedly female.”
“He did it,” Anthony explained, “purely to torture me.”
“A noble pursuit,” Kate said under her breath.
“I heard that.”
“I rather thought you would,” she added.
“And I expect,” he continued, “that he wanted to torture you as well.”
“Me?” she exclaimed. “Whyever? What could I possibly have done to him?”
“You might have provoked him ever so slightly by denigrating his beloved brother,” he suggested.
Her brows arched. “Beloved?”
“Much-admired?” he tried.
She shook her head. “That one doesn’t wash, either.”
Anthony grinned. Miss Sheffield the elder, for all her annoyingly managing ways, did have an admirable wit. They’d reached Knightsbridge, so he took her arm as they crossed over the thoroughfare and took one of the smaller pathways that led to South Carriage Road within Hyde Park. Newton, clearly a country dog at heart, picked up his pace considerably as they entered greener surroundings, although it would be difficult to imagine the portly canine moving with anything that might correctly be termed speed.
Still, the dog seemed rather jolly and certainly interested in every flower, small animal, or passerby that crossed their path. The spring air was crisp, but the sun was warm, and the sky was a surprisingly clear blue after so many typical London days of rain. And while the woman on his arm was not the woman he planned to take to wife, nor, in fact, was she a woman he planned to take to anything, Anthony felt a rather easy sense of contentment wash over him.