A Gentleman’s Game Read Online Free Page A

be yourself, Mr. Nathaniel, and we’ll do fine.”
    He turned his head to look up at her, an odd expression on his features. He looked as though something had clubbed him in the head and he wasn’t sure whether or not he needed to fall over.
    “I’ll try,” he said at last, turning his attention back to the hay. “But you don’t know what you’re asking of me, Miss Agate.”
    As he sliced at the bale, she located two cakes of salt and tucked them under one arm. Two more animals needed treatment. She was ready.
    “Damnation.” Behind her, Nathaniel Chandler inhaled deeply. “Ah—sorry about that. Shouldn’t speak so before a lady.”
    “Quite all right. My parents keep a coaching inn, and as a child I heard much worse from drunken customers.”
    She bit her lip, cutting off further speech. When faced with a pair of twinkling blue eyes and a stable full of horses needing help, she was ready to drop every guard. She needed to be more careful.
    And then she realized that he had cursed because he had got a good look at the inside of the bale.
    “ Is the hay moldy?” Dropping the salt blocks, she lunged to his side and grabbed for a handful of hay. Lucerne hay was among the finest types available, its scent pleasantly grassy and tangy when it was clean and well dried.
    And this was. “It’s perfect. You’re not pleased?”
    “Of course I’m pleased.” He rubbed a hand over his jaw, where thin sunlight caught the golden glint of stubble. “Sort of. It means we still don’t know what’s wrong with the horses.”
    “Sir William said it was colic.”
    “True enough.” Rolling to his feet, he extended a hand to her and pulled her up as well. “But colic is a word that means everything and nothing.” From the floor, he picked up the two bricks of salt. “Colic can involve the gut or the lungs or even the hooves. The sort Epigram has can be due to a poison or simply to the horse not drinking enough water.”
    “A poison,” murmured Rosalind. No…surely that was impossible. Aunt Annie had never destroyed anything without first making a plan for Rosalind’s departure. “How could someone have poisoned the horses?”
    “It wouldn’t have to be a poison as we think of it. As something introduced with malice,” he said. “It could simply be something that disagrees with horses. Just as oysters should not be eaten during the summer months, but that’s not because they wish to hurt people.”
    So he said. But some people did wish to hurt. “Could you tell if someone had intentionally poisoned the horses?”
    His dark-gold brows lifted. “I can’t decide whether you’re the most conscientious secretary my father has ever had or the most suspicious.”
    “Both, probably.”
    “Probably.” He grinned and tossed a salt brick to Rosalind, who caught it in worry-cold fingers. “I don’t think Epigram has eaten something toxic. He didn’t have that look, and his belly didn’t have that feeling.”
    “What is the look or the feeling?” She wanted to believe him. She wanted this all to be chance. Coincidence. She wanted to be just a secretary, doing exactly—and only—the work she was expected to complete.
    Or a milkmaid, eager and confident. As long as she was wishing.
    “I don’t know exactly,” he admitted. “I just…know them when I see them. You can tell the difference between a person with a rheumy cold and a person with her nose in everyone’s business, can you not? Both are disorders of the nose, but they show up differently.”
    “Hmmm.” A question tumbled through her mind, only to fall from her lips a moment later. “Why did you check the hay again?”
    His lips twisted. “Horse racing is a gentleman’s game. It’s a house of cards on a foundation of trust.”
    This she had learned at once in her few weeks as Sir William’s secretary. So much of horse racing depended on trust. The trust that a horse was who his owner said, the trust that the jockey would race his best, trust