On any other occasion, Fred would have charged him, intent on thrashing him within an inch of his life. Maggie would have leapt between them as she always did, verbally eviscerating Fred for attacking someone that he knew very well wasn’t permitted to fight back.
Not that that had ever stopped Fred before.
In Maggie’s absence, Fred had no qualms about cuffing Nicholas on the head and ears, brutally shoving him to the ground, or striking him on the back with his riding crop.
Nicholas was taller than Fred and broader of shoulder, but he was lanky and thin whereas Fred was as stocky and muscular as a bulldog. Nicholas liked to think that in a fair fight he could best his lifelong rival; however, the fights between him and Fred had never been fair, and as Fred was the heir to a baronetcy and Nicholas was a servant, he knew that they never would be.
“Master Fred’s your better, Nick,” Jenny said whenever he appeared with a bloody lip or a newly blackened eye. “You’d best stop provoking him.”
But this time, Fred hadn’t been provoked.
He simply pokered up, and in a fair imitation of his father, Sir Roderick, scolded Maggie for consorting with servants and conducting herself in a manner unbecoming to a young lady. “I shall inform your Aunt Daphne of your behavior,” he told her sternly. “And when your father returns from London, I’ve a mind to speak to him as well.”
And then he turned on his booted heel and strode away, pausing at the edge of the clearing only long enough to lock eyes with Nicholas.
There was murder in his gaze.
“How dared he threaten me?” Maggie seethed an hour later as the two of them lay stretched out on the grassy banks of the stream that ran through Beasley Park. “The jealous arse. Tell my father, indeed. As if Papa would ever hear a word against me.”
“Your aunt would,” Nicholas replied grimly.
Daphne Honeywell, the squire’s widowed sister-in-law, had come to live at Beasley Park only two years before for the sole purpose of turning Maggie into a lady. Nicholas despised the woman. Because of her, Maggie’s days were taken up with needlework and dancing lessons, and her head had been filled with thoughts of balls, routs, and assemblies. Because of her, Maggie no longer wore breeches and rode astride or stripped down to her underclothes to go swimming with him in the lake.
Now she dressed in pretty gowns, made of fabric so fragile and fine that Nicholas feared to touch it, and her thick mink-colored hair, which had once cascaded in a luxurious tumble down her back, was bound up in soft curls and silken ribbons. Even her complexion had changed. Carefully shielded from the sun with parasols and hats, it no longer glowed with a golden tan but had reverted to its natural hue: a flawless, creamy porcelain.
Two years was hardly any time at all, and yet the difference between a fourteen-year-old Margaret Honeywell and a sixteen-year-old Margaret Honeywell was as vast as the ocean.
More and more often, Nicholas found himself staring at his lifelong friend with a peculiar ache of longing in his chest. He’d never liked to be away from her, but now, whenever they were apart, he brooded over her to the point of melancholy.
And that wasn’t the worst of it.
He’d been dreaming about her, too. Vivid dreams that surely no gentleman ever dared dream of a lady.
“Miss Margaret’s not for the likes of you,” Jenny had taken to warning him whenever she caught him sulking. “She’s for Master Fred or some other fine gentleman. Ain’t nothing going to change that.”
Nicholas had never believed it. He and Maggie were soul mates. And yet, as he watched her slow transformation, there were times when he was stricken with an awful pang of sadness, a nagging worry that the day was fast approaching when Margaret Honeywell would take her rightful place in society and be lost to him forever.
“I shan’t stop teaching you to dance merely because Fred and Aunt Daphne object,” Maggie said as they lay by the stream. “I’ve always shared my lessons with you, haven’t I? And dancing is really no different from reading or writing, I feel.”
Nicholas levered up on his elbow and looked down at her. “When you taught me to read, you were seven years old. And we weren’t required to touch each other.”
“Why shouldn’t we touch each other?”
He arched a brow at her.
She only laughed. “What hypocrisy. I’ll wager no one