“Time to go home,” George said.
“Let’s take a look at that foot,” Andrew said, his voice still an obnoxiously bright note in the tableau. He peeled off her stocking, let out a low whistle, and said with some admiration, “Ech, Billie, what did you do to yourself? That looks brutal.”
“Shut up,” George said.
Andrew just shrugged. “It doesn’t look broken —”
“It’s not,” Billie cut in.
“Still, you’ll be off it for a week, at least.”
“Perhaps not quite so long,” George said, even though he rather thought Andrew was correct in his assessment. Still, there was no point in debating her condition. They weren’t saying anything Billie didn’t already know. “Shall we go?” he said.
Billie closed her eyes and nodded. “We should put the ladder away,” she mumbled.
George tightened his arms around her and headed east toward Aubrey Hall, where Billie lived with her parents and three younger siblings. “We’ll get it tomorrow.”
She nodded. “Thank you.”
“For what?”
“Everything.”
“That covers quite a lot,” he said in a dry voice. “Are you sure you wish to be in such debt?”
She looked up at him, her eyes tired but wise. “You’re far too much of a gentleman to hold me to it.”
George chuckled at that. She was right, he supposed, although he’d never treated Billie Bridgerton like any other female of his acquaintance. Hell, no one did.
“Will you still be able to come to dinner tonight?” Andrew asked, loping alongside George.
Billie turned to him distractedly. “What?”
“Surely you haven’t forgotten,” he said, laying one dramatic hand over his heart. “The Family Rokesby is welcoming the prodigal son —”
“You’re not the prodigal son,” George said. Good God.
“A prodigal son,” Andrew corrected with good cheer. “I have been gone for months, even years.”
“Not years,” George said.
“Not years,” Andrew agreed, “but it felt like it, didn’t it?” He leaned down toward Billie, close enough to give her a little nudge. “You missed me, didn’t you, Goatrix? Come now, admit it.”
“Give her some room,” George said irritably.
“Oh, she doesn’t mind.”
“Give me some room.”
“An entirely different matter,” Andrew said with a laugh.
George started to scowl, but then his head snapped up. “What did you just call her?”
“He frequently likens me to a goat,” Billie said in the flat tone of one who has given up taking offense.
George looked at her, then looked at Andrew, then just shook his head. He’d never understood their sense of humor. Or maybe it was just that he’d never been a part of it. Growing up, he had always felt so separate from the rest of the Rokesbys and Bridgertons. Mostly by virtue of his age – five years older than Edward, who was the next one down the line – but also by his position. He was the eldest, the heir. He, as his father was quick to remind him, had responsibilities. He couldn’t bloody well frolic about the countryside all day, climbing trees and breaking bones.
Edward, Mary, and Andrew Rokesby had been born in quick succession, separated from each other by barely a year. They, along with Billie, who was almost precisely Mary’s age, had formed a tight little pack that did everything together. The Rokesby and Bridgerton homes were a mere three miles apart, and more often than not the children had met somewhere in the middle, at the brook that separated the estates, or in the treehouse Lord Bridgerton had had built at Billie’s insistence in the ancient oak by the trout pond. Most of the time George wasn’t sure what specific mischief they’d got up to, but his siblings had tended to come home filthy and hungry and in blooming good spirits.
He hadn’t been jealous. Really, they were more annoying than anything else. The last thing he’d wanted to do when he came home from school was muck about with a pack of wild urchins whose average age didn’t even scrape into the double digits.
But he had been occasionally wistful. What would it have been like if he’d had such a close cadre of companions? He’d not had a true friend his own age until he left for Eton at the age of twelve. There simply hadn’t been anyone to befriend.
But it mattered little now. They were all grown, Edward in the army and Andrew in the navy and Mary married off to George’s good friend Felix Maynard. Billie, too, had passed the age of majority, but she was still Billie, still romping around her father’s property, still riding her too-spirited mount like her bones were forged of steel and flashing her wide smile around the village that adored her.
And as for George… He supposed he was still himself, too. Still the heir, still preparing for responsibility even as his father relinquished none of it, still doing absolutely nothing while his brothers took up their arms and fought for the Empire.
He looked down at his own arms, currently cradling Billie as he carried her home. It was quite possibly the most useful thing those arms had done in years.
“We should take you to Crake,” Andrew said to Billie. “It’s closer, and then you’ll be able to stay for dinner.”
“She’s hurt,” George reminded him.
“Pfft. When has that ever stopped her?”
“Well, she’s not dressed properly,” George said. He sounded like a prig and he knew it, but he was feeling unaccountably irritated, and he couldn’t very well take it out on Billie while she was injured.