“I can do a great deal that you don’t know about. What about breakfast?”
“It’ll have to wait. You ate all the hardtack and we don’t have time to go hunting.”
“I could snare a rabbit, or shoot one, for that matter.”
He looked directly at her. “Oh? And where did you learn to do that?”
“My father,” she said as she took the coffeepot to the stream and scoured it with sand. When she returned, the fire was out and his bedding rerolled and put on the back of his horse. Maddie rubbed Buttercup’s soft nose. “Why did your father hire Toby?” She didn’t want to ask him, but her curiosity was eating at her. From the moment she’d seen him she’d felt as though she knew all there was to know about him. It had been her unfortunate experience that big, good-looking men were very much alike. They had never had much denied them in their lives and always expected more to be given to them. But Captain Montgomery had surprised her from the first. Come to think of it, where had he learned to wear a breech cloth and sneak about so quietly?
He helped her onto his horse, then mounted behind her. “Why do you think a father would hire a man like Toby for his son?”
She smiled. “Easy. To keep you out of trouble. For all his complaining, Toby takes care of you like a mother. He worries about you. No doubt he’s had to pull you out of scrapes with daughters whose fathers were after you with shotguns. Did you join the army to perhaps escape marriage to some poor innocent girl?”
She twisted to look at his face, sure she was right, but he was smiling.
“I have no idea what has given you such a low opinion of me. Have I ever said or done anything to you that could be considered unseemly?”
“Other than threatening me with having to go to bed with you to make you give me freedom that is mine by right?”
“Yes, other than that.” His eyes sparkled.
“No, but then, you don’t like me much.”
“I don’t think like has much to do with ah…what we’re talking about, does it? I may not like you, but you’re not exactly painful to look at.”
“Thank you,” she said softly. “I think.” What an odd conversation to have, especially when she was riding so close to him and they were so alone in the mountains. “Why was Toby hired?”
“To get me into trouble.”
She turned and looked at him.
“My father worried that I thought of duty before anything else in life.” ’Ring grimaced. “My father was also concerned that I lacked a sense of humor, so when I was sixteen he hired Toby to introduce me to, ah…life.”
“Life?”
“Girls.”
“You didn’t—don’t—like girls?”
“I thought you wanted to know about Toby.”
She was a little confused as to what she did want to know about. “Did he? Did he introduce you to girls?”
“More or less.”
She had to try to figure out what that meant. “I’ve never heard of a father hiring someone to show his son about…life.”
“He was worried that I spent too much time involved in our family business, that’s all. So he chose the man who knew more about living than anyone else he’d ever met.”
“Toby?”
“Toby.”
She was quiet a moment. “So, I suppose he probably succeeded. I don’t guess with your face and—” She refused to give him the satisfaction of saying physique. “I would imagine you were an apt pupil.”
“I did what was required of me.”
What in the world did he mean by that, Maddie wondered.