He was staring at her, waiting for her to say something, but Zoë just kept looking at him and blinking. “Do you have a tongue, lass?”
There was a trace of a Scottish burr in his voice. She didn’t know what got into her, but she stuck her tongue out at him.
He laughed in a way that made the horses prick up their ears. “Aye, you have a tongue. Are you one of the girls that came with Miss Amy?” he asked, then without waiting for her answer, he turned back toward the stables.
It seemed natural to follow him as he went into a big stall. Zoë didn’t know much about horses, but she didn’t think this one looked like a derby winner.
“Zoë,” she said as the man picked up an iron tool and started for the horse.
“Is that your name?” He lifted the horse’s leg between his and Zoë saw that the man’s thighs were heavy, thick with muscle.
“Yes, that’s my name,” she said as she turned away to keep from staring at him. “I’m looking for Russell Johns.”
“And what would you want with him?”
Zoë was trying to recover from her initial clumsiness. It wasn’t often that she saw a man she was this attracted to. But how did one impress a man in the eighteenth century? she wondered. “I was told I’m to teach him how to paint.”
The man paused with the horse’s hoof in his hands. “Are you now?” he said coolly. “Are you sure he needs to learn his trade?”
From his tone, she could tell she wasn’t saying the right thing. “I don’t know. It’s just what Amy told me to do.”
“Miss Amy told you the man needed to learn to paint?”
“Not exactly.” She was backtracking because she realized she seemed to have offended him. Whatever she was doing wrong, she was going to make sure Amy got the blame for it. She decided to tell him the truth. “Amy said he was a scrawny little man with bad teeth who hung around the stables waiting for the earl’s young sister to return, and she—Amy, that is—suggested I give the man some art lessons. Amy didn’t say so, but I don’t think she believes he’s very good at making portraits.”
The man dropped the horse’s hoof and gave her a dazzling smile that showed his even white teeth. It seemed that Zoë had done the right thing in telling him the truth. “Did she now?” he said. He looked Zoë up and down in a way that made a trickle of sweat run down between her breasts.
He wiped his hands with a cloth and said, “Can you really paint?”
“A bit,” she said in a modest way that implied that she was actually very good.
“It’s near dinnertime here and everyone is away, getting ready to eat. What say you that I get Miss Amy to put some food in a basket and we take it to the lake? Look what I have.”
Her eyes widened as he held up a wooden box that was covered with runs of different colors of paint. “This is the painter’s kit. He left it here.” He turned it around in his hands as though he’d never seen it before. “Shall we take it with us and you can give me a lesson or two?”
Zoë smiled. “That’s a great idea.” She thought that if the man did have a rudimentary talent, maybe she could teach him enough to get him out of the stables.
“Can you ride a horse?”
Zoë looked at the big animal in front of her and gave a small smile. “I’ve been on a horse before,” she said as she thought of pony rides at the fair.
The man sighed. “I was hoping you could not ride so you could get behind me.” Again, he looked her up and down.
“I know nothing at all about horses,” she said quickly. “Nothing whatever.”
He smiled. “Wait here a moment and I’ll get things ready. Why don’t you look in that box and see if what you need is in there?”
Zoë sat down on the straw with the box full of art supplies. There was clean paper and pencils, charcoal, and a few pieces of chalk. There were watercolors too, but she had no water. “What’s your name?” she asked as he left with the horse.
“MacKenzie,” he said, then was gone.
Zoë looked down at the paper, picked up a pencil, and thought about nothing else.
“Miss Amy, I’d like a word with you.”
She looked u
p from the bread she was thumping and met Russell’s angry eyes. She had no doubt that Zoë had been to see him.