Lord Sebastian's Secret (The Duke's Sons #3)(2)
The man moved back to let him enter. Sebastian stepped in, and paused to let his eyes adjust to the sudden gloom as the door shut behind him. He could make out a high-ceilinged, paneled hall in the light from small windows near the ceiling. Much of the far end of the chamber was taken up by a huge stone fireplace. A carved stair twisted upward at the back.
“I am Anat—” began the man, and stopped as a chorus of yapping arose in the distance. “Alas,” he went on. “They come. They always answer the knock.”
“They?” said Sebastian. The man’s tone suggested calamity.
His companion merely gestured toward the stair. The yapping rose in volume, and then a positive sea of small dogs flowed down the steps and along the stone floor. They pooled around the Indian gentleman’s slipper-clad feet, barking and sniffing and panting. The man crossed his arms over his chest with a pained look. “Can you command them?” he asked. “They will not hear me.”
They were pugs, Sebastian saw. Fifteen or twenty of the tiny brown-and-white lapdogs favored by many older ladies in London. He’d never seen so many together. They milled about the other man, pawing at his legs, staring upward with bulging brown eyes, drooling on his feet, and all the while yapping like… Well, like pugs.
“Please,” said the other man. He looked quite distressed.
Sebastian stepped further into the hall. “Here,” he said, speaking as he would have to the well-trained dogs at Langford. “Come away from there.”
Floppy ears pricked. Little heads came up. The dogs’ prominent brown eyes shifted to him. After a moment’s scrutiny, the pugs flowed over like a school of fish to surround him and began to scratch and slaver at his riding boots. One clamped its teeth on the end of his spur and tried to chew it off. The largest reared up, threw its front paws around his calf, and began moving against the leather in a highly inappropriate manner. “Stop that at once,” Sebastian said.
“My thanks are yours,” said the Indian man and slipped away through a doorway beside the steps.
“Wait,” said Sebastian. “Where do these dogs belong?” But the fellow was gone. Another of the pugs flung himself on Sebastian’s free leg. The two dogs pumped away in unison, huffing like little steam engines.
“Hello, Sebastian.”
He looked up to find Georgina poised on the stair. A beam of sunlight from above gilded her hair and illuminated her oval face. She wore a pale-blue gown, and her hand rested on the wooden baluster, delicate as a flower. She looked like a masterwork in the portrait gallery at Langford.
The dogs panted and writhed on his legs.
Sebastian was not a man to blush, but he’d never found himself in a situation quite like this. Used to obedient dogs, he was torn between reaching down and pulling the two miscreants off him, which would draw more attention to their unsavory activities, and ignoring them, which was increasingly difficult. He lifted one foot off the floor and shook it a little, trying to dislodge the wretched animal unobtrusively.
“Don’t kick them,” Georgina said.
“Of course not.” He was appalled at the idea of kicking a dog.
“People are tempted,” she responded.
He couldn’t tell if she was joking. Her voice sounded odd. She didn’t smile either. Indeed, she looked somehow muted, constrained, quite unlike the elegantly composed young lady he knew from London.
“I can’t call them off, I’m afraid. They only listen to my mother.”
This was not the sort of reunion Sebastian had pictured. He wanted to step forward and greet her properly, perhaps even kiss her, but that was out of the question in his current plight.
“I’ll get Mama,” Georgina added, and hurried up the stairs and out of sight.
As soon as she was gone, Sebastian bent and grasped the offending dogs by the scruffs of their necks. He lifted them away from his legs and held them up so that he could stare at them sternly, one by one. “No,” he said.
Two small tongues lolled below bright eyes, almost as if they were laughing at him. Small paws waved in the air.
He set them firmly aside. “Down. Sit.”
Sebastian was used to command. Troops of cavalrymen jumped to obey his orders. Animals usually responded at once to the assurance in his voice. But this crew of canines stared at him as if he was speaking words they’d never heard before. The two primary offenders dashed forward, obviously ready to resume their assault on his riding boots. “No,” said Sebastian again.
He took several steps back, nearly tripping as they flowed around his moving feet. It was a challenge not to tread on any of them. As he fended them off with gentle insistence—and an utter lack of success—he actually considered climbing onto a chair, out of their reach. Which was ridiculous. And to be found in such a position by his fiancée and her mother was unthinkable.
Georgina walked quickly along an upper hall and down another stair toward the room where her mother was most likely to be at this hour. She wanted to find her mother and get her dogs off Sebastian right away, and she also wanted to retreat to her bedchamber and hide from the scene that must result. Why had she imagined an auspicious beginning to Sebastian’s visit? It had been a pretty picture—her family lined up in a smiling row, cordial greetings exchanged, offers of refreshment and easy conversation. But when had her parents had the time or interest for any of that?