Free Waking Up With a Rake by Connie Mason, Mia Marlowe Page A

mare’s back, triggering the saddle’s failure.
    It was cunningly done. Even if the thorn was discovered, there was no way to prove it hadn’t gotten there by accident. And leather wore over time. If Olivia had ended up at the bottom of the ravine, it might have been days before someone became curious about the cause of the accident and thought to look. By then, the perpetrator could have covered up those two bits of evidence.
    When Mr. Thatcher returned to the stable with Molly, Rhys had snatched him up by his collar and confronted him with his findings. The man’s weathered face grew red with indignation over Rhys’s accusations.
    “I put that little miss on her first pony, your lordship,” Thatcher had said with a glint of fury in his eye. “I’d sooner take a whipping than see her come to harm.”
    “At the very least you were negligent in saddling her horse,” Rhys said, thrusting the man away in disgust. He heard truth in Thatcher’s tone. The groom wasn’t the culprit, but that didn’t excuse incompetence. “Why didn’t you check it?”
    “Molly was already saddled when I come in this morning with a note affixed from Mrs. Symon ordering this saddle be used so her daughter would have to ride aside. Miss Olivia and her mother go round about that, you’ll collect. In any case, I figured Davy had handled Molly’s tack so’s I wouldn’t have to. We pick up slack for each other like that. I didn’t think nothing about it at the time.”
    Rhys had demanded the note and tucked it into his pocket. He’d found a sample of Mrs. Symon’s handwriting later in the afternoon and compared it to the note on the saddle. Whoever forged the note was good, but there were enough differences in the script to make him doubt that Olivia’s mother had sent it.
    He and Mr. Thatcher both cornered the stable lad, but Davy denied having done anything but muck out stalls and pick the dray horse’s hooves that morning. And since the big workhorse was housed in the far portion of the long stable and didn’t generally cooperate when his hooves needed attention, Davy hadn’t noticed anyone lurking about Molly’s stall.
    There was a chance the culprit was a servant who might have gone unremarked, but in his research on the Symons, Rhys had learned that they paid their people very well. The staff was given regular half-day liberties and alternate all day Sundays. The below stairs dining room was always generously set. It wouldn’t make sense for one of the staff to turn on so openhanded an employer.
    Rhys thought it more likely that whoever tampered with the sidesaddle was seated at the long dining table, breaking bread with Miss Symon.
    So he studied his dinner companions with a jaundiced eye. There was the geriatric Baron Ramstead and his much younger baroness. The lady was seated to Rhys’s right. It was a good thing she was attractive because she didn’t seem to have the brains of a peewit.
    Next to Olivia was a Mr. Winfield Stubbs, a portly fellow with a nose like a misshapen rutabaga and jowls to rival a bloodhound. Despite his unfortunate appearance, he was reputedly a great friend of Mr. Symon from his days in India. Mr. Stubbs was a dedicated trencherman and had remarked several times to no one in particular, “Splendid table, what? M’compliments to the chef.”
    Next to him, Lady Harrington, a distant relation of Mr. Symon, was seated. The dowager viscountess, still a handsome woman though she’d never see fifty again, was resplendent in dark silk and ropes of matched gray pearls.
    “You see, Lord Rhys, we Symons are not without nobility in our lineage,” Mrs. Symon had said as an aside when introductions were made before supper. “In fact, given the right circumstances, my own dear Mr. Symon might inherit the Harrington title one day.”
    “By right circumstances, she means the deaths of Lady Harrington’s five strapping sons and all their twenty-six children,” Olivia had mumbled under her breath when