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Which should be difficult, especially with all of these petticoats, but yet somehow I manage to get the shoe off and the blasted thing—

It was possible she was belaboring the metaphor.

She needed to try to cover her faux pas. “Of course, if you are not comfortable with calling me by my—”

“Call her Flick,” her son interrupted. When she turned to him, he grinned first at her, then Marcia and Rupert. “It’s easier to say than Miss Montrose, and isn’t as forward as calling her by her first name.”

Her teenaged son knew more about social expectations than she did?

“Flick…” murmured Rupert, as if tasting the word.

His sister was nodding. “Flick,” she said shyly, peeking through her lashes at Felicity. “I like it.”

Well, hell, Felicity couldn’t scold Bull for using the nickname now, could she?

“Bull.” The word was barked—there was no other word for it—from the head of the table, where Mr. Calderbank was sawing at his chicken. “What kind of name is that?”

Feeling affronted for her son, Felicity spoke up. “I named him James.”

“After my father,” Bull added cheerfully, twirling the fork around his fingers in that never-still way of his. “But every third male at Exingham was named James—and they kept dying—so when Flick dropped me off there, my sister Honoria called me Bull to avoid confusion.”

Marcia must have known the story, because she grinned. “Because he was so good at lying.”

“That’s no’ an admirable trait,” growled Mr. Calderbank.

Again, Felicity bristled, wanting to defend the lad she hadn’t really raised, but…she agreed with the man. Botheration.

Her son, however, shrugged. “I dinnae lie any longer.”

“Ye dinnae?”

Bull squirmed in his seat and exchanged a glance with Marcia. “No’ much.”

Their host now pierced the lad with a glare. “Ye swear?”

It was too much to hope Bull would let that pass. “Every damn day.”

Stifling a groan, Felicity almost missed the reluctant snort Mr. Calderbank released. Was…was that a laugh?

She focused on peas. Peas seemed safer, at that moment, than thinking about Mr. Calderbank laughing.

Picturing him laughing at a joke would make him too likable, and that would be problematic. Easier if he continued to be a grump.

She’d always been partial to a bit of silver at the temples—it was one of the reasons her parents had offered her to the Duke, after all—but on Mr. Calderbank, the effect was disconcerting. The lines at the corners of his eyes told her he was a bit older than her thirty-two years, but there was nothing old or soft about the man.

From lowered lashes, she peeked at his confident movements as he stabbed a piece of meat. There were scars on the backs of his hands, so many they seemed to be made of nothing but scars. Why would a clerk have hands scarred in such a way?

No, he was nothing like the Duke of Exingham, despite the flecks of silver in his beard. He was strong and hard and—

He is a bit of an arse, let us be honest.

Right. Right, she couldn’t afford to like him, no matter how handsome he was, no matter how he made her insides hum and her inner thighs squeeze together.

You really do need to find your copy of A Harlot’s Guide, hmm?

“Exingham,” Mr. Calderbank suddenly stated.

That was it. Just the name of the place where Bull had been raised, away from her.