Chapter 2
I have made many mistakes in my life born of fear or desperation or the desire for safety, but the greatest error I have ever made was letting you go. I should never have let you go.
—from the papers of Arthur Baird, written upon the back of an envelope, never posted
Arthur Baird, Fifth Earl of Strathrannoch, caught the madwoman in his arms when she fell.
Great bloody bollocking hell.
He did not have time for a mad English ginger on his doorstep. He had to go catch a bloody zebra .
This, evidently, was to be his fate: no fortune, no prospects, but rich in exotic equines and insensible ladies.
The unconscious woman’s companion—blond, frowning, and half a head taller than her short, unhinged friend—leapt forward across the threshold. “She’s perfectly well, I assure you. Give her some air.”
“Oh aye,” he said drily. “I’ll just lay her down on the stone floor and leave her there. Very hospitable.”
Instead he turned on his heel, leaving the stern blonde and her small white dog in his wake, and made for the drawing room. He was at least fifty percent certain there was a chaise longue in the drawing room.
He hoped.
He hitched the madwoman higher in his arms as he strode forward. Christ, she was an armful, all softness and curves everywhere, the sunset-colored sweep of her hair spilling over his shoulder, and—
He coughed and nearly tripped over his own feet.
Surely to God he had not just entertained a brief stab of attraction toward an unconscious mad Englishwoman .
He shook himself, causing the woman’s head to jostle about alarmingly. Her eyelids fluttered. Her eyelashes were long and thick and—he had no name for the color of them. The darkest, warmest, rosiest copper.
He kicked a child’s puzzle-box out of his way, swept three leather-bound books off the faded chintz chaise, and plopped the woman on it in some relief.
Orange. The color of her eyelashes was orange .
The other woman had gathered up the loose letters and trailed him into the room. When he deposited her companion onto the chaise, she knelt immediately before the still faintly fluttering redhead. The dog leapt up onto the chaise, and the woman picked up her friend’s wrists and chafed them briskly.
“Lydia,” she said, her tone crisp. “Wake up. This is no time for hysterics.”
The ginger on the chaise cracked open one blue eye. She flicked her gaze around the room, landed on Arthur, hesitated briefly, and then closed the eye once more.
“No,” she rasped. “I have chosen the abyss.”
Despite himself, Arthur laughed.
Her eyes flew open, both of them this time, and she pushed herself upright, disarranging the dog. A bit of color came back into her milk-pale cheeks. “No,” she said. “Never mind. I don’t want the abyss. I—I want an explanation. For all of this.”
The blond woman blinked at her companion, looking surprised and ever so slightly impressed.
“Aye,” said Arthur. “As do I. Who are you? And why did you—” He paused, quite unable to find the proper turn of phrase for this situation.
Why did you just offer me your person and your fortune? seemed a bit unseemly.
And oh by the by, do you truly have a fortune, because I might be persuaded to accept you after all? seemed even worse.
He settled for, “Why did you seem to think we are acquainted?”
The redhead took a deep, fortifying breath. She opened her mouth, then closed it again, and attempted several more breaths.
Arthur waited. He did not look at the woman’s bosom as she breathed, which was astonishingly difficult, given how she’d felt in his arms. He did not know whether to congratulate himself on his restraint or be alarmed that it was required.
“My name is Lydia Hope-Wallace,” she said finally, “and this is my friend Lady Georgiana Cleeve.” She looked down and gestured at the dog. “And this is Sir Francis Bacon.”
Arthur did not know what to do with that information. He elected to nod.
“My eldest brother, Theodore Hope-Wallace, is an MP in London,” Miss Hope-Wallace went on, “and our father was the third son of the Marquess of Vye.”
She appeared to be waiting for some acknowledgment of the name, but Arthur did not recognize it. His brother, Davis, had all the political ardor in the family—he would have recognized the names of Vye and Hope-Wallace and known straightaway who this woman was.
But thinking about Davis was like pressing his finger against the fine edge of a blade, and so he forced the thought back down.
“Right,” Miss Hope-Wallace said, taking another deep breath. “I am a writer. I write, um—” She looked up at him, then down at the letters her companion had gathered up. She seemed to set her teeth before going on. “I write political pamphlets under the pseudonym H, distributed by Belvoir’s Library in London. They are”—she licked her lips—“radical pamphlets. Hence the pseudonym.”
She looked up at him again, her cheeks going pale once more, but he only nodded at her to go on.
“Nearly three years ago, I received a letter from the Earl of Strathrannoch, inviting me to discuss the role of Scottish soldiers in the fight against Napoleon. We have corresponded regularly since. Our letters passed only through Belvoir’s—I never wrote to Strathrannoch directly, and he never wrote to me. You—” She tightened her hands around the bundle of letters and locked her gaze with Arthur’s. Her eyes were dark blue, a velvety midnight blue, and just now close to spilling over with tears. “Did you truly mean what you said? You are Lord Strathrannoch? And yet you did not write these letters?”
He had the sudden and insane desire to tell her that he had written them, simply so she would stop looking so wounded, but he shook his head. “I’m Strathrannoch. And I’ve never written to a political pamphleteer in my life, I can promise you that.”
She looked down at the letters, her thick rosy lashes— orange , damn it—veiling her eyes. Arthur felt a discomfiting tension rise between his shoulder blades at the sight. She was going to cry, and then he was going to do what he always did when someone dissolved in front of him—act a complete nodcock.
But she didn’t cry. She lifted her lashes and those great dark-blue eyes were hard with outrage.
“Then who,” she said precisely, “has written these letters? Before you answer”—she appeared to notice his mouth opening in refutation—“keep in mind that this individual has been impersonating you, your lordship, for nigh on three years. It may be in your best interest to figure out who would do such a thing.”
Arthur ran a hand through his hair in exasperation before answering her. “I’ve no bloody idea. Probably someone pulled my name out of Debrett’s—Strathrannoch Castle is far away enough from London that you’d never know the difference.”
Miss Hope-Wallace shook her head. “That’s impossible. We spoke of Scotland often—the letters were certainly written by a Scot. And more than that, it’s someone who knew this place intimately. I could tell you the number of windows that need replacing on each floor of the castle.”
Arthur felt heat start in the tops of his ears. He knew well enough how many windows in the damned castle needed replacing, and where each was located, and he didn’t very well require a reminder from—
His thoughts ground suddenly to a halt. “Knew this place?” he repeated. “Knew Strathrannoch Castle?”
“Yes,” she said. “From the gate lodge to the stables to the tops of the ramparts.”
The tension between his shoulder blades redoubled, and he had to force his muscles to unlock so he could stride over to the chaise and pluck the topmost letter from Miss Hope-Wallace’s lap.
She let out an outraged squawk, but Arthur barely heard her. He sank down atop the desk in the corner of the room and stared at the letter.
At the handwriting he knew almost as well as he knew his own.
“Oh Christ,” he said quietly. “Oh fuck .”
There was a squeaking sound from the chaise, and Arthur was abruptly recalled to the present moment.
The friend, Lady Georgiana, seemed to have been the one who’d made the sound. He could not quite discern if her fingers pressed to her mouth were holding back horror or laughter.
Miss Hope-Wallace, on the other hand, was staring at him, her full lips pressed tightly together. “You know,” she said. “You know who authored the letters.”
His voice came out low and furious. “Aye. I know who wrote this.”
It should not have been a surprise. He’d had a lifetime of such surprises, a thousand cuts that were always just a bit too fresh to heal.
What was this new betrayal after the last one, the greatest one?
And yet—stupidly—he was still surprised. It still hurt.
“Who?” Miss Hope-Wallace demanded. Her cheeks were pink again, flushed and rosy, and her chin was set. “Who wrote them?”
“Davis Baird,” Arthur said. “My brother.”
The words were still ringing in the silence when two of his employees burst into the drawing room.
“Strathrannoch!” Huw Trefor, the Welshman in charge of the Strathrannoch stables, was out of breath, his cheeks ruddy over his white beard. “Get the bloody hell out of your books, man, and help me with the damn zebras! They’re all over the estate—I think one’s made it down to the forest, and I—”
At the sight of the two women on the chaise, Huw stopped speaking abruptly.
Bertie Palmer—Arthur’s estate manager and secretary, as well as the love of Huw’s life—peered curiously around his much-taller partner.
An expression of utter delight stole across Bertie’s face, and he adjusted his spectacles with one finger. “Well,” he said, in his gentle voice, “what have we here?”
Bloody hell .
“These are—” Arthur began, and then paused. “This is—”
He had no idea how to finish his sentence. What had Davis told the woman? What had he promised?
Davis could charm the wool off a goddamned sheep. He could convince anyone of anything—no one knew that better than Arthur himself. If Davis wanted something from this woman, he’d have promised her the bloody world. He must have promised her something, because somehow she had turned up here believing herself the next Countess of Strathrannoch.
Davis had always been the same. Handsome, clever, charming, perfect—a winning smile that deflected punishment, always the right words to persuade people to bend to his will. A natural leader, a charmer of women, the second son who ought to have been the first.
Who wished he had been the first. Who never saw an obstacle he couldn’t manipulate his way around. Who let nothing—neither wisdom nor morals nor compassion—stop him from getting what he wanted. It was no surprise that his charming, traitorous, contemptible arse of a brother had persuaded this woman to fall in love with him. Arthur had seen it plenty of times before.
He cursed Davis to the depths of hell—again—for leaving him alone with this catastrophe. How the devil was he meant to introduce her? This is my brother’s affianced bride ?
Or, worse— mine ?
No. There would be no mention of weddings or troths in front of his staff.
Huw was the more practical and forthright of the pair. Bertie, on the other hand, was crafty. Cunning. Almost Machiavellian.
On the faintest suggestion of a potential Lady Strathrannoch, Bertie would have Arthur’s mother’s silver ring polished and presented on a platter. Bertie would have a special license procured and Arthur and Lydia’s first five children named— not that Arthur was thinking about procreating with Miss Hope-Wallace.
The tops of his ears burned again. “Nothing,” he declared. “No one.”
He paused. That hadn’t come out right.
But Miss Hope-Wallace was nodding her agreement. “Nothing,” she said. Her voice was shaking again, her pupils bigger than Arthur felt they ought to be, her eyes glassy. “No one. We were never here.”
And then she leaned forward, her flame-colored hair tumbling over one shoulder, and vomited on her own shoes.