Earl Crush (Belvoir’s Library Trilogy #2)

Chapter 6

Entrap in gatehouse. Entrap in barbican. Entrap in bedchamber—enlist Fern?

—from the private notes of Bertie Palmer, hastily concealed upon the arrival of his employer

Arthur was not entirely certain what had changed in Miss Hope-Wallace between when she’d lit out from his castle like her slippers were afire and when they’d returned, perspiring and dusty and dragging two trunks between them.

Actually, he could identify several things that had changed. Her attire, for one—somehow she’d gone from something filmy and pale green to a riding habit now splotched with dirt from hem to shoulder. Her hair too—in the morning, her vivid hair had been caught in a neat coil at the base of her neck, but now it was free and straggling loose down her back, sticking in her mouth, where she swiped at it absentmindedly with a hand.

Everything about her physical person had gone disheveled and unruly, and he—

Bleeding Christ if he didn’t like it all much too much.

He’d lost his head for a moment when he’d had her in his lap on Luath’s back. He’d been half-mad with relief that he’d gotten to her in time. When he’d seen her clutching her horse’s black mane, her face white with terror, his mind had been evacuated of everything but fierce, ravaging purpose. Get to her. Keep her safe.

He had not calmed until he’d had her in his arms. He’d held her there, soft and lovely and close to his chest, and for the second time that day, he’d felt a little wild at the sensation. When he’d hauled her up against him, she’d dragged herself closer like she wanted to be there.

Dolt , he told himself. She was trying not to fall off.

But his mind had been full of pent-up terror, and his arms had been full of the sweetest, roundest curves he’d ever encountered, and when he’d looked down at her mouth, he’d thought of—

A great many things, most of which weren’t achievable on horseback. He prayed—an actual, carefully worded prayer to the divine—that she had not recognized his abrupt and violent erection.

He supposed she probably had not, given that she suddenly seemed less afraid of him, rather than more.

Something, to be sure, had changed though. They’d walked along the road, side by side and silent as the grave, until Miss Hope-Wallace had shaken her hair back from her face with a decisive jerk of her chin. “I will do it,” she’d said.

And that, it seemed, was that.

He tried not to think about Miss Hope-Wallace after he left her at the castle door under Bertie’s alarming glinty-eyed supervision. He made a serious attempt to redirect his thoughts from her person, from the bewitching combination of timidity and raw courage that seemed to coexist within her.

From the color of her eyelashes, which he couldn’t stop trying to name. From the way she’d felt in his arms.

He helped Huw recapture the horses and the zebras, and then spent some time hacking away at the rotted section of fence that had permitted the mass zebra exodus in the first place. Eventually Huw bluntly informed him that bashing down the fence—without repairing it—was not as helpful as it might have been.

So he took himself off to his barbican and continued to think—that is, not think—about Lydia Hope-Wallace. The barbican was his respite. He’d fashioned the structure—originally a fortification near the castle’s entrance—into a kind of forge-courtyard-laboratory for his mucking about with coal and metal. These days, it was the place where his mind went clear. The place where fire and beeswax smoke burned through his constant worry over his brother and the earldom and the state of his finances.

And yet his work did not seem to take his mind off of Miss Hope-Wallace. How could it, when the iron he was turning glowed the precise color of her hair? When a spark landed on his shirt and burned a hole straight through to his chest, right where she’d been pressed against him?

Soft. Lush. Clinging.

Thinking about her was as useless as it was distracting. He burned himself twice whilst pondering the shape of her lower lip, plump and deeply curved.

Which he had no business thinking about. She had come here to marry his brother .

The very thought of Miss Hope-Wallace and Davis was a rough scrape against an unhealed wound. Arthur had been so happy when Davis had come back to Strathrannoch Castle a month ago. He’d been entirely taken in by Davis’s questions, his brother’s interest in Arthur’s work.

He’d wanted to believe it. A lifetime could not quite dull that unguarded edge of want.

More fool he.

Davis had lied to him, just as he’d lied to Miss Hope-Wallace. She had been nothing more than a tool to Davis, a pawn manipulated to achieve his own purposes.

And even as fury rose in him—how could Davis have exploited her, her earnest bravery, her toughness and her strength?—Arthur felt uneasiness as well.

Was he the same? Was he not taking advantage of her as Davis had done? He meant to have her help, to use her letters and her connections. True, his motives were not selfish. He wanted to protect those who might be hurt by his own ill-considered invention.

But his motives were not entirely unselfish, either. He still wanted to shake some sense into his brother, to bring Davis back to the fold. He still wanted Davis to change.

Arthur had never had an easy time asking for help. He would do almost anything to avoid it—would grind the glass himself in his barbican to fix the broken windows of Strathrannoch Castle. He would travel for hours astride Luath, to town and back again, before asking one of his tenants to borrow their mill.

But he’d asked Lydia Hope-Wallace. He did not know any other way to find his brother.

He would make himself stop thinking about her mouth, he resolved as he left the barbican. He had no other choice.

He was still thinking about her mouth when the heavy oak door of the bedchamber beside his own opened with a thud directly into his face.

“Ouch—Jesus—fuck—” His voice came out garbled around the hand he’d clapped to his nose.

What the devil? That chamber was empty —Fern, his maid, rarely entered it to clean, since the countess’s chamber had not been occupied for well over a decade—

A gingery head peeked around the door. Her dark blue eyes were wide above the hand she had pressed to her mouth.

“Oh goodness,” Lydia Hope-Wallace croaked. “I’m so sorry.”

He swiped his hand across his nose and checked it for blood. Seeing none, he turned his gaze onto Lydia.

She looked back up at him. Or—sort of at him. Her gaze seemed to be arrested somewhere at the level of his nipples.

He absolutely refused to think about nipples in her presence.

“What,” he said, trying to make his voice even, “are you doing here?”

Her mouth opened and then closed again. She turned redder than ever—it made a startling contrast with her orange hair—and addressed his shirtfront. “This is—ah—my chamber? Mr. Palmer told me to sleep in here?”

Bertie. He was going to kill Bertie.

He’d thought the revelation of Davis’s misdeeds had extinguished Bertie’s machinations involving a future Lady Strathrannoch and a half dozen tiny Strathrannoch heirs, but it seemed the man had only been temporarily put off. He had been, evidently, lying in wait for Arthur’s moment of vulnerability.

Bertie had installed Lydia in the countess’s bedchamber. The room currently reserved for Arthur’s nonexistent wife .

It was a bloody miracle that Bertie had not shackled them together to Arthur’s headboard until their wills gave out.

That was another highly vivid image he was not prepared to entertain, and it was all Bertie’s fault.

Arthur locked his hand around her elbow and prepared to drag her down the hall. The castle had a dozen bedchambers, and he meant to relocate Miss Hope-Wallace and the innumerable temptations of her person as far from his own as was possible. But before he made it half a dozen steps, Bertie himself came round the corner, followed closely behind by Huw, whose damp white beard suggested he’d bathed since fetching up the zebras.

Bertie’s bright brown eyes saw everything, up to and including Arthur’s fingers clutching the soft right angle of Lydia’s arm.

Arthur let go as though her elbow had sprung red-hot from his forge.

“Ah,” Bertie said, “I see you’ve settled in, Miss Hope-Wallace. I trust Strathrannoch has welcomed you to the castle to the best of his abilities?”

Arthur pinned Bertie with a glare, which Bertie did not acknowledge.

Lydia looked doubtfully between them. “Is there something wrong?”

“Nothing at all, my dear,” Bertie said warmly. He flicked a slightly cooler glance at Arthur. “Do you see aught amiss, Strathrannoch?”

The message was clear. Arthur was not meant to insult Miss Hope-Wallace by implying that she was unwelcome.

Which he wouldn’t have done in any case, for God’s sake. He was not entirely insensitive.

He rubbed at the back of his neck and then promptly dropped his hand. His shirt had a hole beneath the arm, which he normally did not worry about when he was in his own blasted wing of the castle. Alone.

“No,” he declared. “Everything’s grand. Cozy, really. Snug.” He peered around Lydia into the countess’s bedchamber. “Have you even got any furniture in there?”

“I turned over the mattress,” said Huw helpfully.

Arthur sent him a baleful look. “You’re part of this conspiracy?”

“What conspiracy?” Lydia was looking between the three of them rather more vigorously.

“It’s easier on Fern,” Bertie said, as though this were a rational explanation. “She needn’t walk so far between rooms to do her cleaning.”

Arthur ground his teeth together. “Aye, to be sure. This is all for Fern .” He turned back to Lydia. “You have furniture, then? You have whatever you need?”

She appeared to give up on the mystery of their conversation. “Yes, it’s all perfectly well, except…” She trailed off, her cheeks going pink. “There’s a small creature in the wardrobe. It appears to have made itself a little burrow of stockings and shredded correspondence.”

“Ah,” Huw said happily, “that would be the degu. I had no idea she had nested in the countess’s chamber!”

“Of course,” Lydia repeated. “The degu. In the countess’s chamber.”

Arthur felt as though he was beginning to lose his grip on sanity. “The creature’s part of the menagerie,” he said. “The one I told you about. With the zebras.”

“Actually,” Huw intervened, “Annabelle came from an entirely different menagerie than the zebras.”

“Annabelle?” Lydia inquired. Her voice had grown slightly faint.

Arthur pinched the bridge of his nose. “Annabelle is the degu.”

Typically he did not regret letting Huw build a small menagerie in his castle. But these were not typical times.

Huw’s rock-solid system of ethics protested the mistreatment of any living creature, but neglected animals were his particular weakness. As stable master, he’d taken in several horses from the village that would have been put down for their health or temperament—Arthur’s own gelding among them.

Outside of his job at Strathrannoch Castle, Huw had developed a predilection for rescuing abused animals from traveling menageries. Abetted by the ever-crafty Bertie—whose Jamaican solicitor father had bequeathed to him a capacious knowledge of English legal codes—Huw had embarked upon several philanthropic (and slightly felonious) trips across Great Britain to rescue exotic creatures. All of which explained why Strathrannoch Castle was now home to sixteen zebras, two flying squirrels, six macaws, and the small and fuzzy Annabelle.

Arthur took a single despairing breath and then shoved Huw in the direction of Lydia’s door. “Relocate Annabelle,” he ordered, and then grabbed Bertie and dragged him down to the end of the hall.

“You needn’t be quite so peremptory, Strathrannoch,” Bertie said when Arthur released him. The older man straightened his cuffs, which looked as pristine as they always did, particularly in comparison to Arthur’s general dishevelment.

“I am not marrying this woman,” he hissed at Bertie. His voice was barely above a whisper, but he still looked nervously back in the direction of the countess’s—Lydia’s—hang it, Miss Hope-Wallace’s chamber. She’d gone inside with Huw, presumably for the degu rousting.

“No one said you were.” Bertie had moved on to the neat fold of his cravat. He wore an air of beleaguered innocence, his London accent particularly crisp.

“I can see right through you,” Arthur growled. “You’ve the same expression on your face as you did when you made me hire young Widow Campbell as castle cook—”

Bertie polished his spectacles on his handkerchief. “I could not possibly have anticipated that she would set the kitchen afire.”

“And when you trapped Polly Murray and me in the cold cellar together for twelve hours—”

“An unfortunate accident—”

“She nearly lost a toe to frostbite, Bertie!”

Bertie replaced his spectacles. “An exaggeration, surely.”

“When I hired you and Huw a decade ago,” Arthur snapped, “it was to help me run this damned estate and keep my people fed and housed, not ensure the continuation of the Strathrannoch line.”

Bertie’s eyebrows rose. He did not say anything for a long moment.

And Arthur, ludicrously, felt chastened.

He had been twenty-two when he’d hired Bertie and Huw. His brother had been away at school—he’d been sick with dread every time the bills arrived and too ashamed to tell Davis that he had to come home. He’d wanted to peel off his skin when he’d shown his account books to Bertie—terrified the older man would mock or pity him.

Instead Bertie had rubbed his hands together and nodded briskly. “Let’s get to work,” he’d said. “First, tell me what you possess that you cannot part with. And then I propose that we sell everything else and start fresh.”

Bertie and Huw had been at his side ever since, with the notable exception of occasional animal rescue jaunts about the island of Great Britain. Arthur had no right to question their dedication or their years of service.

“I am not especially concerned with the continuation of the Strathrannoch line,” Bertie said mildly. “Nor, I can say with some certainty, is Huw.”

Arthur blew out a breath.

It had been his father who had been obsessed with the Strathrannoch line, of course. He had never let Arthur forget what a disappointment he was as heir, and how infinitely preferable Davis would have been.

Arthur was dreamy, distracted, clumsy with his strength. He spoke too familiarly to the tenants. Was forever late to dinner after losing himself in piles of engineering books.

Davis was never late for dinner. Davis was easy and charming; he never had a black curl out of place, never addressed anyone too bluntly and accidentally caused offense.

“It is only that we would like for you to be happy,” Bertie said, interrupting the decades-old direction of Arthur’s thoughts.

“I am happy.”

Bertie’s mouth crimped at the corner, a tiny movement that Arthur was not certain how to interpret.

“I am,” he said, more forcefully this time. “Just because you found the love of your life nigh on thirty years ago does not mean that everyone wants the same for themselves.”

“I know that you need more for yourself than”—Bertie gestured at the stone walls of Strathrannoch Castle around them—“this. That you want love and family.”

Arthur thought about his brother—the serrated twist of disappointment and grief he’d felt when he’d realized it had all been a ruse. That Davis had taken the rifle scope and fled in the night.

He thought about the small part of himself that still wished—somehow—that it had all been a misunderstanding. The same part of him that had greeted Davis with a spark of idiotic hope.

The part of himself that he quenched, ruthless as hot metal plunged into cold water.

He did not need more than he had. He would not ask for it.

“No,” he said flatly. “I don’t need love or family. And I do not want them either.”