Earl Crush (Belvoir’s Library Trilogy #2)

Chapter 10

… I’ve decided to extend my stay with the Stanhopes a trifle. We are having such a pleasant visit!

—from Lydia to her eldest brother, enclosed in a letter to Selina along with a note: “Would you please post this from Sussex? No sense in alarming Theo just yet.”

By the following morning, they were in a carriage together: Lydia, Georgiana, and Arthur, with Huw up front, holding the reins.

Lydia had been startled to discover that the Strathrannoch stables possessed a carriage at all—but when she saw the vehicle, it made rather more sense. The coach-and-four was a great, ugly thing that groaned and creaked as the horses pulled it into motion. Its style had been popular a generation ago, as the ancient hazed glass of the windows suggested. And it was decorated, all along both sides, with an enormous version of the Strathrannoch crest, inlaid in a little mosaic of multicolored wood. The crest appeared to be a giant boar, mouth agape, each of its tusks larger than Lydia’s forearm.

“There was no way to sell it,” Arthur explained when he caught her staring at the coach in stupefaction. “The design could not be removed or scraped off without damaging the box. Both gaudy and impractical—a Baird family specialty.”

Fern and Rupert had seen them off, the boy waving furiously whilst one of the rescued macaws tried to retain its purchase on his shoulder. Bertie had promised to pass along any information from Belvoir’s the moment it arrived.

And though the carriage had seemed perfectly capacious when she, Georgiana, and Arthur had piled into it, after an hour’s progress toward Haddon Grange, Lydia was starting to revise that impression.

It was just that the earl was so… substantial. She and Georgiana sat together on one bench, Arthur opposite them, and Lydia found that her eyes were drawn again and again to the man’s thighs and shoulders, which seemed to take up nearly as much space on his side as she and Georgiana did together on theirs.

This was, obviously, the fault of his shoulders. Not her eyes. It was not her fault there was nowhere else in the carriage to look.

He had at least worn a coat and cravat for their journey, though he still had not shaved and his beard was growing thick with curls, like his hair. She wondered if it would be soft to the touch now—no longer a rasp of stubble but something she could put her fingers into.

She realized the direction of her thoughts with no small horror, and tried to make herself stop.

Of course, the man immediately made this resolution impossible by addressing her directly.

“Does your family know what you came here to do?” he asked. “Your brother—the one who’s a politician?”

“Ah,” she said. “Er. No. Not precisely.”

Georgiana squeaked as she smothered her laugh. Lydia pretended not to hear her.

“I told my mother and brothers that I wanted to spend the month with my friend Selina Kent, the Duchess of Stanhope, and her husband at their country estate in Sussex. I chose a week when everyone was busy with their own affairs”—her mother parading debutantes in front of several recalcitrant sons; her eldest brother, Theo, deep in legislation; the next eldest, Jasper, away on holiday in Venice—“and met Georgiana at the Stanhope estate. And then we, er—”

“And then the duke and duchess pretended not to notice when we fled the country,” Georgiana explained.

“I… see.” Arthur looked slightly alarmed by her machinations.

“They did not know,” Lydia said, torn between a desire to defend herself and the knowledge that her plan had, in fact, been a complete failure from top to bottom. “My family. They did not know about my correspondence with Davis, and I thought… I thought…”

She had thought to shock them with her triumph, she supposed. She loved her family, powerfully and without reservation, and yet they treated her like a fragile child half the time.

For God’s sake, Theo, meet with your mates at the club, not at home. You know Lyd can’t dine with strangers.

Mother, let Lyddie alone this Season, won’t you? She doesn’t have to marry; there’s no sense torturing her.

She had envied her brothers—the way they seemed to move through the world so easily. And she’d wanted them to think her brave and strong. An equal, not a doll to be perpetually safeguarded.

“Were they not aware of your political writings, then?” asked Arthur.

Lydia felt the corner of her mouth lift. “Some of them. Two of my brothers.”

“Two of how many again?”

“Four.”

Arthur’s brows rose.

Her mouth curled up further. “All older.”

“I have heard Mrs. Hope-Wallace say that Lydia did not walk until she was two or speak until she was nearly four,” Georgiana informed the earl.

Lydia laughed a little. “I had no need to. My brothers carried me everywhere and spoke my mind for me.”

They still would, if she asked, and she felt the familiar tangle of emotions when she thought about her brothers.

Theo, Jasper, Gabe, Ned: All four of her brothers accepted her exactly as she was. They had never tried to force her into the mold of a perfect, outgoing debutante, nor had they tried to pressure her to marry one of the fortune hunters who had proposed in her first and second Seasons.

She was grateful to them—always and endlessly. But some part of her was resentful too, a creeping dissatisfaction that made her feel guilty and a little ashamed. It had always been the same: Lydia did not need to speak for herself because someone was always there to speak for her.

She had let them build a wall around her life, thinking it protection, and somehow that shield had become a cell.

Her journey to Scotland had never been about marriage, not really. It had been about choosing the person she believed she could be over the half life she’d let herself inhabit.

“And only two of your brothers know about your writings?” Arthur inquired.

“Yes, Ned—he’s the closest to me in age, and he knew from the start. I lured him in as my accomplice. And Jasper.”

Charming, rakish Jasper. He had come to her already knowing about her writings, somehow—she had not asked how. Jasper always seemed to find things out through the very force of his personality.

She’d begged Jasper not to tell Theo. Theo had become head of the family at fifteen when their father had died, and he had never stopped approaching his role with painful seriousness. She did not fear that Theo would try to stop her, precisely—no, she feared he would be sick with worry over her actions, and that was almost worse.

“All right, duckling,” Jasper had said, nudging her with his shoulder. “Only let’s not get thrown in jail, please? For me?”

They’d spoken of her writings exactly one more time, when Jasper had made a few offhand remarks about how she might keep her identity a secret. They had seemed like casual suggestions until Lydia had thought them through later and realized how perfectly each proposition solved an issue she had worried about.

Fun-loving, complicated Jasper. Sometimes she suspected she was not the only Hope-Wallace with secrets.

“And you mean to go back to them?” Arthur asked. “After all of this is done?”

“Yes. I suppose… I suppose I shall tell them we’ve been in Sussex this whole time.” She would have to leave out the zebras. It was almost a pity—Ned would have loved the story, and Theo would have turned all sorts of interesting colors.

There was a pause, a brief tentative silence, and then Arthur said abruptly: “You’re fortunate.”

She blinked up at him. He looked chagrined by his own words, his lips pressed together in a harsh line.

“Me?” she asked. “Why?”

He did not seem at first to want to answer; he put her in mind once more of an ill-tempered bear. But finally he unbent enough to say, “To know you have them all to go home to, I suppose. To have someone in your life who grew up alongside you. Who can hold the memories of your childhood with you.”

Her heart squeezed a little. “It must be difficult not to have such a thing.”

“That’s why ’twas so easy for Davis to get round me, I suppose. Because I wanted to believe him when he came back to Strathrannoch and called it home. It has always been home for me, even when he didn’t see it that way.”

“Were you happy there? Growing up at Strathrannoch?” She had not meant to ask it, not really, only—only she wanted to know.

“Happy?” He said the word as if it were unfamiliar in his mouth. “I suppose so, in many ways. I always loved the land and the people. I’ve never left Scotland, never wanted to. But… do you know how, sometimes, you love something more because it’s so much damned trouble?”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

His laugh was soft and rough. “Luath, for example. My horse. He was gelded too late—a big mean thing who would sooner bite your hand than take an apple out of it. Took Huw and me years to gain his trust, years of petting and cosseting. But I would carve out my heart for the great beast now, and he for me. ’Twould not be the same if he had been easy to love.”

“I understand.” Her voice was almost a whisper, but he did not seem to mind.

“Strathrannoch as well. My father—he did not make the track smooth for me. I ought by rights to have hated the place, and yet I never could. When he died and the estate became mine, ’twas sunk so deep in a pit of debt and rot that I knew I could never bring it out on my own. And the land—even the damned land itself is hard at Strathrannoch. Hard to grow in, hard to till. Our people didn’t trust me then. Some still don’t.”

He paused, seeming to realize the length of his speech. His gaze met hers, and his mouth tipped up, loosening from the slash it had been. “But I love it all anyway.”

Lydia tried to smile back, tried to say something, but she could not manage it. She felt the press of tears at the backs of her eyes, and she looked blindly out the window until the feeling receded.

But it did not go away, not completely.

She wished she had not asked. She wished she did not keep learning more of this man, who coddled his horse and took in strangers when they had no other place to go. Who loved things more when they were hard to love.

When Lydia took risks in her life, they were calculated. Her anonymous pamphlets, for one—she trusted the discretion of Selina and Belvoir’s completely, and the importance of her political work was worth more than the small chance of discovery.

This trip had been, in some ways, the largest gamble of her life. She had traveled across the country, proposed a sea change in her own life. The chance for independence, the chance to finally live instead of waiting for life to happen to her—the potential rewards had been vast.

And the danger inherent in her trip to Scotland had seemed not so very great. Aside from the serious but unlikely risk of brigands and highwaymen, there had been little that she feared. She’d had in mind a marriage of convenience, a financial and political partnership with a man she’d considered a friend.

Her heart had not been involved. Her pride would have been stung, to be sure, if her proposal had been rejected, but she also would have understood. She would have been disappointed. She would not have been crushed.

But now—as she sat across from Arthur, her gaze flickering to him and then away again as though the sight of him burned her eyes—she felt a new and present danger. A risk she had not anticipated. A consequence incalculably great.

She felt… something… toward him. She could feel his presence across from her even without looking at him, large and warm, stubborn and loving. She wanted to know him better. She wanted him to kiss her. No— she wanted to kiss him , to pull his head down toward hers and bring his mouth to her own.

She knew she was too emotional, her feelings boiling to the surface of her body and flinging themselves outward in blushes or tears. She was sensitive and prone to flights of fancy. She was easily bruised. Feeling something for Arthur would make her infinitely more vulnerable.

And as she thought of the crooked tilt of his mouth as he’d spoken of love, she was not certain that her calculations mattered in any case. She did not know if she could stop herself.