Earl Crush (Belvoir’s Library Trilogy #2)

Chapter 14

Having such a splendid time in Sussex that I’ve decided to stay on longer still. Please don’t trouble yourself to visit!

—from Lydia to her brother Theo, enclosed in a letter to Selina

That evening, Lydia shoved hairpins into her hair and tried not to look at Georgiana, cross-legged on Lydia’s bed.

“I feel,” Georgiana said blandly, “there is something you have neglected to share with me.”

“No. Nothing. Truly, Georgiana, where did you find that dress? You have an unnatural talent for disguise.”

Georgiana glanced down at the coarse serge frock she was wearing. It was slightly too big for her narrow form, which only added to the impression that she was, as she claimed to be, Lydia’s lady’s maid. When she ducked her head and put on the round tones of a South London accent, Lydia could quite forget that Georgiana was an earl’s daughter who’d once been the most promising debutante of the Season.

When she arched one blond brow, as she was doing now, it was rather easier to remember who she was.

“I am not interested in discussing fashion,” Georgiana said.

“Are you quite certain? Because I’ve brought these really lovely slippers with sort of a gold bit in the weave—”

Georgiana ignored her. “You’re telling me that you broke into Lord de Younge’s office, found absolutely nothing of note, and nothing else happened ?”

“Correct.”

“Then why are you avoiding my eyes and turning the color of a tomato?”

“I really think you would like these slippers.”

Georgiana gave her a dubious look, which Lydia pretended not to notice by turning to examine her own face in the glass. She appeared much as she’d imagined she would: scarlet-faced and guilty as anything.

She needed to get hold of herself.

Yes, she had kissed Arthur. That was perfectly fine. The sky was not falling. Only—

Oh God, she had kissed Arthur. She’d wound her fingers into his hair and practically dragged his head down toward her mouth, which might have been embarrassing if Arthur hadn’t responded as though she were a banquet and he a starving man.

It had started out so soft, so gentle—a girl’s dream of a first kiss.

And then it had become something else entirely.

Lydia was no sheltered miss. Between her friends, her four older brothers, and the entire erotic catalogue of Belvoir’s Library, she was perfectly well acquainted with the full range of what might happen in the bedchamber between consenting adults.

But she had not dreamed—

Well. She had not dreamed it would feel like that. His mouth all over her, licking and sucking and biting —oh God, she had especially liked the biting. She’d felt wild with wanting, her body unmoored, searching for pressure and touch and satisfaction. And then, when he had touched her, she’d felt hot, desperate shocks of bliss everywhere his fingers had passed.

Her body—so ungovernable, so bloody tuned to her emotions—had become not something that shamed her, but something wonderful, something that spilled pleasure by the handful. Her own pleasure—and his as well.

She wanted it again. She wanted more .

She was six-and-twenty years old. She had been on the Marriage Mart for seven Seasons; she had told herself she was content with a passionless life.

But she had not known what was possible. She had not known about this rough-tender blacksmith of an earl. She had not known that her heart could wrench when he said her name, or that his hands on her waist would feel like an anchor when the world spun free around her.

Now she knew. And she could no longer be satisfied with what she’d had before. It ought to have terrified her—it did terrify her.

But she felt strangely, stubbornly determined as well. She was tired of waiting for her life to change. Had she not resolved already that she would change things for herself?

So she would do it. She would grab on to him with both hands, and if it ended in her own heartache, damn it, she would at least go to her grave knowing the sharp, shocking pleasure of Arthur’s skin touching her own.

“Are you ready to go down?” Georgiana asked. “I suspect it’s time.”

Lydia swallowed hard and shoved her feet into the aforementioned slippers. They made her several inches taller, and if she turned too fast, her silk-stockinged ankles were visible beneath her hem.

For luck , she told herself.

Heavens, she was going to need it.

She made her way down the stairs and to the drawing room, where the guests had gathered before dinner. She spotted Arthur immediately and was on the point of sauntering over to him when Lord de Younge caught her by the elbow.

“Lady Strathrannoch,” he said happily, “what a beauty you are. I hope your rooms are to your liking. Come, I shall introduce you to one of your own people—a visitor we have from England who’s just arrived.”

He steered her to a small group of chattering guests. Lydia spotted Claudine Thibodeaux—who was showing vastly more bosom than she had been that morning at breakfast—and her bespectacled husband. Both were talking avidly to a tall man with a thick head of wavy blond hair, a man who looked remarkably like—

“This is Mr. Eagermont,” said Lord de Younge, “newly arrived from a fascinating investment tour of the Midlands, is that not right?”

But Lydia was not listening. Her mouth opened, and nothing came out.

Mr. Eagermont?

“How do you do?” the man said in a rich, mellifluous voice. He bowed over Lydia’s numb fingers, pressed a kiss to the back of her hand, and then looked to her face with an expression of graceful charisma.

And then the expression dropped right off his face as he recognized her.

“Lydia?” he demanded.

His regular voice was just the slightest bit different from the rich one he’d used a moment ago. Rougher, a little care-worn. A voice she knew almost as well as she knew the shape of his shoulders or the precise shade of his eyes.

Because the voice belonged to her brother Jasper.

She blinked. She swallowed. And then she managed, “I am not sure we’ve been introduced, Mr. Eagermont. ”

Jasper, to his credit, did not blush—her other brothers certainly would have—only looked from Lydia to Lord de Younge and murmured, “I beg your pardon, my lord.”

Then he bent to Lydia’s ear and said, in a voice like ice, “The hallway. Now.”

She had never in her life heard Jasper use that particular tone of voice. He excused himself from the group and, a minute or two later, she silently followed. No one appeared to notice her departure.

In the hall, Jasper caught her elbow and began to drag her rapidly away from the drawing room’s open door. She squeaked and dug her nails into his arm, but he made no sound, only pressed his mouth into a grim line and piloted her all the way to the fabric-covered threshold that marked the servants’ staircase. He yanked open the handle and put a hand on her lower back, meaning to thrust her up the stairs.

She widened her stance and put a hand on the doorjamb to brace herself. “Jasper,” she hissed, “what in heaven’s name is going on?”

“Why aren’t you in Sussex?”

“Why aren’t you in Venice?” She squeezed his forearm so hard she thought she might draw blood, but—infuriatingly—he did not appear moved, only nudged her harder through the door.

“I’m not going anywhere until you—eep!”

Jasper was gone. He was one moment beside her, his forearm being slowly mangled by her fingernails, and the next moment altogether vanished.

“In the future,” said a familiar deep voice, “I trust you’ll listen to my wife.”

Good heavens , Lydia thought dreamily.

And then, a moment later, Oh hell.

Arthur swept her into his arms and held her against his broad chest for a long, luxurious moment. She caught his familiar scent of burnt honey. And then he pushed her back and began gently examining her for injury.

At least, she supposed that’s what he was doing. It was rather hard to think clearly with his hands methodically exploring her person.

Jasper, meanwhile, had got himself up from the floor. His hair was standing on end, which gave her normally dapper brother the appearance of an extremely large and disorderly rooster. “Your wife? Get your damned hands off her—that’s not your wife!”

“Lydia,” Arthur said in a low murmur, “is this fool someone you know, or should you prefer that I throw him out on his arse?”

“Ah,” Lydia said, “both?”

“Aye, all right, then,” Arthur said, and began stripping off his jacket.

“Try it,” snapped Jasper, “just try it, you Scottish oaf, and we’ll see how far height gets you when you’ve not the brains to back it up.”

“’Tis not the height,” said Arthur, and he reached out and caught Jasper’s cravat, pushing him into the wall and holding him there by the throat. Jasper’s toes just barely touched the ground. “’Tis the reach that matters.”

Lydia stared, agape, at the sight of Arthur holding her brother against the wall like a rather forlorn quilt. She had been witness to a great deal—a very great deal—of male tussling in a house with four older brothers, but it had been a long time since she’d seen anyone get the best of Jasper. It had been years since she’d even seen anyone try .

Jasper’s fair skin had begun to fade into a whitish-purple before it dawned on her that some action was required on her part.

She leapt forward and grabbed Arthur’s arm. Dear Lord , the man had biceps muscles that could break—she did not know what. Things that were difficult to break. Stones. Bricks. Mid-sized country mansions.

“Best let him go,” she said to Arthur, tugging at the immovable fixture that had once been living flesh. “That’s my brother Jasper, and I’d hate to have to explain his demise to our mother.”

Arthur dropped Jasper, who slid slowly down to sit upon the floor.

“Your brother?” Arthur was looking in bafflement from her to Jasper and back again. “Did I not hear Lord de Younge introduce him as Mr. Eagermont?”

Lydia nodded, then reconsidered and shook her head. “I cannot explain it.”

“Did I not hear,” Jasper rasped from the floor, “Lord de Younge introduce you as Lady Strathrannoch?”

Lydia looked at Arthur. He gazed back impassively, and then raised his eyebrows slightly, as if to say, By all means, explain that one.

And then Lydia made a very rash decision in a series of very rash decisions, the sum of which had landed her in Scotland, investigating a missing weapons thief with her fake husband.

She lied.

“Yes,” she said, “I am Lady Strathrannoch. I left from Selina’s country house in Sussex and came to Scotland in order to elope with the Earl of Strathrannoch.”

It was, she supposed, only about half a lie, if one wanted to do the mathematics. Perhaps even only one-third, depending upon how one separated out her deceptions.

Jasper, who’d struggled to his feet, began wheezing and appeared to consider retiring to the floor once more.

“You went to Scotland?” he gasped. “On your own? To elope ?”

Lydia was too afraid to discover whether Arthur’s expression registered equanimity or horror at her words. “I wasn’t entirely alone. I came with Lady Georgiana.”

“Oh, well, that makes it all right then.” Jasper scrubbed his hands over his face several times, then once through his hair, thus committing the rooster version of her brother to its mortal end. “Mother is going to go off her head.”

“Ah,” Lydia said. “Well. Perhaps you ought to let me tell her first. As the”—she was going to hell for this, surely—“the Countess of Strathrannoch. In the flesh. Mother will like that.”

“If she doesn’t bayonet you for marrying without her guiding hand.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Lydia said. “Mother would use a rapier. More elegant. Far less blood.”

“Lyd—”

To her surprise, Arthur interrupted Jasper’s pointed questions with one of his own. His hand came warmly to her upper back, his thumb resting on the bare skin above the buttons that closed her gown. “I think my wife’s satisfied your curiosity well enough, and you’ve not yet answered any questions of hers. Why are you here under false pretenses?”

“I am on business,” Jasper said. He stood a little straighter as he faced Arthur, and his voice had taken on that mellifluous tone again. His Mr. Eagermont voice, evidently. “It is important that de Younge not know my true identity.”

“On business?” Lydia stared at him in frank astonishment. “You do not even like business.”

“I have been known to dabble—”

“You most certainly have not,” she said. “What did Theo have to do to you to persuade you?”

“Theo?” Jasper blinked, and then, changing course, nodded. “Yes. Theo. He’s involved himself in textile-factory reform. I’ve been tasked with gathering information for him.”

“By… playacting?” It made a kind of sense, she supposed. Jasper was by far the best of the Hope-Wallace siblings at winning friends and mesmerizing innocent bystanders with his charm. If anyone could wheedle information from a roomful of strangers, it was certainly Jasper.

And yet—it also did not make sense. “Why here?” she asked. “Why Scotland, for heaven’s sake? Is de Younge one of Theo’s competitors?”

“He is.”

“In politics or investments?”

“Yes,” Jasper said decisively, and then he pushed himself off from the wall and angled his face toward Arthur. “Don’t think this is over, Strathrannoch.” His voice was icy, but Lydia noticed that this time he kept himself just out of Arthur’s reach as he headed back toward the drawing room.

“’Twas over before it started,” observed Arthur mildly.

It was remarkable. Even from behind, she could see Jasper’s ears turning a rather virulent shade of puce.

“You needn’t antagonize him,” she whispered to Arthur.

“He tried to remove you to a place you didn’t want to be. Brother or no, he deserves what he got and more.”

She blinked up at him. His curls were slightly disheveled, his jacket off and his sleeves falling open at the cuffs. The appeal of him was boggling, really. She wanted to launch herself at him. She wanted to wrap her legs around his waist. She wanted to find out if their height difference would matter if he had her up against the wall and—

“Ah,” she said. “Forget about Jasper. Put yourself back together or they’ll think we’re out here trysting again.”

“Lady Strathrannoch”—her stomach did a neat somersault as he nudged a wayward lock of hair out of her mouth—“I suspect they already do.”

Lydia encountered Georgiana at the top of the stairs, one long hall away from the precious respite of her bedchamber.

“Formidable evening?” Georgiana asked as she surveyed Lydia’s general state of, presumably, pallid bedragglement.

It had not been so very awful at first. Over dinner, she had not needed to speak, and she’d rather enjoyed listening with one ear for the conversation of the Valiquettes and Thibodeaux and with the other for the increasingly less subtle barbs traded by her brother and her faux husband.

And then they’d all entered the drawing room for music, coffee, and general postprandial relaxation, and things had become—

“Worse than formidable. There were parlor games .”

Georgiana’s mouth quirked. “Did you have to sit on someone’s lap and meow like a cat?”

Lydia blinked. “What kind of parlor games—no, never mind. I don’t want to know. No, I merely had to propose a riddle, except Jas—” She stopped, arrested. “Oh! You’ll never guess who arrived at Kilbride House today.”

Georgiana’s expression went slightly smug. “I already know. Mr. Joseph Eagermont, an investor—though no one seems to know quite in what.”

“They wouldn’t. Because Mr. Eagermont is Jasper .”

Georgiana stopped in her tracks, still several feet short of the bedchamber door. “Is that so? Your brother Jasper?”

“The very one.”

“Under an assumed name?”

“Indeed. I played charades with him as Mr. Eagermont for the last two hours. Fortunately, he will not reveal my true identity to anyone here, since he cannot admit our connection without compromising his own facade. However—ah, if you encounter him, you should know that he believes I am the actual Countess of Strathrannoch.”

Georgiana’s expression was unreadable. “Are you not?”

“I—what? Of course not.”

But Georgiana was not attending. Her pale blue eyes had taken on a terrifying glint. “Secret identities. Unintelligible writings. You must realize this scenario is more Gothic than my last three novels.”

“I suppose I had not considered it.”

Georgiana turned on her heel back toward the hall, away from Lydia’s chamber. “You don’t need my assistance to retire, do you?”

“I’ve managed the last twenty-six years without you. You know you are not actually my maid?”

“Just so. I think—I think I should like to see what I can find out about this Mr. Eagermont.” She appeared slightly glazed—dreaming, no doubt, of Scottish mystery novels with very large print runs.

Lydia waved a hand. “Go. Enjoy yourself.”

Georgiana was already halfway down the hall. Lydia gazed after her friend until Georgiana vanished down the servant’s staircase—truly, it was remarkable how she could watch Georgiana transform into her role, her hair tugged up into a hasty twist, her shoulders curving to hide her height—and then pushed open her door.

Whereupon she took one look at her bedchamber and emitted a single, quickly stifled scream.