Chapter 17
How I wanted you. I wanted to keep you in my bed forever, give you words of milk and honey, pour out sweetness upon you. Tell you to lay your head in my lap and rest awhile, for I would keep you safe.
—from the papers of Arthur Baird, crossed out, begun again
The only thing that Arthur regretted was the dawn. He would have liked to haul Lydia into the bed, pull her delectable body up against his, and go to sleep with his face in her hair. But it was morning, so he had to watch her wrestle her dressing gown into place and return to her own bedchamber to prepare for the day.
He regretted the sun. He regretted her thousand-buttoned dressing gown. He supposed, as he washed and shaved and changed his clothes, that he regretted the state of last night’s trousers.
But he could not regret the feel of Lydia against him, the breathless pulsebeat of her desire—the demand of her thighs around his waist and the cry at the back of her throat.
He had not compromised her. He had not done something irrevocable, something that might trap her into marriage with him. For all his faults, he had not lost that last portion of his wits.
He did not know if he could win her affection—after what Davis had done to her, he did not even know how to begin. But suddenly, somehow, it seemed possible. She had wanted him—desired him—told him in low heated words what she yearned for him to do. It seemed conceivable that, given time, she might be persuaded to say yes if he asked her to marry him in truth.
He held to hope with both hands and imagined how he might ask her to be his. He felt the shape of the words on his tongue with no small trepidation.
But she had done it. She had told him what she wished for. Could he not be brave enough to do the same?
He was still wondering when he pulled open his door and found Lydia there on the threshold, her hand poised to knock.
For all that he’d seen her day in and day out for the last three weeks, he was still knocked sideways by the sight of her. Her dress was green, her hair neatly coiled. She wore delicate lacy gloves that buttoned at the wrists, and he wanted to peel them off. With his teeth.
He entertained the brief fantasy of carrying her right back to the bed. He entertained a second, much longer fantasy that involved his head between her thighs and a prompt rectification of the fact that he had not yet tasted her.
But despite the erotic intrusions—which surely ought to be better after the morning’s interlude, not worse —he still had eyes and ears for nothing but Lydia. Her expression was dismayed as she unfolded a sheet of paper.
“I’ve had a note from Jasper,” she said. “He left it in my room—I’m not certain when. It’s… troubling.”
“Would you have me read it?”
She nodded and pressed the letter into his hands.
Lyd , it read in a deeply slanted scrawl, I’ve been called back to London. I’ll break the news of your marriage to Mother. Stay here in Scotland with Strathrannoch—in his castle or the summer house in Glencoe. I’ll write you when she’s calmed enough for you to come home.
It was only initialed, not signed—a looping messy J .
He folded the paper and took her hand in his. He hated that she was upset—hated too that her brother would spread the word of their false marriage before Lydia had a chance to control the story.
But—God. He did not want to take advantage of her distress, and yet he wondered if this might be the opportune time to tell her that he wanted to make their deception real.
He felt a sort of comfort in the rationality of the notion. He could give her a reason to accept, some logical explanation for why she might choose to tie herself to him. If she married him, she would not have to tell her family anything beyond the truth.
He could appeal to her clever, methodical brain. He need not try to make inroads on her heart.
“Lydia,” he began, clasping her fingers more tightly, “I’m certain that you must be worried about what your family will think of all this.”
Her brows drew together for a moment, and then her face cleared. “Oh! No. It’s not that. Jasper is being rather dramatic—I think Mother will be quite delighted, all in all.”
He paused, somewhat taken aback. Delighted seemed an awfully rosy prediction even under the best of circumstances—and their reality could not, under any rational definition, be termed the best of circumstances.
“No,” she said again, “it’s not what he’s said about our mother. It’s only… did you mention the summer house in Glencoe to him?”
“The summer house in Glencoe?” He glanced down at the note again, relinquishing Lydia’s hand. He felt a prickling sensation along the back of his neck. “Never. It’s nigh on two decades since we owned the house there. I thought you must have said something to him about it.”
“I never mentioned it,” she said.
“Perhaps the de Younges brought it up. They were friends with our parents.”
“Perhaps,” she said, “but if so, why would Jasper be under the mistaken belief that you still owned the property?”
The words on the paper had gone sharper, the black ink crisper, the small splotch near the bottom of the paper resolving into tight focus beneath his gaze. “Davis,” he said. “You told me that Davis wrote to you about Glencoe.”
“Yes.” Her voice was very even as she waited for him to come to the same conclusions she had already drawn.
“Could your brother have been the one who searched your room? Could he have read the letters from Davis?”
Her mouth was tight as she too considered the page, and her eyes were dark when she looked up at him. “I think it possible. But I wonder…” She moistened her lips. “Do you recall when Jasper told the story of the turnip paste in the shape of a cod?”
“Aye.”
“Davis told me that story,” she said. “The exact same way. The exact same words. And Davis wrote to me of the summer house in Glencoe. I begin to suspect… I begin to suspect that Jasper has been reading my correspondence all along.”
His mind reeled at the thought.
She was right—of course she was right. Her careful, precise brain had picked up the clues that Davis and Jasper had left and made sense of the connections that Arthur had not even divined. But—
“Why would your brother do that?” he asked, searching her face. “How would he even have had access to your letters? Did you not say that you picked them up directly from the library?”
His mind spun out further questions that he did not give voice to. Had Jasper known of Davis’s nefarious intentions? If so, why wouldn’t he have warned Lydia?
How could Jasper have let it go this far? And why?
“I don’t know,” she said. Her small gloved hand came out, catching his fingers in a tight grip. Her gaze locked with his, and he could not have pulled himself away even if he’d wished it. “I want to go after him. I want to travel to London and see if he’s gone home as he said he would. And I want to ask him what the devil is going on.”
Every part of him instantly, instinctively rebelled against the idea. He understood why she would want it—she must have a thousand more questions for her brother than he did. But he did not want to let her go—did not want to be parted from her. Not now. Not yet.
She seemed to misunderstand the reason for his hesitation. “I know it may seem like an interruption in our search for Davis. But think—if Jasper has been following my correspondence with Davis, he must have a reason for doing so. He may know more than we do. He may speed us along in our search for Davis and the rifle scope.”
He had to clear his throat before he spoke, like a fool. “You mean… for me to go with you? To London?”
She blinked a few times. He could see the shadows cast by her rosy lashes on her cheeks. “Of course. That is, if you want to.”
“I do,” he said. Relief made his head light, made him tighten his grip on her hand. She did not want to part. There was still time. “I’ll pack. We’ll leave this afternoon. Together.”
It did not take long to discharge themselves from Kilbride House, though their departure so immediately after Mr. Joseph Eagermont sent Lady de Younge into a state of fluttering dismay.
“Fortunately she still has the Valiquettes and Thibodeaux to occupy her,” Arthur murmured to Lydia as Lady de Younge pressed a hamper of food into her arms.
“Fortunate indeed.” Lydia’s voice was a wry whisper, her gaze focused on the pinched face of Madame de Valiquette, whose dismal farewell had been quite French and portentous.
By the late morning, they were resettled into the creaking Strathrannoch coach, with Huw once again at the reins. Arthur hoped the carriage stood a better chance of surviving the trip to London than his arse, which absorbed every jostle and bump through the ancient flattened cushions.
He’d spent probably far too long on a letter to Bertie—the man knew perfectly well how to keep Strathrannoch Castle and its environs running in Arthur’s absence. But the trip to London and back would be at least three weeks, if not longer. Arthur had never left Strathrannoch for so long—had never, in fact, left Scotland. So he wrote pages of idiotic anxious notes, as though Strathrannoch were his own newborn babe, and vowed to write again when they reached Edinburgh in case the first note did not arrive.
In the carriage, Lydia busied herself with papers: Davis’s correspondence, the sheets they had taken from his room in Haddon Grange, and a compendium of notes she had recorded over the last week at Kilbride House. Her face was pink and her eyes were bright, and if Georgiana hadn’t been in the coach with them, Arthur would’ve gotten on his knees before her to beg for her hand.
Well. He certainly would have gotten on his knees before her. He had a number of full-color engraved illustrations in his mind for what might happen after that.
But Georgiana was in the coach, which required some discretion. She spent the morning scowling so furiously that Lydia eventually looked up from her notes and blinked at her friend. “What on earth is the matter?”
“Nothing at all,” Georgiana said.
“Is it—”
“I am worried about Bacon!” she burst out, all in a rush. “We have never been parted this long before!” And then she glowered at them so fiercely that neither Arthur nor Lydia dared to respond for some minutes.
He’d intended to steal a moment with Lydia alone at their first night’s stoppage. He’d thought to pull her aside before she went into the bedchamber with Georgiana, perhaps, or maybe find a quiet corner of the inn. Only the bloody inn was packed to the rafters—why in hell was it so busy in late October? The dining room was so noisy that he had to shout to be heard, and the proprietress had only a single room available for sleeping.
He could not think of anything less romantic than a tiny, ale-scented chamber into which he, Lydia, Georgiana, and Huw all piled together in a tessellation of cots and bedrolls.
He didn’t need starlight and orange blossoms, for Christ’s sake. He just needed not to have to bellow at the top of his lungs for her to hear his declaration.
But it was not to be.
He would propose to her on the morrow, he resolved to himself, and ignored the somersault in his belly at the thought. He turned on his side, nudged Huw’s heel slightly farther from his nose, and tried quite fruitlessly to go to sleep.
It seemed to Lydia, as they stopped to dine in Edinburgh the next afternoon, that Arthur had been behaving rather oddly ever since—
Well. Ever since he’d torn open her night rail and brought her to sexual climax against a wall.
Which in itself could perhaps be termed “behaving oddly.”
But she had asked him to do that—perhaps not the night rail shredding, but she certainly wasn’t complaining—and he’d told her he did not regret it. And yet he appeared uneasy, a trifle distracted. Every time she looked up to meet his gaze in the coach, he was already looking at her and scowling quite ferociously. Part of her—the part that was always primed to see disaster around every corner—wondered if he was displeased with her. But he did not leave her side, not in the public rooms they dined in or the inn’s bedchamber. Even today, in the coach, he had seated himself snugly on the bench beside her, his long muscled thigh pressed to her own.
At one point he grabbed her hand and then dropped it again as though it were hot to the touch.
During breakfast, he’d knelt beside her and then popped up so swiftly she’d inquired if he’d misplaced something.
He did not seem to have misplaced anything, except perhaps the power of speech. He’d glowered silently at her and their companions and the bannocks and honey on the table.
Once they’d arrived in Edinburgh, though, he seemed to have quite lost his head. She was no more than three bites into the apple she’d acquired from a street vendor when he’d grabbed her elbow and dragged her down a narrow alley.
She, to her credit, dropped neither the apple nor her reticule, though she did stumble a bit on the small heel of her striped half boots.
Arthur’s hand—large and solid—held her elbow steadily. He didn’t let her fall.
“Is everything quite all right?” She peered up at him—his whiskers had begun to emerge once more, and his shirt, as usual, was open at the collar. He looked slightly overset and rather edible, in point of fact. Something about the open vee at his neck, the notch at his collarbone, called out to be explored. By her mouth.
“Lydia,” he said, which was not precisely an answer. He nudged her a little deeper into the alley, which opened on the other side to a smaller, busier street of shops and stalls and market-goers.
“Yes?”
He dropped her elbow. He ran his hands through his hair—he had a hole at the seam of his sleeve beneath his arm—and then picked up her hand, apple and all. “Lydia,” he said again, and then hesitated.
“Yes,” she said encouragingly. “That’s correct.”
He blew out an exasperated breath, and as he did, her attention snagged on something in the street at the other end of the alley. She narrowed her eyes, uncertain. Something—something in the bustling road beyond them struck her as out of place.
“I know these last weeks have been unsettling,” he began.
She came up on her tiptoes, just a bit, peering over his shoulder into the crowd. “Unsettling,” she agreed. “Indeed.”
There was a couple in the middle of the street. Something about them had caught her eye, she was certain of it, only she could not say precisely why.
Arthur still held her hand, the apple cupped absurdly between their palms. “I know—that is to say, I believe—I hope , rather, that you are open to matrimony. To—to an earldom. To an earl , I mean.”
She heard his words but did not register them, her gaze fixed on the couple in the street, haggling with a fellow leading a horse and cart.
The man was balding under his beaver hat. The woman was short, buxom, dressed in navy with gold embroidery.
Navy and gold. The livery of Kilbride House.
Her hand fell away from Arthur’s. The apple hit the cobblestones with a wet thunk, and she gasped at the sound and shrank farther back into the shadows.
Arthur closed the distance between them in an instant. “What’s wrong?”
“The Thibodeaux,” she said. “They’re in the street just before us. And Arthur”—she hesitated, but she knew, she knew she was not wrong in this—“they are the ones who ransacked my room. Claudine was the scullery maid we saw at my door, dressed just as she is now. I recognize her.”
His body had insinuated itself between hers and the busy street, his solid form a wall of protection, his gaze following hers to the man in the hat, the woman in navy and gold.
It was the Thibodeaux. She could see that quite clearly now, and by the grim acknowledgment on Arthur’s face, she knew he recognized them as well.
“They are the ones working with Davis,” he said. “Not the de Younges. Not the Valiquettes.”
“Yes,” she said. “And we cannot let them get away. Not until we know what they are doing here in Edinburgh.”