CHAPTER ONE
"I would sooner share accommodations with a rabid badger."
Lady Harriet Fordshire delivered this pronouncement with the sort of crystalline clarity that had, over five London seasons, earned her a reputation as either refreshingly forthright or terrifyingly blunt, depending entirely upon whether one was the target of her observations.
The innkeeper, a weathered fellow whose face suggested he had witnessed every variety of human folly and found none of it particularly surprising, merely blinked. "I'm afraid, my lady, that we've no badgers available. Rabid or otherwise."
"A pity." Harriet shook the rain from her travelling cloak with rather more force than strictly necessary. "For I suspect a badger would prove more agreeable company than Lord Vane."
Behind her, she heard a sound that might have been a laugh, if laughs could be rendered in ice and served with a garnish of barely concealed contempt.
"Your confidence in my social graces is, as ever, overwhelming.
" Lord Sebastian Vane's voice carried that particular quality of aristocratic boredom that suggested nothing in the world could possibly be interesting enough to warrant genuine emotion.
"Though I confess some curiosity as to what the badger has done to deserve such an unflattering comparison. "
Harriet turned, which required rather more effort than she would have wished to admit.
The journey from London had been rather odious, the roads a testament to England's apparent belief that travel should be as punishing as possible, and her every bone ached with the particular misery of twelve hours spent in a jolting carriage.
That she should arrive at this middling establishment only to find him already installed in what was apparently the only remaining room seemed less like coincidence and more like evidence that the universe harboured a personal grudge.
"Lord Vane," she said, investing his name with approximately the same enthusiasm one might reserve for announcing an outbreak of plague. "What an absolutely unexpected displeasure."
Sebastian Vane stood near the fire, because of course he did, he had probably commandeered the warmest spot in the establishment the moment he'd arrived, being the insufferable man that he was.
The flames cast flickering light across features that Harriet had always thought were wasted on such a disagreeable personality: dark hair that curled slightly at his collar despite what she suspected were vigorous attempts to tame it, grey eyes the colour of winter storms, and a jawline that belonged on a classical sculpture rather than on a man who had once laughed at her poetry.
Not that she noticed such things. She simply possessed excellent powers of observation, which she employed equally upon friends and enemies alike. That Sebastian Vane happened to fall into the latter category was entirely incidental to her assessment of his physical attributes.
Seven years, and she could still hear that laugh.
Could still feel the hot flush of humiliation climbing her cheeks as she'd stood in her mother's drawing room, seventeen and foolish and so terribly proud of the verses she'd composed, only to watch Richard's closest friend dissolve into barely suppressed mirth.
He had apologised, of course. Eventually.
After Richard had elbowed him sharply in the ribs and hissed something that Harriet hadn't quite caught but which had made Sebastian's face go peculiarly blank.
But what good was an apology extracted under duress?
The damage had been done. She had locked away her poetry and her softer feelings alike, and she had never quite forgiven him for being the one to teach her that vulnerability was dangerous.
"Unexpected?" Sebastian raised one dark brow, a skill Harriet had never mastered and secretly envied. "I believe we are both travelling to Fordshire Park. The roads being what they are, it would seem rather expected that we might find ourselves seeking shelter at the same establishment."
"The displeasure, my lord, remains unexpected. I had hoped, foolishly, it now appears, that the storm might have swept you into a ditch somewhere between here and London."
The innkeeper made a small choking sound. Harriet ignored him.
Sebastian's expression didn't change, but something flickered in those grey eyes, amusement, perhaps, or possibly the barely restrained urge to strangle her. Harriet found she didn't particularly care which.
"Alas, the ditches proved most unhospitable. They quite refused to have me."
"Ditches," Harriet said, "clearly have excellent judgement."
A gust of wind chose that moment to rattle the windows with considerable violence, as though the storm itself wished to remind them all that nature cared nothing for human quarrels.
Rain lashed against the glass in sheets so thick that Harriet could barely make out the courtyard beyond.
Her carriage, or rather, the hired conveyance she had been forced to employ when her own vehicle had thrown a wheel somewhere outside Maidenhead, sat in the yard like a dejected beetle, water streaming from its roof.
The innkeeper cleared his throat with the desperate air of a man who had wandered into a battlefield and was now seeking any available exit.
"If I might, my lady, the room in question does have two beds, separate to be exact, on opposite sides of the room, in fact.
It's our largest accommodation, used often by travelling families… "
"Absolutely not," Harriet and Sebastian said in unison.
They glanced at each other. Harriet felt a flash of irritation that even their refusals should coincide. Could the man not even allow her the dignity of rejecting the arrangement first?
"The lady may have the room," Sebastian continued, his tone suggesting this was a matter of supreme indifference to him. "I shall make other arrangements."
"There are no other arrangements to be made, my lord.
" The innkeeper's face had taken on the harried expression of one who had explained this particular point several times already.
"The storm has driven half the county indoors.
We've guests sleeping in the parlour, the private dining room, and I believe Mr. Weatherby has taken up residence in the stables with his horses, though whether by choice or necessity I couldn't say.
The man does seem uncommonly fond of the animals. "
"Then I shall join Mr. Weatherby," Sebastian said. "I'm certain the horses will prove superior conversationalists to most of the company available."
"The stables are full, my lord. Every inch of space has been claimed. I could perhaps offer you a place in the kitchen, near the hearth, though Cook does rise at four and is not known for her gentle temperament…"
“Upon my word!” The words escaped Harriet before she could stop them.
Both men turned to look at her, and she felt heat climbing her cheeks, not from embarrassment, she told herself firmly, but from the fire and the lingering chill of the rain.
"This is absurd. We are adults, are we not?
Capable of behaving with appropriate decorum? "
Sebastian's eyebrow climbed higher. "Are you suggesting what I believe you're suggesting?"
"I am suggesting that the alternative to sharing a room appears to be you sleeping in a kitchen and being murdered by an ill-tempered cook at four in the morning, which, while not entirely without appeal, would create complications I am not prepared to manage.
" Harriet drew herself up to her full height, which was not particularly impressive but which she had learned to deploy with maximum authority.
"The room has two beds. We shall maintain appropriate distance.
We shall not speak of this again once we depart.
And if you snore, I shall smother you with a pillow and claim it was self-defence. "
The innkeeper's expression suggested he was not entirely certain whether to be relieved or alarmed by this development.
Sebastian, for his part, was staring at Harriet with something that might have been surprise, or might have been reassessment, or might have been nothing at all as the man's face was infuriatingly difficult to read.
"Very well," he said finally. "If Lady Harriet has no objections, then neither do I."
"Lady Harriet has numerous objections," Harriet replied. "But she is also cold, exhausted, and unwilling to sacrifice a proper night's sleep to the demands of propriety. The room, if you please."
The innkeeper practically fell over himself in his haste to lead them upstairs.
***
The room was, as promised, quite large. It occupied the entire eastern corner of the inn's upper floor, with windows on two walls that would have provided a lovely view had they not been currently obscured by sheets of driving rain.
Two beds stood on opposite sides of the space, separated by a considerable distance and a small writing desk that seemed to serve as a sort of neutral territory.
A fire crackled in the hearth, casting warm light across worn but clean floorboards and walls papered in a faded pattern of climbing roses.
Harriet stood just inside the doorway, acutely aware of Sebastian's presence behind her, and wondered what on earth she had been thinking.
She had not been thinking. That was the problem. She had been reacting to the cold, to the exhaustion, to the maddening impossibility of the situation and now here she was, preparing to spend the night in a bedchamber with a man she had spent seven years despising.
It is one night, she told herself firmly. One night, and then we need never speak again.