Chapter 8
… He’s just spent three-quarters of an hour stewing apples with his own hands. When I asked if Miss Hope-Wallace especially fancies apple pudding, he fled like the kitchen was afire. Promising!!!
—from Fern Ferguson, maid, to Bertie Palmer, estate manager at Strathrannoch
The drawing room of Strathrannoch Castle was overlarge and not quite warm enough at night. The windows were poorly fitted and late-October drafts occasionally put out the candles or sent a letter winging its way down from Arthur’s desk.
And yet he could not stop returning to the room.
In the near-fortnight since Lydia Hope-Wallace’s arrival, he had joined her in the drawing room again and again, a moth drawn to her flame. Every morning he told himself to stop, to visit his people and their fields. To stay away from the room and its temptations. He knew enough now about her correspondence with Davis; there was nothing to be gained by asking her about her writing or her politics or her numerous beloved brothers.
But eventually the sun would start to dip. His tenants would begin hinting delicately about their dinner. And his feet would make their way unerringly back to where Lydia pored over maps and notes at his desk while they waited to hear back from her library. He could not seem to stop himself.
She was shy, he’d learned—she rarely spoke in groups, and only when directly addressed. But she was far from timid. She had opinions on every subject—he knew, because he’d asked her about all of them. She opposed the Seditious Meetings Act and became nearly irate on the subject of rotten boroughs. She had thoughts on the Luddites, on the Corn Laws—when she learned of Huw’s devotion to animal welfare, she engaged the elated stable master in a lengthy conversation on the philosophical work of Jeremy Bentham.
In some ways, she would have made a perfect wife for Davis—the old Davis, before he’d fallen into the clutches of the powerful and corrupt. Davis had loved to talk of politics and people; Davis would have known how to soothe her anxieties and draw her out of her shell in company.
But Arthur was content to watch her, bright-eyed, pink about the cheeks, just a bit flustered.
And in the evenings, after supper, he found himself returning to the drawing room, even though she was not there. The drawing room was where she worked during the day, and when he sat at the desk at night, he found that he could still catch her scent. It was soft—warm—edible, like cream on scones. The room whispered echoes of Lydia, and he was helpless to resist, no matter how much he knew he ought to stop.
A few more days. He would let himself linger in the pleasures of her clever mind and the sweet curve of her mouth for a few more days, until they received a return letter from her library. And then she would go back to London, and he would be alone again at Strathrannoch.
And alone was far safer. He’d learned that lesson well from his brother.
As he’d read Davis’s letters to Lydia, he’d become increasingly convinced that he had been right about his brother’s motivations. It seemed clear that Davis was subtly probing for information in the letters. He’d asked Lydia who in London was on her side, who she suspected would be willing to speak out against the Clearances or against Scottish involvement in the Napoleonic Wars. He had claimed to be looking for allies in England.
When Lydia had gone scarlet before handing the packet over to Arthur to examine, it had occurred to him with no small discomfort that some of the letters must contain his brother’s attempts at lovemaking. He found that he did not—under any circumstances—want to read such a thing.
But the letters were not overtly flirtatious. In retrospect, Arthur supposed she had removed the more romantic missives before turning the letters over to him. But even without an obvious confession of his feelings, Davis did what he always did when he fixed his attention upon someone—made the recipient of his regard feel special. Feel as though their words mattered to him more than anyone else’s.
It was a powerful talent, that. And one that made you feel quite the fool when you worked out that you’d been deceived.
Arthur was musing upon his brother’s talent directed toward Lydia Hope-Wallace and fuming to himself so vigorously that he did not at first notice when the woman herself slipped into the drawing room in the middle of the night.
He did notice, however, when she kicked a stack of books, knocked several to the floor, and cursed under her breath.
His head went up. “Lydia?”
She jumped into the air like a startled doe. Or a zebra.
“Oh,” she gasped, her dark blue gaze finding his. “Oh, I’m so sorry! I did not see you!”
Indeed, he could imagine that she had not thought to meet him down here in the drawing room at—he checked his decrepit pocket watch—two o’clock in the morning. She wore a night rail—he could see the edge of it peeking out above her toes, a silky-looking cotton—and over it a thick wool dressing gown, which fastened down the front with a row of fabric-covered buttons.
All the way down, from her chin to her ankles.
It must take her ages to get the thing on. Or off. He imagined it—one at a time, each slow slide of button through buttonhole. Each one falling free with a careful manipulation of her fingers, each revealing a new inch of that fragile garment beneath.
Oh Jesus, he had to stop thinking about her like that. He’d undressed her only to the level of plain white cotton, and he was finding even that mental picture terrifyingly arousing.
“Are you looking for something?” he managed to rasp. What was she doing downstairs in the wee hours? Should she not be tucked up into her bed in the chamber beside his own?
That too was something he tried very hard not to think about, with only middling success.
“Oh no,” she said, as if by reflex.
He blinked. “No?”
“Oh,” she said—this was, perhaps, the fourth time she’d uttered the syllable—and then laughed a little. She had the loveliest laugh—warm and soft, her fingers on her throat as though the very sound surprised her. “Yes, I suppose I am. I could not sleep—I often cannot. I paced my bedroom and looked through all the letters I have left to me, and I imagined for a moment that I could see the beginnings of a pattern—and then it all unraveled in my mind. I thought perhaps if I looked at my notes again…”
Her notes—yes. She was here for her notes .
She’s not here for you , he informed his suddenly very alert body.
“By all means.” He pushed back from the desk, his boots scraping the threadbare wool rug beneath his feet. “Do you keep the notes here in the desk?”
“Yes.” She came toward the desk cautiously, and he noted the ridiculous things she had on her feet. Bed slippers, he supposed, with enormous tassels bobbing near the front in a rainbow-hued explosion of yarn.
He backed away from her with an unholy celerity as she approached. Lydia Hope-Wallace—with her sunset hair and her thousands of buttons and her ridiculous footwear—was altogether too much for his self-possession at two o’clock in the morning.
She was reaching for the drawers at the right-hand side of the desk when she paused, frozen, to stare at the map spread across the desk’s age-spotted surface.
Her lips parted. He waited for her to speak; it was, he’d learned, not entirely unusual for her to pause to gather herself before voicing her thoughts.
But the silence stretched, a moment and then another, and then she said his name, in a whisper that slid down his spine like a delicate fingertip.
“Arthur. You did it.”
It took him too damned long to recover from the effect of his name on her lips. God, the woman did his head in.
“I—what? I didn’t—”
She clapped a hand down on the map and looked up at him, her blue eyes lit from behind as though her emotions produced candlelight. “You discovered where Davis has been living! How did you do it? How long have you known?”
“Lass, I didn’t discover anything.” But he found himself drawn back to the desk toward her, toward the map she was busily caressing.
Had he, somehow, ascertained Davis’s location and then simply forgotten he’d done so? Perhaps the sudden descent of blood from his brain southward had impaired his memory. Hell, perhaps he was hallucinating all of this, and Lydia Hope-Wallace was safe in her bed and not inches from him, her face aglow.
“Look,” she said, her mobile fingers no longer caressing the map so much as jabbing at it. “All of these dots—all of the ones you’ve done in blue ink, rather than black. There must be fifteen of them, all within a dozen miles of one another.”
He looked down. “These are naught but the places you wanted me to mark. The places that Davis referenced but did not name. The dry-goods store. The assembly where he learned to dance. The home of the widow known hereabouts for her, er, bountiful charms.”
“Oh yes—of course!” Her hands spread flat against the desk, and she leaned forward, her braided hair slipping over one shoulder. “Of course. You were so clever to change the color of the ink, or we might not have noticed the pattern. But it makes sense. If he was trying to keep his whereabouts a secret, it would not be the places he named that gave him away. It would be the places that he did not put a name to at all.”
He had not intended it as cleverness—it had been borne of necessity, to track the work she’d asked of him.
But she was right. He leaned toward her, bending his head into the light of the lamp to see the pattern she’d indicated.
Good God, she was canny. It seemed plain as day to him now. The line of blue dots marched up and down the River Tay, clustered above and beneath the nearby town of Haddon Grange. It was as if the letters had been encoded in a message only he could read—only he could have made sense of Davis’s offhand remarks. Only he had the stories and memories of nearly thirty years of brotherhood, pulled together and apart like magnets, attracted and repelled at the same time.
“Do you know this place?” Her fingers were long and tapered, longer than her stature properly justified. She slid the pad of her index finger along the River Tay, a few inches from Arthur’s own hand.
“Aye, I know it. ’Tis a town called Haddon Grange. There’s an estate nearby—a family we’ve known since childhood. A proper town—sometimes I go there for supplies when I don’t want to travel all the way to Perth.”
She was smiling now as she looked up at him, her expression incandescent. He had seen her smile before—could practically enumerate the instances. Several times at Georgiana and at Rupert in his presence. Once at him, when she’d caught him slipping a misbegotten cabbage dish to the degu.
But none of those smiles could match this one for sheer luminosity. Her lower lip, usually a deep, plump curve, was stretched wide, and her eyes crinkled a bit at the corners.
“That must be where he’s been living!” Her voice was a study in quiet triumph. “Perhaps he’s there even now—or perhaps someone will know where he’s gone. Oh, Arthur! We needn’t wait for Belvoir’s now—”
He did not know why he did it. Perhaps it was his name, again, on her mouth, setting off a small explosion in the part of his brain that made sensible decisions.
Or perhaps it was the word after his name. The confident, unhesitating we .
Whatever the reason, he reached out and touched her cheek.
He felt a bright, fierce little shock as his fingers met her skin, powerful enough to jolt his hand back.
He had half a heartbeat to stare at her in utter bafflement. Had he gone mad? Had she felt it too? It was as if his life had become a sentimental novel—touching her sent electricity sparking through his body; the woman was the kindling to his conflagration—
And then she yelped and clapped a hand to her face.
Oh. He was an idiot. There was no mystical connection instantiated by the collision of their bodies. He had simply given her an electric shock, right there on the smooth skin of her cheek.
“Och, for the love of God,” he said, “I’m sorry. The rug—it collects a charge that way—I shouldn’t have done—”
He stretched his hand back out, placing his fingers over her own.
She made another sound, soft and startled, though he was not quite sure why—he was certain he had not shocked her this time.
“Let me see—”
“Oh, no—I assure you, I’m perfectly well—”
She wrenched her hand free from beneath his, and then suddenly there he was. Exactly as he’d intended moments ago, the tips of his fingers on her skin.
Only now her cheeks were stained with pink, and he bent his head down to take a look at her.
She seemed unmarred. Of course she would be—he had only shocked her, not damaged her in some way.
Yet he could not stop himself from checking.
He wanted to make sure she was all right, that was all. He needed to make sure.
He slid his thumb along her cheekbone. She was surprisingly unfreckled for an ivory-skinned little ginger. Perhaps it was all the ridiculous hats she liked to wear, frivolous and pretty, like her seemingly endless collection of slippers.
Beneath his thumb, her skin was smooth and warm. So delicate—the blood rushed to the place where he touched her, flushing beneath his hand.
Was she like that—everywhere?
He did not mean for his thumb to slip down, but it seemed to move of its own volition. He watched himself cup her jaw. He watched his thumb trace the arc of her lower lip, and then, when she took one trembling breath, he watched himself brush against the corner of her mouth.
He would have thought it was some other man’s hand on her face, except he could feel everything. He could feel the featherlight brush of her quick unsteady breaths. The heat of her skin, the gentle rise of her lower lip. The softness of her body, where his other hand had come to rest at her waist.
He could kiss her. God, he wanted to kiss her. He wanted her mouth under his. He wanted to know if she tasted as sweet and warm as she smelled. He wanted to know if her skin would flush when he sucked at the place where her neck met her shoulder; he wanted to know if his teeth would leave a mark. He wanted her up on the desk, her legs locked around his waist, wanted to kiss her and loose her buttons and touch her and touch her and touch her.
He might have, if she hadn’t taken half a step backward. The edge of her dressing gown brushed against the desk, and there was a faint whispering sound as a stack of Davis’s letters slid to the floor at their feet.
It might as well have been the report of a pistol.
He dropped his hand and backed away, a half step and then a little farther for good measure.
Davis’s letters. Bloody hell, the woman had come here for Davis . She’d been in love with his own damned brother.
Arthur felt suddenly dizzy, almost sick.
What had he thought to do with her? Tup her on the desk? Take her virtue and trap her into marrying him?
Christ, she would think him a fortune hunter. She would think him no better than Davis.
He would be no better than Davis, if he used her that way. Had they not taken enough from her already, he and his brother? He had seen the tears in her eyes upon the revelation of Davis’s deception. He had already trapped her here in this godforsaken castle, waiting for news and trying to help track down his brother and the weapon. He would not be party to harming her further.
It did not matter how much he wanted her. It did not matter how she looked—glowing and vibrant, tempting and real—or the way she felt beneath his hands.
He could not touch her again.
“I beg your pardon,” he said. “Your—er, are you well? Your cheek?”
Her fingers rose to caress the skin where his hand had been. He watched the movement, memorized it. Wished with foolish desperation it was his own hand.
“Yes, of course,” she said. “I’m perfectly well.”
There was something in her voice at odds with the crisp words. A kind of—wistfulness, perhaps? A ribbon of yearning that wound itself round and round inside his chest. That pulled tight with a tension that felt like heartache.
“Tomorrow,” he said shortly, “we’ll talk of Haddon Grange with the others.”
And then he turned on his heel and fled from her—from her big blue eyes and the heady, high-proof softness of her skin, and from the longing that rose in him when he looked at her.