Chapter Seventeen
It began to storm sometime in the night.
Elias thought it somehow appropriate, as though the unresolved tension, the utter unbearable heat, had spiraled out into the universe and cracked above them in the way that it had not here on the earth.
Every rumble of thunder, every flash of light, hit him like vindication. It allowed him to eventually sleep. And he was pleased to hear it still raging when he woke again, in the hours that must have been morning, even without the sun.
“So, the choice really comes down to the day before or the day after the funeral,” Harcourt was saying to him, from his customary chair in the parlor, seemingly unbothered by his own wet boots or the flashing treachery outside.
“It is an unseemly way to juxtapose a wedding, but here we are, anyhow.”
“Those are the only days available?” Elias responded, frowning.
“Unless you want to wait another week,” Mr. Harcourt replied, giving a dainty sip to his tea as the walls shook with the force of a thunderclap. “Do you?”
“I do not,” said Elias.
“Perhaps we ought to call for Miss French and ask her opinion?” Mr. Harcourt suggested, raising his brows. “She is the bride, after all.”
Elias lifted his own teacup, pressing it to his lips to hide his grin. “Harriet is indisposed this morning,” he said. “She is not feeling quite herself.”
In truth, she was sulking and had not come to breakfast, just like the morning after he’d shared port with her in her room. She was likely planning her revenge, her barbed reaction to his withholding of the pleasures they’d both wanted.
Why was that so unbelievably delightful to him?
He couldn’t wait to see what she’d come up with.
“Are you certain?” Harcourt asked, his eyes flashing an unsettling silver blue from the next ripple of light. “I thought I saw her this morning, out in the greenhouse.”
“What?” said Elias, frowning and dropping the teacup back to its saucer with a clatter. “The glass greenhouse? In this weather?”
“I might have been mistaken,” Harcourt said quickly. “My eyes have been playing tricks on me today. I also thought I saw a pig in the foyer when I came in.”
Elias sighed, pushing himself to his feet. “I will be right back.”
Evidently, there were two ladies he needed to wrangle back to safety today. He must have left the bedroom door open.
He didn’t think Peach was brave enough to scale the stairs on her own, small as she was, but evidently, he’d been mistaken.
He thought he’d have to search for her and chase her down, like one of the fools at the harvest festival in the mud ring, but instead, the next boom of thunder sent her little, pink body barreling out of a shadowed corner and into his legs, her squealing voice ringing out in alarm.
“Oh, for God’s sake,” he muttered, leaning down to pick her up and holding her to his chest as he walked to the nearest window and peered out, frowning at the greenhouse while he stroked her head. “Is Hattie out there? Do you see her?”
Peach did not answer.
She did startle again, though, as the front doors slapped open, pushed to their limit by the gale of wind that followed them indoors and the duet of squealing feminine voices that followed.
Elias turned to see Ruby and Hattie, drenched to the very bone and flinging themselves against the wood in an effort to get the doors shut.
He sighed, stepping forward to assist, only to watch them wrangle it in good order, using their backs in what appeared to be a choreographed two-step until the entryway was sealed again.
“The. Damned. Wind.” Ruby panted, giggling a bit and pushing dark strands of sodden hair out of her face. “I had forgotten!”
“I hadn’t,” Hattie said softly, her eyes on Elias.
Ruby followed her gaze, smirking at him standing there, holding his quarry.
“You stole my pig,” she said, pushing away from the door and tossing her wet hair so that droplets showered both Elias and Peach, the latter of whom reveled in the speckling, waving her pink head back and forth as though in invitation for more.
“I shan’t forget that. I’m off to find towels, Hattie, my love. ”
“All right,” said Hattie, not moving from her place against the door, a position that Elias could not help but find all too familiar in the wake of the previous evening.
“Harriet,” he said softly, drawing a step closer as he took in the effect of her dress, plastered to her like a translucent second skin. “You should not have been outside in that.”
“You,” she managed, swallowing to clear the dryness in her throat, “are carrying a pig.”
He frowned, looking down at Peach, who looked back up to him, guileless. “Yes.”
Hattie was smiling when he returned to her gaze. Diamond-sharp droplets of water fell off the burnished copper of her wet hair, beading and gleaming down the column of her throat.
He wanted to lick the rainwater from the hollow between her collarbones.
“You know, you looked just like that,” he said softly, taking her in from her water-logged slippers to the dripping curls of her tangled hair, “after I pushed you in the ocean.”
She narrowed her eyes, her smile twisting into a smirk. “Did I?”
He nodded slowly. “It was an awakening for me, in fact.”
Her brows rose, spiky and flat against her pale face. “Oh, for me as well,” she told him. “It awakened my ability to swim.”
He felt himself grinning, flashing his teeth at her, sharp and hungry. “And can you still swim, little Harriet?”
“I suppose,” she said, drawing her bottom lip between her teeth. “If someone tries to drown me.”
He mirrored her glare, his own eyes narrowing as he took another step toward her. “Intriguing …”
“Ah, Miss French,” came Julian Harcourt’s twice-blasted voice, startling the poor pig again so badly that she twisted nearly free of Elias’s embrace. “Oh! There is a pig!”
Elias cringed, managing to bend at the waist quickly enough to let her wriggle free, her hooves clattering on the tile as she fled back to the shadows.
“Well,” Hattie observed, “she’s had quite enough of you.”
He tossed her another glare over his shoulder as he straightened.
Mr. Harcourt was standing politely, hands folded in front of him, averting his eyes from the sodden and very visible body of Harriet French.
“Ruby!” Elias boomed, spinning on his heel and poking his head out into the hall. “Where the devil are those towels?”
“Yes, yes, I’m coming!” she cried back, her footsteps echoing as she hurried in their direction. “Goodness. You think you’re giving a pair some privacy!”
“Is that Mr. Harcourt?” came Monica’s voice, her pale-blonde head appearing down the hall. “Send him down, will you? I’ve a jacket for him.”
“Oh, God,” muttered Harcourt, flushing.
Elias felt oddly smug about that, for some reason. “The barrister wishes to know if we want to be married the day before or the day after the funer… the showcase,” he said briskly, turning his eyes back to Hattie. “What do you prefer, my dear?”
She gave him a lazy smile, her gaze lingering on his mouth. “Surely, you prefer to wait as long as possible, Lord Selwyn. Isn’t that what you’re always saying?”
“I’ve never said that,” he returned, a note of warning in his tone at her wandering attentions.
“He enjoys delays,” she said to Harcourt, who was still pointedly not looking at her. “The day after, I think.”
“The day before it is,” Elias snapped. “Before, Harcourt. You hear me?”
The barrister only sighed.
“Mr. Harcourt, if you please!” Monica called again from the hall, which, to Elias’s surprise, had the immediate effect of making the man turn and slink off where he was bid.
“Before!” Elias called again, making Hattie giggle from her place at the door as she clutched a towel to her body, running it down her throat.
He spun to glower at her. “You! Go dry off before someone sees you like that.”
“Perhaps I’ll wear my new dressing gown,” she cooed, floating past him as she went into the embrace of the house, leaving behind wet footprints in her wake.
He watched her go, his eyes fixed on the swinging detail of her soaked-through backside, until she faded from view, at which point he sighed and collapsed against the wall himself, pushing his fingers to his temples.
There was one blessed moment of silence before the doors slapped open again, and the exact same choreography that Ruby and Hattie had performed commenced, this time starring Rhys and Malcolm.
Elias only turned, head against the paneling, and watched this time.
“Why,” he said, once the doors were closed, “is everyone outside in this weather?”
“Refreshing, isn’t it?” Rhys shouted, as though he’d gone deaf from the gales of wind. “Oh! A towel!”
Malcolm made a disgusted noise as Rhys whipped Hattie’s discarded towel from the ground and began to dry himself. “I’ll just go get myself a new one,” he said. “Baron.”
“Lennox,” said Elias, nodding as the other man passed him.
“You never call me ‘Caradoc,’” Rhys observed, rubbing the towel over his hair. “Am I more of a first-name chap?”
Elias turned to give him an exhausted look, which made the other man giggle.
“Yes, I suppose I am,” Rhys Caradoc decided.
“I was wondering, actually,” Elias said, watching with a morbid sort of fascination as Rhys made a show of drying himself, “why Willa trained you to be an illusionist and not … Well, everyone else got a vocation.”
“I do all right,” said Rhys, wiggling his dark eyebrows with a chuckle. “She wanted me to be a surgeon, in fact. Something with precision. I just refused to cooperate with anything respectable.”
“Ah,” Elias said, nodding. “That makes sense.”
“It does, doesn’t it?” Rhys agreed, dropping the now-soaked towel back onto the tile floor with a plop and sauntering past him into the house. “Well, see you at dinner!”
He sighed, resuming his restorative wall lean as Peach emerged tentatively from her shadow and began to root at the towel, flopping over onto the thing as though it were warm and cozy and not cold and wet.
Elias wondered if she liked Rhys’s scent. Or perhaps Hattie’s.
“Oh, that scalawag,” a maid exclaimed, marching into the foyer to retrieve the towel and hesitating when she saw the pig. “Oh. Pardon, my lord.”
“No, it’s all right,” he said. “I’ll move her.”
“I’d box that Welsh lad’s ears if he weren’t so pretty,” she said to the pig as Elias lifted her from the middle, her little cloven legs dangling as the maid whipped the towel off the floor. “Lucky for you, piglet, you’re a pretty one too.”
“You are,” he agreed quietly to Peach, after the maid had gone.
He watched the door for a moment, wondering if anyone else was going to blow in from the outdoors.
Perhaps Willa herself, in fact.
And when no one did, he nodded, sighed, and took his pig back to his bedroom.