Chapter Two
AT TESTING TIMES like this, Mr Christopher Angel picked himself up from the ground, plucking grit from his skinned palms, and reminded himself that even the most majestic and glorious of swans must have failed at their first attempt to take wing. Though the earl’s burly footmen hadn’t needed to be quite so heavy-handed.
To add insult to injury, not only had Kit failed to enlist the earl’s help, but night had fallen in the interim, black as pitch. Collecting his hired nag from the earl’s stables was out of the question, so thus began a slow limp away from the house, Kit’s every pained step tracked by two of the earl’s suspicious henchmen until he was out of sight. The village inn, where he’d left his meagre belongings in a bare closet laughingly described as a guestroom, felt an awfully long distance away.
Anne was now safe, at least. He trusted that she was safe from the earl’s advances, of course, but also from the male members of his lordship’s household if their loyalty could be measured by the magnitude of the bruise blossoming on his kneecap. Anne had been in no fit state to ride with him back to London, and even if she was, his lodgings on Sindell Street were hardly suitable. Whilst not quite the worst address in London, some of the goings-on in the narrow alleys bookending it would make a bawd blush.
So Rossingley it was, where the fierce housekeeper had helped Anne into a chair, her stern gaze falling kindly on his poor sister.
As Kit fumbled and cursed his way towards a sup of ale and bed, he reflected his petition for the earl’s assistance might have garnered a more positive outcome if he’d approached it from a different angle. Though, in Kit’s defence, Uncle Charles hadn’t forewarned him that his noble amour was carved from a block of ice. That bloodless creature had been the love of Charles’s life? Kit obviously hadn’t known his uncle as well as he’d thought. Uncle Charles had been gregarious and warm, a man who found joy in the first daffodils of spring, in art and poetry. A man radiating bonhomie. The earl’s froideur risked melting stone.
He was singularly beautiful though. His uncle hadn’t warned him of that either. Even if it was beauty of a wintry sort, savage even. Vacant and statuesque, dripping with ennui. One looked but didn’t dare touch.
Nevertheless, the earl was not entirely void of sentiment. At mention of Charles, two angry points of red had settled on the crest of those haughty cheekbones; a flash of fury had burned in those silvery-blue eyes. Even so, Kit couldn’t picture the man warming anyone’s bed, man or woman. Fires of passion burning bright? More like tupping a snow-covered rock.
With the inn in sight, Kit vowed if he never clapped eyes on the disagreeable earl again it would be a day too soon. Alas, he’d have to return to Rossingley tomorrow to retrieve his horse, enquire after his sister’s wellbeing, and beg that confounded iceberg for his assistance in the matter. Again.
That grey silk slip of a thing he was wearing though. So at odds with its bearer. Outside of a molly house, Kit had never seen such a flimsy garment. It seemed almost as if another person had chosen it; the whim of someone fey and light of heart, a frippery intended to please a lover. The way it clung to the earl’s every lean sinew and draped across his shoulders, softly kissed the jut of his hip bones—Kit would forfeit an egg on his other kneecap just to catch a glimpse of the earl dressed in that again. Not that he’d ever admit it, not even at knife point.