Elmwood
His mind flashed back to when she had almost stopped his heart by straddling him with the determination of a cavalryman mounting up to ride home from the front.
It had taken every modicum of will that he possessed to raise his hands to stop her, to tell her no.
He found himself imagining what might have transpired if he had not, if instead he had used his hands to reach up under that absurdly voluminous skirt and grasp the bare flesh…
Steady, there.
He had found the fortitude to tell her no, and it was undoubtedly for the best. She was almost as disastrous as he was, with her grim determination to ruin him every which way in order to wrest the Charm out of him.
He admired her stubbornness—though what really endeared her to him was how incapable of guile she seemed to be.
She had called herself a grasping strumpet—the Harrier’s delightful words, he assumed—and indeed, she had spent every one of their meetings trying to bend him to her will by various means.
But by brutally announcing, I’m blackmailing you, I’m seducing you, I’m teaching you to make an egg so you don’t starve, you incompetent twat, she’d rather undercut her wiles.
Not that she’d said that last bit, but it had been written all over her face at the time.
He wondered if she had any idea how much of her feelings she wore on her face, plain for anyone to see.
He’d been a fool to think, upon their first encounter, that she would excel at cards.
Even if she thought she had been seducing him to manipulate him, some small but persistent part of him wondered if that was where it began and ended.
There had been a look on her face for just a moment, when she was leaning over him and he could feel the soft weight of her pressing against his core, a look that was filled with both tenderness and hunger.
He marveled now that he’d ever thought she would flirt and use innuendo to proposition him, when all it would take was a glimpse of that look.
He took a long drink from the bottle, trying to banish the look from his mind.
He needed to think of dull things. Officers’ dinners that went on for hours until he wanted to slide underneath the table for a nap.
That experimental “silent opera” he and Winthrop had attended shortly before he’d bought his commission.
His father’s friends blathering about investments.
The look would not be banished.
She was looking at him now, but her current expression was all frustration and anxiety. He wondered if that other look was still in there, lurking below the surface. The look that was all for him. He shouldn’t want to see it again, but he did. Very badly.
“Tell me more about the Harrier’s threats,” he said.
If anything could quell his amorous longings, it would be discussing the Western Harrier.
And, he had to admit, he was concerned for her.
What sort of scheme was the Harrier up to now, and was it connected to…
No, it didn’t matter. He was done with trying to outmaneuver the Harrier.
He was showing a polite interest in her troubles. That was all.
He took a long swig and passed the bottle to Lady Croft on the opposite side of the desk.
“I don’t see what the point is, if you won’t help me,” she said plaintively, then took a drink. “Besides, you’ll likely not see a problem with his plans. You’re a lord. You probably think it’s fine to play with the lives of common folk.”
She passed the bottle back to him.
“Yet you think your husband would object?” he said. “He’s a lord.”
She frowned. “Well, yes, but I spent years bringing him around.”
“Did you?” Elmwood believed it. He thought she could convince anyone of anything, and they’d no doubt enjoy the process.
“Yes.” She tilted her chin up, as though expecting his rebuke. She would find none from him.
“Why not apply your considerable powers to bringing the Harrier around, then?”
“He is not a man who will listen,” she said. Then her eyes narrowed. “I imagine you know that already. He is no friend of yours.”
“What makes you say that?”
She waved a hand at him as she reclaimed the bottle and took another swig.
“He’s the reason I knew to seek you out.
He tasked me with watching for you and writing him if you ran to Merewyth.
He hates you.” On the last bit, her voice wavered, and he realized the drink was going to her head a bit.
He shouldn’t let her get drunk. “I didn’t write him,” she added, sounding apologetic, though he was not certain the apology was directed at him because she had considered it, or at the Harrier for not complying with his orders.
Should he thank her? That didn’t seem quite right. Finally, he settled on “I hate him, too. He’s an innately hateable fellow.”
She leaned toward him, resting her forearms and—oh, bloody saints—her bosom on his father’s desk.
“He’s despicable.” He likely ought to wrest the bottle away from her, but he liked the sight of her lips pressed against the glass.
He’d like her lips to be pressed against him, but he’d put a stop to that.
He’d been correct to stop it, he told himself firmly.
He eyed the bottle again. Was the drink going to his head?
Elmwood attempted to refocus on what Lady Croft was saying. She was using strong language to express her opinions about the Harrier, slipping back into what he realized was her mostly banished farm girl accent as she swore. It made him want to kiss her filthy mouth.
The drink was definitely going to his head.
“I’m not in a position to judge anyone for killing, but I’ve never seen anyone enjoy it as much as the Harrier does…” Elmwood said, agreeing with her, then trailed off.
After Elmwood had discovered that the Harrier was receiving covert messages from the Relancian camp, he had begun to spin wild theories in his mind.
Was the Harrier a traitor, trading secrets with the enemy?
The problem was that Elmwood couldn’t make sense of how it all fit together.
The Harrier was the greatest champion of the war with Relance.
His reputation was staked on hating the entire country and its populace.
What benefit could there possibly be for him to secretly be in bed with them?
In short order, it became Elmwood’s obsession.
He made note of the Harrier’s movements.
He followed Brumdorf whenever the man went off on an errand.
He snuck into the Harrier’s tent and rifled through things ineffectually.
Aside from confirming that the letters continued to arrive at regular intervals, he couldn’t make any headway.
Then he’d noticed something so obvious that he was embarrassed it had taken him months to figure it out.
The letters from the Relancian camp corresponded perfectly with incidents where troops under the Harrier’s command ended up in dire situations, only to have the Harrier rush in at the eleventh hour to save the day.
The Harrier was hiding intelligence from the rest of the officers to make himself look the hero.
“The thing is, Lady Croft, he’s a terrifying opponent, on or off the field of battle,” Elmwood continued carefully.
He had no wish to delve any deeper into his remembrances of just how terrible the Harrier could be, but he needed to warn her.
“He is without shame when it comes to obtaining his aims. I once thought to bring him to justice and it ended very, very badly for me. I urge you not to set your will against his. No good will come of it.”
Even saying that cost him. He breathed deeply, trying to focus on her and not on the memories that began to batter at the doors of his mind.
Hilde reached up and ran her fingers absently through her unbound hair, as if she were combing out knots.
Elmwood clung to the gesture as a drowning man clings to a bit of wreckage.
If he were to run his fingers through that mass of hair, it would be so cool and heavy against his skin.
It would weigh his hands down, pressing the tremble right out of them.
“He came here shortly after Thorgoode and I married,” she said.
It refocused his attention on the conversation, and he realized her eyes had taken on a glassy quality.
“Our marriage caused him to mistrust Thorgoode’s judgment, I think.
He was eager to find fault with the Croft and in the village, and then when Pip and Will…
They were two boys from the village who chose that week to steal a cow from the Croft’s byre.
When Tom, who was the steward then, brought them in, it was for Thorgoode to chastise them and give them unpleasant work to make up for their misdeed.
There was no real harm done, after all. But the Harrier was there, and he insisted that thieves must be punished harshly or else everyone would think they could steal from their lord and get away with it.
” She was staring at the surface of the desk, speaking as if to herself, lost in the memory.
“He hanged them. He hanged them from the big tree at the village crossroads, with all of Croftholde watching. They were the same age Han was at the time. Just children.”
It sounded exactly like something the Harrier would do. He had done worse.
“Your husband didn’t put a stop to it?”
She sat upright from her half sprawl on the desk, as if clearing her thoughts with a movement.
“He said that we had to let his brother do as he pleased, and then he would go away and we could go back to doing what we pleased. But he wasn’t the one who had to comfort their mothers.”
Elmwood studied her, hesitant to ask his next question.
“Then why do you think your husband would stop him now?”
She looked him dead in the eyes, her wits focusing.
“That was a long time ago. Thorgoode has changed. He always regretted what happened to Pip and Will. He wouldn’t let his brother destroy Croftholde.”