Chapter Twenty
She had decided that there was no chance of accomplishing anything today if she didn’t change clothes. She had to get that particular scent away from her skin and her nose if she was going to focus. If she was going to act. If she was going to do anything at all.
The problem was that it didn’t work.
She had shed the pelisse, changed into a woolen gown of shimmering mushroomy silver and purple, and even rewrapped her hair with a matching ribbon, but she could still smell him. She could still taste him.
He was in her hair, she realized.
His wrists had transferred the bloody lust potion to her hair.
And washing her hair was not a matter of whim, nor was adding enough jasmine oil to drown out the scent without also giving her curls too much weight and oil.
She was destined, it seemed, to suffer.
Rehearsal was not for several more hours yet. Harcourt had already pissed off to do whatever mysterious barrister business he’d gotten into his head. Lem and Rhys had both retreated to the ballroom to practice their murder choreography.
She didn’t want to see Ruby. Or Hattie.
They would ask questions she did not care to answer.
She tried and failed to read a novel. And then a stage play. And also that letter from her father. She also briefly considered going and sitting in the damned chicken coop with that bastard rooster and calling herself content.
But then Malcolm came home. And he was not alone.
“Lib!” he called, stomping through the house like a toddler looking for a misplaced toy. “Come out! I’ve got a diversion for you.”
“No, thank you!” she yelled back, which only gave him the correct direction in which to stomp to retrieve her.
Her heart was already in her throat.
She had seen the throng of men he’d brought with him down below her bedroom window. She could see their heads, various shades of brown and blond and gray, with one telltale shock of copper red right in the center.
Malcolm walked in and gave her an easy smile. “Come on,” he said. “I know you don’t have to be at the playhouse until late afternoon. I want to show you something.”
She frowned. “I’ve seen all your toys already, Malcolm.”
“No, you haven’t!” he said back, laughing. “I’ve a quarry now, remember? You must come. I’ve decided I need to show it to you.”
“Why?” she said, reaching down to grip her stool cushion beneath her as though it would anchor her in the spot. “It’s a hole with rocks in it.”
“Because,” he said, “I’ve decided to gift you a bushel of quartz for your theater. We uncovered a vein of the stuff and it has come to my attention that the place’s chandelier is very shabby. Certainly too shabby for Shakespeare.”
“It’s not an opera house,” she protested, already a little weakened by the offer. “‘Quartz’?”
“Well, technically it’s flint. But it’s very fine. Transparent in some places. Druzy as well, which is kind of silverish. There’s chalcedony, some bands of agate too. You could have one with purple stripes. And of course, there’s jasper too.”
“‘Jasper’?” she repeated weakly.
Malcolm nodded, blinking. “The red sort mostly, but some green.”
“Oh.” She swallowed, licking the dryness from her lips. “The rocks.”
“The gems. Come on! Sunlight is burning.” He held his hand out to her, his eyes widening at her dress when she stood. “You’ll match the agate bands! You could have the most colorful chandelier in England if we assemble it the way I’m thinking.”
“Oh, all right.” She sighed. “But we have to go right now? This instant? With all those men down there?”
“Only some of them,” he said, wide-eyed and innocent. “The others are staying to start digging the foundation for the new hothouse. Jasper and a few of the old timers are coming along, though.”
“Ah,” she said, wincing. “I thought he might be staying too. Mal, can just you and I go? Later?”
“No,” said Malcolm, some of his brightness sharpening to a glint. “I hate climbing up the Downs and you know it. Either you come now, or the next time, I’m bringing Faither with us. I saw your blasted letter.”
Libba stared at him for a moment. Then she frowned and said a very naughty word.
“Excellent,” he declared, clapping his hands together. “Wear boots or you’ll ruin your stockings.”
Somehow, between leaving her bedroom and awaiting her on the landing, he’d amassed more hangers-on.
Libba appeared to Malcolm with his throng of workers at his back, and Errol, Rhys, and Monica at his front, clearly all intending to join on this trek.
“Buckets of sediment for under the brick,” Errol was saying to Malcolm. “Drainage is important for tropical flowers.”
“Shavings and chips of colorful stones have so many applications, you know!” Monica was saying to Rhys, dreamy eyed. “The colors! Rhys, think of the colors!”
Libba gave a heavy sigh.
She met Jasper’s eye across the throng. His hair was still ruffled from where she’d fisted her fingers in it, fluffy and curling away from his ears as though trying to remember the shape of her handprints.
His cheeks were flushed and rosy, though that very well could’ve been from the brisk temperature and misty wind. His lips looked fuller than she remembered them to be. Had she done that?
He quickly averted his eyes rather than holding her gaze.
The coward.
“I’m always thinking of the colors,” Rhys assured Monica. “Oh! That makes me wonder if we can dye the fairy fire.”
“Oh, shall I fetch Ruby?” Monica said, breathless.
“No!” Libba snapped. “We have quite enough people. Onward!”
There were far too many of them to take a carriage, especially with all the workers in tow, but the path to the Downs was not far from Starling’s Rest. The house sat on a hill midway between the bustle of the town center and pavilions and the more industrial outliers that housed the barony’s commercial interests.
It would likely take about half an hour to walk there with a crowd this size.
She pushed through the others to reach Malcolm before Jasper could take his side, grabbing his elbow as they turned onto their path and taking a little sip of breath to steel herself for what she needed to say.
“I’m not trying to renew some sort of filial bond,” she said under her breath to him, drawing his face down to regard her.
His happy expression flickered a little, displeasure tugging at the corners of his lips, which made her sigh.
“It’s complicated,” she said. “But I will explain it to you when there is time. I needed his signature on a legal form to assist Lem with something, and now I might not need it at all, which is a fine mess I’ve made for myself.
Now I have to go, anyway, and make sure he keeps his trap shut about it. ”
“I would ask for elaboration,” Malcolm said with a little frown, “but I expect I would not get it just now.”
“I’ll happily spill the whole stupid mess to you when we’re back home,” she promised. “I just wanted you to know it wasn’t what it looked like. I haven’t been pining to be his daughter again all of a sudden.”
“Fine,” he said, shrugging. “Even if you were, I suppose it’s not my business.”
She huffed, dropping his arm. “Well, if you’re going to act like that about it,” she said, “maybe I won’t tell you anything.”
“A blunted threat,” he returned, arching a brow. “Considering the default state of things.”
She made a face at him and turned to look for a different companion.
She turned directly into Jasper.
He caught her by the shoulders before she could break the bridge of her nose against his chest. His broad, firm chest, warm under the shirt and jacket. Freckled and dusted with golden hair under the shirt and jacket.
Goddammit!
“Lib,” he choked, using his grip on her to turn her back around. “We’re going this way.”
“Yes, I know,” she shot, slapping his hands off her. “Why are you here?!”
“B…Because I was invited?” he attempted, cutting himself off and pushing his fingers to his lips to stop a laugh at the way her head snapped around to glare at him. “Malcolm wouldn’t take no for an answer. He extorted me. Workers for Templeton-Rath in exchange for my presence.”
“Oh, of course,” she replied, knowing she sounded petulant. “All roads lead back to Templeton-Rath.”
He slid his fingers into the crook of her arm, tugging her gently so that she would slow her gait. It allowed some of the workers to fill the space between them and Malcolm, who had now called Errol into his thrall ahead of them.
Behind them, some ways back, Monica and Rhys were still chattering about colors and things that glinted in the light.
“Do I need to apologize to you?” Jasper asked after checking both in front of and behind them. “For this morning?”
“For this morning? No,” she replied, clenching her jaw. “For absolutely everything else? I’d say so.”
“That’s fair,” he replied with a sigh, lashes fluttering over those upturned, golden eyes. “That is fair.”
“So, are you going to?” she asked, raising her brows at him as they reached a set of wooden stairs that scaled the first chalky drop of the Downs. “I’m listening.”
“I am going to,” he assured her. “Once I’ve figured out the words. And the attrition bit. And … erm …”
She gestured for him to take the stairs ahead of her. She wanted to glare at his back. At his broad, strong back. No, that wasn’t helping. But the only place to look was even lower, and his bum was doing incredible things just now, scaling the steps.
She wondered if she had died sometime in the night and this was hell.
Had he always been shaped like this? Had there always been so very much to grab in his trousers and she just hadn’t noticed?
“Fairy circles,” Rhys called, once they’d reached the top, adjusting the green angora scarf around his neck. “Don’t step inside them!”
“What?” Jasper said, looking over his shoulder with a frown. “The mushrooms?”
“Don’t,” Rhys said again, his face dropping to a glower as he completed the knot in his ill-gotten scarf. “Walk around.”
“Ignore him,” Malcolm called back. “Nonsense.”
Libba noted he did indeed swerve left to avoid a ring of colorful sprouting fungi a few moments later. She’d bring that up sometime soon.
When it served her.
“What happens if we step in them?” a worker asked Rhys. “Something Welsh?”
“Aye,” said Rhys ominously. “Something very Welsh.”
“It’s a doorway, they say,” Monica added sweetly. “To the realm of the fair folk. Rhys, tell them! He’s very good at these stories.”
“They aren’t stories,” Rhys told her sternly. “Well, they are the way historical events are … You know what, just avoid them. We’ll have an educational hour once we’re at the top.”
“If I find a single thimble of cream in the hallway tonight, I’m going to set your bed on fire,” Malcolm told Rhys without turning around. “We’re grown now. Past this.”
“Past what?” Rhys called back, wrinkling up his nose at the jab. “Sense?”
“Well past sense,” Libba muttered, getting a low, soft chuckle from Jasper at her side. It made every hair on her arms stand straight up.
She turned her head to look at him, haloed by the mid-morning sun, glowing like a damned forge.
“It’s true, isn’t it?” she said, softly enough for him to hear. “We’re well past sense.”
He blinked, flicking his gaze to her in his periphery as they reached the second set of stairs. “Yes, I’d say so,” he replied, just as softly. “So, what do we do about it now?”
“We go stand and stare into a quarry,” she said with a sigh. “And then you find a reason to stay at the Rest tonight.”
“Why?” he asked, his brows high and his lips fighting a smile. “Why would I do that?”
“Because,” she said, pushing him out of the way so she could ascend first, without the torment of his backside in her view. “We have business to conclude.”