Taken By the Earl of Bodington (Passion Without Borders #2)

Charlotte Ellis

I am standing at the service entrance of Ashford House in Mayfair with a cafe latte going cold in my hand and a portfolio tucked under my arm, pressing the buzzer for the third time.

The January wind cuts through my wool coat like it has somewhere better to be.

I should have worn the heavier one. I should have confirmed the appointment yesterday instead of assuming the Earl of Bodington's household runs on the same cheerful chaos as my own studio.

I should have remembered that people who live in houses with service entrances probably do not answer their own doors.

The intercom crackles.

A pause. Then a woman's voice, crisp and unhurried: "Use the main entrance, Miss Ellis. Someone will meet you."

The main entrance. Of course. Because nothing says welcome like being redirected from the servants' door to the front of a Georgian townhouse that probably costs more than every flower I will sell in my lifetime combined.

I walk around the corner and up the stone steps, and before I can knock, the door opens to reveal a woman in her sixties with silver hair pinned in a precise bun and the kind of posture that suggests she has never slouched in her life.

"Miss Ellis." Not a question. "I am Mrs. Hartley, the housekeeper. Lord Bodington is expecting you."

She does not wait for me to respond before turning into the house.

I follow, stepping from weak winter light into a corridor that smells of beeswax and old stone, past oil paintings I am too nervous to properly look at.

My boots sound obscenely loud on the marble floor.

I have been in houses like this before. Six years of gala work will do that to a person.

But something about this particular corridor, this particular quality of silence, makes every step feel like an announcement I have not authorised.

Mrs. Hartley deposits me in a library.

I use the word library loosely. Libraries have bookshelves and perhaps a reading chair.

This room has floor to ceiling windows, leather furniture older than my grandmother, and approximately four thousand books arranged with the casual precision of someone who actually reads them.

A fire crackles in a marble fireplace. The ceiling is high enough that my voice would echo if I were foolish enough to speak.

"Someone will be with you shortly," Mrs. Hartley says, and disappears.

I set my cafe latte on the nearest surface and immediately pick it up again when I realise the surface is a side table that probably survived the Blitz and deserves better than coffee ring stains.

The room is not empty.

I notice him in pieces. The worn grey sweater first, soft at the elbows in a way that suggests actual use rather than artful distressing.

The dark hair, longer than I expected, falling slightly across his forehead.

The book in his hands, spine cracked back the way people do when they have no intention of stopping anytime soon.

He is sitting in a leather chair by the window, and he has not looked up, which gives me a moment to catalogue the rest: tall, even folded into the chair.

Sharp jaw. The kind of stillness that suggests either deep concentration or complete disregard for my presence.

I clear my throat.

He does not look up.

"Excuse me," I say. "I am here to meet the Earl of Bodington? About the gala commission?"

He turns a page.

I stand there with my portfolio and my cooling latte and my professional dignity, and I watch a man in a grey sweater ignore me in favour of what appears to be a biography of Thomas Cromwell.

This is fine. This is absolutely fine. I drove an hour and a half from Oxford to be ignored by someone's assistant or secretary or whoever sits in libraries reading during business hours.

"The flowers," I try again, a bit louder. "For the charity gala. Lady Pemberton's foundation? I was told someone would be available to review the design concepts."

He closes the book.

The movement is unhurried, deliberate. He sets the book face down on the arm of the chair, which is the first indication that something is off, because no one who works in a house like this would set a book face down on a chair that probably belonged to a prime minister.

He looks at me.

Dark eyes. Darker than I expected. There is something assessing in the way he takes me in, not rude exactly, but thorough. As if he is solving a problem he did not know he had.

"You're the florist from Oxford," he says.

Not a question. His voice is low and unhurried, and it does something inconvenient to the back of my neck.

"Charlotte Ellis. Petals and Promises." I shift my portfolio to my other arm. "And you are?"

The corner of his mouth moves. Not quite a smile. Something adjacent.

"Alexander Ashford," he says. "The Earl of Bodington."

The room rearranges itself around this information. The grey sweater. The reading. The complete lack of ceremony. I look at the books, then back at him, and before I can stop myself, I say: "You really do prefer books over parties, don't you."

The not quite smile deepens by a fraction.

"I do," he says. "Is that a problem?"

"Not for me. I prefer flowers over people most days."

He stands. He is taller than the chair suggested, and the grey sweater does nothing to diminish the breadth of his shoulders. I revise my earlier assessment: not just tall, but present. The kind of man who fills a space without trying.

"Shall we?" He gestures toward the long table at the centre of the room. "I've read the initial brief. I have questions."

I cross to the table and open my portfolio, spreading the design concepts across the polished wood. Colour swatches, sketch mockups, detailed notes about bloom schedules and structural requirements. I have spent three weeks on this proposal. Every decision is defensible.

Alexander Ashford stands across from me, close enough that I catch a trace of something warm, sandalwood perhaps, or old paper. He studies the first page with the intensity of someone who is actually reading it.

"White ranunculus for the entrance hall," he says.

"Yes. They catch the light beautifully. Architectural but soft."

"The east corridor has poor natural light at evening. The entrance hall pulls from there."

I blink at him.

He looks up. "The windows face north. By six o'clock, the light is gone entirely. Your ranunculus will look grey."

He is correct.

The irritation arrives before I can stop it, sharp and specific.

I have spent a decade learning how light affects flowers.

I have built my entire business on understanding the relationship between bloom and space.

And this man, this Earl in his worn sweater with his Cromwell biography, has identified a flaw in my design within three minutes of seeing it.

"Anemones," I say, reaching for my pencil. "Same colour palette, but they hold their shape better in low light. The centres give them structure."

I lean across the table and begin revising the concept directly in his margins, which is probably not what one does with an Earl's documents, but he has challenged my professional judgment and I refuse to be caught unprepared twice in one conversation.

His eyes follow my hands as I sketch. I can feel the attention like a physical weight, tracking the movement of my pencil across the page.

"Better," he says when I finish. "What about the ballroom arch?"

We spend forty minutes at that table.

Alexander asks questions that tell me he has done more than read the brief.

He has studied it. He pushes back on my timeline for delivery, citing traffic patterns I had not considered.

He suggests a lighting consultation with the house electrician, whose name he knows, whose schedule he has apparently memorised.

He disagrees with my choice of eucalyptus for the garlands and then concedes the point when I explain the specific variety I am sourcing, which holds its colour better than the standard alternative.

By the end of it, my coffee is cold, my pencil is dull, and I have accumulated four pages of notes in handwriting I will barely be able to read later.

"The commission is yours," he says, as if there were ever another option. "Mrs. Hartley will arrange access for your site visits. I would like to walk you through the principal rooms myself."

"You don't have to do that. I'm sure you have more important things to read."

The almost smile returns. "I do. But I suspect you will have questions about ceiling heights that Mrs. Hartley cannot answer."

He is correct about that as well.

The walk through Ashford House takes another hour.

We move through drawing rooms and hallways and a conservatory with a glass ceiling that turns the January grey into something softer.

Alexander answers every question I ask about window orientation and structural load limits and the precise measurements of the ballroom alcoves, and he answers them with the precision of someone who has measured these rooms himself.

I catch myself watching his hands as he gestures toward a particular cornice detail. Long fingers. Ink stain on the edge of his thumb, probably from the book. He notices me looking and says nothing, which somehow makes it worse.

At the service entrance, he hands me a folder containing the signed commission paperwork.

"Two weeks," he says. "You'll have full access to the property during setup. Let Mrs. Hartley know if you need anything."

"Thank you, Lord Bodington."

"Alexander," he corrects. "If we're going to argue about flowers for two weeks, we might as well use first names."

I take the folder. Our fingers do not touch, but I am aware of the gap between them, the precise three inches of space that separates his hand from mine.

"Charlotte," I say. "And I don't argue. I advocate."

He does something with his mouth that is almost a smile. "I look forward to it."

I drive back to Oxford with the commission signed and the radio off and the unsettling feeling that I have agreed to spend two weeks in very close proximity to a man who already knows things about light that I have spent ten years learning.

At home, I open my laptop to note the colour palette adjustments and finally remember to google the man I have just agreed to work for.

The first result is a photograph from some society function five years ago.

Alexander stands at the edge of the frame, half turned away from the camera, clearly uncomfortable with being photographed.

Beside him is a woman so polished she makes the room look apologetic: blonde hair, perfect posture, a smile that suggests she has never been surprised by anything in her life.

The caption reads: Sebastian Ashford with fiancee Lady Victoria Sinclair and his half-brother, Lord Alexander Ashford, Earl of Bodington.

Half brother.

I look at the photograph for a long time. At Sebastian's easy smile and Victoria's possessive hand on his arm. At Alexander's expression, guarded and distant, a man standing at the edge of his own family portrait.

I close the laptop and stare at the ceiling of my flat, and I wonder what exactly I have walked into.