“Alex,” he whispered, wanting to go to her, to apologize, to promise to make everything right.
“He is an intruder here!” Alex pointed a brazen finger at Griff, caught arm for arm by the hulking footmen. One had a gap between his teeth and shockingly red hair. The other was missing a front tooth and possessed a swollen ear. Lucy had not been joking. The Hawthorne House help had been procured from a boxing ring.
Griff jerked his arms, kicked out his legs, but every hit seemed but a fly’s annoying buzz to the footmen. They merely held him tighter. One twisted an arm, and Griff caught a howl behind clenched teeth. The footmen shoved him to his knees.
“I may be an intruder,” he said, “but I’m not going to hurt you. God, Alex, it’s me.”
“Precisely.” A world of sorrow in that single word as Alex turned her back on Keats’s friend. What in hell had happened between them? They used to be friends of a sort, too.
“Do you know him?” Sacks hissed in Keats’s ear.
Keats couldn’t find the words to respond.
Mrs. Beckett was looking at him, her keen eyes like a predator’s in the dark. “What are you doing here? Get back to the stables.”
What was he doing here? Hell. Alex would see him.
Alexhadseen him. She walked toward him slow as a dream. “Keats? Is that…”
He made for the stairs.
And ran right into Lucy. She wobbled, and he steadied her, met her gaze briefly, so full of worried curiosity, before a hand wrapped tight about his wrist and tugged. And really, Keats was nothing more than a leaf on the wind; he went where he was blown, apparently.
Once face-to-face, Alex’s eyes became blue moons, then she threw his wrist away as if touching him had burned her. “You! What areyoudoing here, too?”
Ah, hell.
Lucy stepped to his side. “You know Mr. Keats, Alex?”
“Mr. Keats?” Alex threw her head back and laughed like a banshee, clutching her belly. A laugh that didn’t last long enough for Keats to escape down the stairs. Oh, no, she cut the laugh off as neatly as you would a pat of butter and settled a deathly calm gaze on him. “He is not Mr. Keats. He is Keaton Godwin, Earl of Ennis. My brother.”
Beside him, Lucy turned stone bit by bit, her arm closest him then everywhere else until even her breathing stopped. Stone had no lungs to take in air, had no heart to beat for love. He had to revive her, to transform stone to soft curves once more.
He put one hand on her shoulder, his other hand on his heart. “Lucy, I?—”
She knocked his hand away.
“What is going on here,” Mr. Beckett bellowed.
“Should we break ’is bones?” the redheaded footman asked, almost lifting Griff off the floor.
“No bone breaking yet.” Mrs. Beckett stalked toward Keats, crossing her dressing gown more tightly over her front. “You. Is it true? You are an earl? Lady Alexandra’s brother?”
“Actually, I’m a marquess now.” Keats cringed. It wasnotthe time for technicalities. “My… Our”—he met Alex’s gaze—“father has just died.”
Alex blinked, reaching out and grasping for something, someone, finding Lucy, and letting herself give up strength for just a moment. “Dead? Oh, God.”
“That’s what I came to tell you,” Griff shouted. “Now you—ow, ow, ow!”
The giant with the swollen ear twisted Griff’s arm at an unnatural angle. “Now the bone breaking, Mrs. Beckett?”
“Not yet.” She covered her mouth with a hand and looked at her husband. “This is a disaster. What do we do?”
A disaster? Keats was not a disaster. A liar, clearly. A hedonist, formerly. A marquess… it appeared so. But a disaster?
He stepped between the husband and wife. “I do not wish to cause you disaster or to alarm you. I followed my sister here the night Miss Jones took her from London. I stayed using a different name in order to watch over her. I wrote to my friend”—he strode down the hall, holding out an arm to Griff—“the Earl of Finley, requesting he keep my father calm, so that my father would not attempt to find Alex. I have tried for the last month, longer, to do what is best for Alex and for this place. Finley should not have snuck in here.” He reached for his friend, to pull him to his feet.
The red-haired footman boxed him in the ear.
