He had not calmed until he’d had her in his arms. He’d held her there, soft and lovely and close to his chest, and for the second time that day, he’d felt a little wild at the sensation. When he’d hauled her up against him, she’d dragged herself closer like she wanted to be there.
Dolt, he told himself.She was trying not to fall off.
But his mind had been full of pent-up terror, and his arms had been full of the sweetest, roundest curves he’d ever encountered, and when he’d looked down at her mouth, he’d thought of—
A great many things, most of which weren’t achievable on horseback. He prayed—an actual, carefully worded prayer to the divine—that she had not recognized his abrupt and violent erection.
He supposed she probably had not, given that she suddenly seemedlessafraid of him, rather than more.
Something, to be sure, had changed though. They’d walked along the road, side by side and silent as the grave, until Miss Hope-Wallace had shaken her hair back from her face with a decisive jerk of her chin. “I will do it,” she’d said.
And that, it seemed, was that.
He tried not to think about Miss Hope-Wallace after he left her at the castle door under Bertie’s alarming glinty-eyed supervision. He made a serious attempt to redirect his thoughts from her person, from the bewitching combination of timidity and raw courage that seemed to coexist within her.
From the color of her eyelashes, which he couldn’t stop trying to name. From the way she’d felt in his arms.
He helped Huw recapture the horses and the zebras, and then spent some time hacking away at the rotted section of fence that had permitted the mass zebra exodus in the first place. Eventually Huw bluntly informed him that bashing down the fence—without repairing it—was not as helpful as it might have been.
So he took himself off to his barbican and continued to think—that is,notthink—about Lydia Hope-Wallace. The barbican was his respite. He’d fashioned the structure—originally a fortification near the castle’s entrance—into a kind of forge-courtyard-laboratory for his mucking about with coal and metal. These days, it was the place where his mind went clear. The place where fire and beeswax smoke burned through his constant worry over his brother and the earldom and the state of his finances.
And yet his work did not seem to take his mind off of Miss Hope-Wallace. How could it, when the iron he was turning glowed the precise color of her hair? When a spark landed on his shirt and burned a hole straight through to his chest, right where she’d been pressed against him?
Soft. Lush. Clinging.
Thinking about her was as useless as it was distracting. He burned himself twice whilst pondering the shape of her lower lip, plump and deeply curved.
Which he had no business thinking about. She had come here to marry hisbrother.
The very thought of Miss Hope-Wallace and Davis was a rough scrape against an unhealed wound. Arthur had been so happy when Davis had come back to Strathrannoch Castle a month ago. He’d been entirely taken in by Davis’s questions, his brother’s interest in Arthur’s work.
He’d wanted to believe it. A lifetime could not quite dull that unguarded edge of want.
More fool he.
Davis had lied to him, just as he’d lied to Miss Hope-Wallace. She had been nothing more than a tool to Davis, a pawn manipulated to achieve his own purposes.
And even as fury rose in him—how could Davis have exploited her, her earnest bravery, her toughness and her strength?—Arthur felt uneasiness as well.
Was he the same? Was he not taking advantage of her as Davis had done? He meant to have her help, to use her letters and her connections. True, his motives were not selfish. He wanted to protect those who might be hurt by his own ill-considered invention.
But his motives were not entirely unselfish, either. He still wanted to shake some sense into his brother, to bring Davis back to the fold. He still wanted Davis to change.
Arthur had never had an easy time asking for help. He would do almost anything to avoid it—would grind the glass himself in his barbican to fix the broken windows of Strathrannoch Castle. He would travel for hours astride Luath, to town and back again, before asking one of his tenants to borrow their mill.
But he’d asked Lydia Hope-Wallace. He did not know any other way to find his brother.
He wouldmakehimself stop thinking about her mouth, he resolved as he left the barbican. He had no other choice.
He was still thinking about her mouth when the heavy oak door of the bedchamber beside his own opened with a thud directly into his face.
“Ouch—Jesus—fuck—” His voice came out garbled around the hand he’d clapped to his nose.
What the devil? That chamber wasempty—Fern, his maid,rarely entered it to clean, since the countess’s chamber had not been occupied for well over a decade—
A gingery head peeked around the door. Her dark blue eyes were wide above the hand she had pressed to her mouth.
“Oh goodness,” Lydia Hope-Wallace croaked. “I’m so sorry.”
