“I don’t know what you mean.”
His laugh was soft and rough. “Luath, for example. My horse. He was gelded too late—a big mean thing who would sooner bite your hand than take an apple out of it. Took Huw and me years to gain his trust, years of petting and cosseting. But I would carve out my heart for the great beast now, and he for me. ’Twould not be the same if he had been easy to love.”
“I understand.” Her voice was almost a whisper, but he did not seem to mind.
“Strathrannoch as well. My father—he did not make the track smooth for me. I ought by rights to have hated the place, and yet I never could. When he died and the estate became mine, ’twas sunk so deep in a pit of debt and rot that I knew I could never bring it out on my own. And the land—even the damned land itself is hard at Strathrannoch. Hard to grow in, hard to till. Our people didn’t trust me then. Some still don’t.”
He paused, seeming to realize the length of his speech. His gaze met hers, and his mouth tipped up, loosening from the slash it had been. “But I love it all anyway.”
Lydia tried to smile back, tried to say something, but she could not manage it. She felt the press of tears at the backs of her eyes, and she looked blindly out the window until the feeling receded.
But it did not go away, not completely.
She wished she had not asked. She wished she did not keep learning more of this man, who coddled his horse and took in strangers when they had no other place to go. Who loved things more when they were hard to love.
When Lydia took risks in her life, they were calculated. Her anonymous pamphlets, for one—she trusted the discretion of Selina and Belvoir’s completely, and the importance of her political work was worth more than the small chance of discovery.
This trip had been, in some ways, the largest gamble of her life. She had traveled across the country, proposed a sea change in her own life. The chance for independence, the chance to finallyliveinstead of waiting for life to happen to her—the potential rewards had been vast.
And the danger inherent in her trip to Scotland had seemed not so very great. Aside from the serious but unlikely risk of brigands and highwaymen, there had been little that she feared. She’dhad in mind a marriage of convenience, a financial and political partnership with a man she’d considered a friend.
Her heart had not been involved. Her pride would have been stung, to be sure, if her proposal had been rejected, but she also would have understood. She would have been disappointed. She would not have been crushed.
But now—as she sat across from Arthur, her gaze flickering to him and then away again as though the sight of him burned her eyes—she felt a new and present danger. A risk she had not anticipated. A consequence incalculably great.
She felt… something… toward him. She could feel his presence across from her even without looking at him, large and warm, stubborn and loving. She wanted to know him better. She wanted him to kiss her. No—shewanted to kisshim, to pull his head down toward hers and bring his mouth to her own.
She knew she was too emotional, her feelings boiling to the surface of her body and flinging themselves outward in blushes or tears. She was sensitive and prone to flights of fancy. She was easily bruised. Feeling something for Arthur would make her infinitely more vulnerable.
And as she thought of the crooked tilt of his mouth as he’d spoken of love, she was not certain that her calculations mattered in any case. She did not know if she could stop herself.
Chapter 11
Do you know when it started for me, love of mine? It was that first moment. The very first instant that I saw you on the doorstep, in your green dress and your green shoes and your hair the color Nature uses for things so sublime you cannot hold them in your hand. Autumn. Sunset. A flame.
—from the papers of Arthur Baird, written upon the back of an envelope, never sent
In Haddon Grange, they divided their forces.
Strathrannoch was tasked with remaining out of sight so as to avoid recognition. His afternoon activities seemed mostly to consist of lurking and attempting to look less conspicuous and strapping and earl-ish.
Lydia and Georgiana, meanwhile, wandered down the main thoroughfare in search of the boardinghouse Arthur and Huw had described to them. It had grown chilly in the fortnight since they had arrived in Scotland; Lydia held her embroidered pelisse close around her. Late-blooming cranesbill and lacy white hydrangeaspilled from window boxes and pots set along doorways. Clematis in a dozen shades of blue and violet twined along thatched roofs.
Lydia’s plan had been twofold. Georgiana—who’d dressed down for the occasion—would make her way to the boardinghouse’s kitchens and begin to work her magic upon the serving staff. Lydia, meanwhile, meant to delicately pump the owner for information about Davis Baird.
Like most of Lydia’s recent plans, this one had been better in theory.
The owner was a brisk, bluff woman who had no time for mousy English spinsters. Every time Lydia attempted to speak, the woman finished her sentence with an impatient huff, and within the first several minutes, the four or five probing questions Lydia had prepared about Davis Baird had gone straight out of her head.
Things did not improve from there. By the time a quarter of an hour had passed, Lydia found herself back on the street outside the boardinghouse, having asked such useful questions as “Do you keep beds in your bedchambers?” and “Have you ever heard of, um, earls?”
She’d also apparently rented herself a room, which she scarcely remembered doing and certainly had not intended. But there was a key in her reticule in the place where several coins had formerly resided, so she supposed she’d somehow been talked into it.
Thankfully, Georgiana had been more effective.
“He’s been there,” Georgiana whispered under her breath as she caught up to Lydia in front of the milliner’s shop halfway down the main road.
They reunited with Arthur and Huw behind the local inn’s stables, where they’d temporarily boarded the horses. Arthur slouched against the wall. He’d once again lost his jacket and cravat, though if he’d thought to make himselflessnoticeable,showing a vee of muscular chest was certainly not the way to go about it.
