“Davis Baird,” Arthur said. “My brother.”
The words were still ringing in the silence when two of his employees burst into the drawing room.
“Strathrannoch!” Huw Trefor, the Welshman in charge of the Strathrannoch stables, was out of breath, his cheeks ruddy over his white beard. “Get the bloody hell out of your books, man, and help me with the damn zebras! They’re all over the estate—I think one’s made it down to the forest, and I—”
At the sight of the two women on the chaise, Huw stopped speaking abruptly.
Bertie Palmer—Arthur’s estate manager and secretary, as well as the love of Huw’s life—peered curiously around his much-taller partner.
An expression of utter delight stole across Bertie’s face, and he adjusted his spectacles with one finger. “Well,” he said, in his gentle voice, “what have we here?”
Bloodyhell.
“These are—” Arthur began, and then paused. “This is—”
He had no idea how to finish his sentence. What had Davis told the woman? What had he promised?
Davis could charm the wool off a goddamned sheep. He could convince anyone of anything—no one knew that better than Arthur himself. If Davis wanted something from this woman, he’d have promised her the bloody world. He must have promised her something, because somehow she had turned up here believing herself the next Countess of Strathrannoch.
Davis had always been the same. Handsome, clever, charming, perfect—a winning smile that deflected punishment, always the right words to persuade people to bend to his will. A natural leader, a charmer of women, the second son who ought to have been the first.
Whowishedhe had been the first. Who never saw an obstacle he couldn’t manipulate his way around. Who let nothing—neither wisdom nor morals nor compassion—stop him from getting what he wanted. It was no surprise that his charming, traitorous, contemptiblearseof a brother had persuaded this woman to fall in love with him. Arthur had seen it plenty of times before.
He cursed Davis to the depths of hell—again—for leaving him alone with this catastrophe. How the devil was he meant to introduce her?This is my brother’s affianced bride?
Or, worse—mine?
No. There would be no mention of weddings or troths in front of his staff.
Huw was the more practical and forthright of the pair. Bertie, on the other hand, was crafty. Cunning. Almost Machiavellian.
On the faintest suggestion of a potential Lady Strathrannoch, Bertie would have Arthur’s mother’s silver ring polished and presented on a platter. Bertie would have a special license procured and Arthur and Lydia’s first five children named—notthat Arthur was thinking about procreating with Miss Hope-Wallace.
The tops of his ears burned again. “Nothing,” he declared. “No one.”
He paused. That hadn’t come out right.
But Miss Hope-Wallace was nodding her agreement. “Nothing,” she said. Her voice was shaking again, her pupils bigger than Arthur felt they ought to be, her eyes glassy. “No one. We were never here.”
And then she leaned forward, her flame-colored hair tumbling over one shoulder, and vomited on her own shoes.
Chapter 3
… We arrive at Strathrannoch tomorrow. Do you recollect the bit in theVindicationin which Wollstonecraft claims that the only way for women to achieve spiritual vigor is for them to first run wild? Well—let us hope she was not wrong.
—from Lydia Hope-Wallace to Selina Kent, Duchess of Stanhope and patroness of Belvoir’s Library, posted from Dunkeld
Lydia was not certain she had ever, in her entire life, so longed for oblivion.
It was not the first time she had vomited in public. It was also not the second, nor even, lamentably, the third. (The third had been a rather unfortunate incident involving her next-oldest brother Ned and a not-very-grief-stricken widow whom Ned had been attempting to charm. At her own husband’s funeral.)
It was, however, the first time Lydia had vomited in front of a man to whom she had recently offered her hand in marriage.
She hadlikedthese slippers. They were pale green and pointed, with huge floppy bows on top. She’d thought, when she put themon that morning, that they would give her a burst of courage when she looked down and glimpsed their optimistic adornments.
They were now a horrifying, ruined, utterly unmentionable metaphor for the outcome of her fondest hopes and dreams.
Independence. A life of her own devising. A partner who did not see her as an object of pity.
