Ned shook his head. “He was here for a day and then off again. You know how he is—always flitting about between his friends and his ladybirds and his Venetian holidays and whatever else he does.”
Lydia’s voice when she replied was measured. “Indeed. I do know how he is.”
“Mother’s been off her head ever since he dropped in and told us about your elopement.”
Lydia collapsed onto the bed beside her brother and groaned. “Of course.”
“Have you heard that you’re acountessnow?” Ned’s initial outrage seemed to have faded into a kind of irrepressible good humor. “Because I have. About a thousand times.”
Lydia scrubbed her hands over her disheveled hair, an action which did remarkable things to her barely concealed breasts. Arthur tried desperately not to think about her breasts, here in her bedchamber with herbrother.
“Do you think there’s any chance that Jasper might turn up tonight?” she asked.
“I have no idea. I haven’t been keeping his social calendar for him.”
Lydia made a sound somewhere between a sigh and a snort. “Of course not. Well, we’ll see if he does. If not, I have other ideas about how to track him down.”
Ned’s gaze sharpened upon her. “Why do you need Jasper so desperately? Is it something to do with your pamphlets?”
“Something, yes. I’ll tell you everything after I talk to him.”
Ned looked unconvinced by her words, but he nodded shortly.
Lydia glanced between Arthur and her brother and then turned back to Ned. “Listen, while I dress, can you take Arthur and”—she made a gesture that seemed to take in his whole person—“fix him up? Perhaps find him some clean clothing? We lost everything to the, ah, highwaymen.”
Ned looked extremely put out by this suggestion. “I can’t say as I’ve got anything that will fit a giant.”
“Be resourceful,” Lydia said and patted him on the cheek. “You’re my favorite brother for a reason. And—Ned?”
He paused in his dubious appraisal of Arthur’s person. “Yes?”
“Can youtrynot to trifle with my husband?”
Perhaps she had called him such before, but Arthur did not think so. His spirits shot upward so decisively that even the bloodthirsty look Ned shot him could not dampen them.
“I can’t make any promises,” Ned said darkly.
By the time dinner began, Arthur had met the rest of the Hope-Wallace brothers and concluded that they ought to be separated from one another for the general safety of the British Isles. Preferably via incarceration.
Once he had removed Arthur from Lydia’s chamber, Ned had come out with the revelation that the only suitably sized clothing he could procure on short notice would have to come from a footman.
An hour later, Arthur was clean-shaven and more or less indistinguishable from the crimson-liveried male servants in the house, except that he’d refused the white wig and the tricorne hat. Ned had made an extremely cogent argument for the wig, but Arthur had glowered at him until he subsided.
Eventually Ned had hauled him downstairs to a spacious sitting room, which sported a tasteful wall-covering of fruits and birds, several old and no doubt priceless rugs, and a glassily polished pianoforte.
Lydia was there already, sitting beside another of the innumerable brothers at the piano and laughing—that sweet soft laugh he loved—with her elbows pressed to her knees.
His gaze fell on her and held there, like the point of a compass drawn to magnetic north. Somehow, quite without his realizing it, she had become the pole by which he was guided.
She looked so lovely, warm and comfortable beside her brother. She’d exchanged the precarious dress for one of her own,which was all white lace and miles of skirts. She looked pristine, exquisite, perfectly at home here in this expensive house with its matching servants.
He wanted to drag her upstairs and find her body beneath all those yards of snowy lace. He wanted to take down her hair, muss it, kiss her until she was flushed and tousled and dazed. He wanted—
Jesus, things he ought not want whilst dressed in silk knee breeches that were slightly too small.
He was introduced to the other brother at the piano—this one was Gabriel, the physician. He was as blond as the other brothers had been, though more sober-faced, and his grip on Arthur’s hand was viselike.
Lydia, for her part, alternated between sympathetic grimaces in Arthur’s direction and furious glances at Ned, who pretended not to see her. Presumably she had noticed Arthur’s patently absurd costume, but was too decorous to point it out, in case he did not realize how ridiculous he looked.
