“I will never look you in the eye again,” she said after long, unhappy moments. Her face was tucked against Thomas’s chest, and her voice was husky, though her arms had loosened their grip about his waist. “You are an awful man, Thomas Jennings, to provoke me so.”
That she could scold him was reassuring.
“I am a beast,” he acknowledged, resting his chin on her crown. “You may keep the handkerchief.”
He cast around for something to say to distract her from gathering her emotional bricks and beams while still in his arms. She would want a personal admission from him, something genuine.
I’m sorry came to mind, though he wasn’t sorry to have been the shoulder she cried on. A storm of such proportions had to have been building for years.
“Fairly came upon me in the middle of a bout of tears, once,” he said. “I thought I’d have to knock his teeth down his throat so great was my humiliation.”
Loris squirmed free to peer at him. “You were crying?”
Her eyes were shiny and puffy, her nose reddish. Some vagrant instinct in Thomas more usually devoted to balancing ledgers wanted to kiss that nose, to kiss any part of her, better.
“I was feeling sorry for myself,” he said. “I’d missed the funerals of twin cousins, fellows I’d grown up with. They’d occasionally tolerated me of a summer rambling around my grandfather’s estate, though I hadn’t seen them for years. They were scapegrace ne’er-do-wells, the pair of them, but for them to be gone—I felt very much betrayed, alone, and frightened. Then too, we’d parted on bad terms, and I was angry they’d died without mending the breach.”
Betrayed, alone, frightened . He was probably describing Loris’s emotional reality as well as his own past, and yet, with his sister, who’d lost the same pair of cousins, the breach had yet to be mended.
Loris sat forward, and Thomas let her go that far.
“I used to think when Papa would go off on his sprees, the worst part was people telling me they’d seen him stumbling out of the Cock, or over in Haybrick or Trieshock, buying a round for the house. I knew he’d be back in a couple of days, tossed out of the back of a farmer’s wagon, stinking, insensate, and filthy. I dreaded his homecomings, the stench of him, the tears, the apologies, and the careful questions he’d ask, trying to reconstruct his latest debauch.”
God’s bullwhip. If the man hadn’t decamped, Thomas would have tossed him from the property—though, Loris, loyal daughter that she was, would probably have gone with her papa given the chance.
Her father hadn’t given her that option—yet. “How long had this been going on?”
“Years. But now my confusion is worse. Now I vacillate between dreading that he will appear again in the same condition, or worse, never appear at all.”
Thomas lowered himself to the bottom step, to take a place immediately beside her.
“Have you considered what you’ll do if he returns?” he asked, snapping off a dead pansy from among its cousins. Tanner should return, by God. What man could leave his only child with no provision and not worry over her fate? Had Greymoor made any search for his missing steward?
Had the magistrate? Anybody?
“If Papa comes back,” Loris said, tossing another wilted flower aside, “Claudia Pettigrew will lay information against him. Her pride will demand that much.”
The worst item on Loris Tanner’s endless list of dreads was likely that her father would be executed for the crime of rape, which was… awful.
No wonder she’d cried her heart out. “You think your father might be guilty?”
“He was never a violent drunk,” Loris replied, dabbing at her throat with Thomas’s handkerchief. The gesture was dainty, weary, and—damn it all to hell—alluring. “Papa was jovial and gregarious—nobody thought to send him home when there was so much fun to be had. But when Papa was far gone, even he didn’t know what mischief he got up to. A daughter is not the best predictor of such behaviors in her own father.”
“I suppose not.” Nor would Loris grasp the fundamental contradiction of rape accusations and severe inebriation.
Though blind drunkenness hardly constituted a defense to rape.
A thoughtful silence arose, one softened by the scents of the forest and flowers around them. Thomas should dredge up an apology for making her cry, except clearly, she’d needed to cry.
While he had needed to be with her when she did.
“What did you do instead of knocking the viscount’s teeth down his throat?” Loris asked. “When he found you grieving?”
Grieving. A genteel, if accurate, description of one of the most unbecoming moments of Thomas’s adult life.
“Fairly was the soul of kindness. He patted my back, handed me a generous tot, and fussed and pothered until I could be safely sent up to bed. He has never mentioned it since.” Though Thomas reflected on that memory frequently, for—as mortified as he’d been—it was a dear memory.
“A good friend.”
Never quite that. “A good man.”
“Will you let me pretend this embarrassing lapse of dignity has not occurred, my lord?”
Thomas ignored her dodging back into use of his title. “Now, that will be difficult. For Fairly, you see, had no need to recall the pleasure of patting my back, nor lending me his handkerchief. In your case, I am most unwilling to part with similar recollections.”
“You are teasing me.” Loris wasn’t upset, but neither did she sound pleased.So Thomas tried harder. “You are the best-smelling female of any species I’ve had the pleasure to stand downwind of. Why would I part with the memory of your embrace?”
Ah, a small smile. Sunshine in the dense woods, honeysuckle gracing the humid breeze.
“I make my scents as a hobby,” Loris said, pinching off yet another of the wilted pansies. “You have such a variety of flowers on your estate, Baron. I like to capture their fragrance for my own pleasure.”
Thomas bumped her shoulder with his. He would rather have bumped her cheek with his lips—merely as a gesture of comfort, of course—but the moment was too fragile for such a risk.
“Today you are wearing you mother’s honeysuckle scent,” he said. “The day I met you, you wore roses, and I’ve also caught a hint of lemon and spices from you. That one is particularly riveting, but I like the lily of the valley fragrance too.”
“Your wood is carpeted with lily of the valley. You could perfume London from one end to the other if you wanted to.”
“Perhaps we will.” For Thomas could hardly manage such a task without his steward, could he? “That will have to wait until spring. For now, I will inspect your premises with a view to your safety.”
* * *
The baron had stomped around Loris’s cottage muttering about hinges and braces, as if the small dwelling were a castle in need of fortification. Between admiring her embroidery and sniffing at the bouquet of orange lilies on the sideboard, he’d quizzed her too.
Had anybody tried to locate her errant papa? Not that she knew of.
Had she? No, for how would she have attempted that?
What had Micah Tanner’s drunken revelries typically involved?
Loris had answered honestly, though the memories nearly reduced her again to tears: relieving himself in the Haybrick village fountain, riding his horse into church on Easter morning, making up treasonous songs about the Regent’s dietary habits.
Sutcliffe had stopped asking questions after that. By the time the baron had marched off in the direction of the stable, Loris’s cider was sitting badly in her belly, and her vision had become unreliable.
When she ought to have been studying the hardware around her door and attending carefully to the baron’s lecture on lock picking—how had he learned about lock picking?—she’d instead been fixated on his hands, which conveyed strength and competence, but also an unnerving masculine elegance.
And those hands on her person had been… devastatingly gentle. They had asked nothing, borne no hurry or jud
gment. Loris knew a man’s hands could be beguilingly tender—Viscount Hedgedale’s hands had been seduction itself, at first—but she hadn’t realized that a man could be a source of comfort.
Loris went after the flowers potted along her porch railing, yanking wilted blooms into a pile of fading color.
“I understand selfish men,” she muttered to the flowers. “I understand men who are too proud to take orders from me. I understand men who look after their own interests first and last. I do not understand this man.”
She tossed a lovely little pansy that had not yet begun to wilt onto the pile of spent flowers and sat back when she realized what she’d done.
“Apologies,” she said, retrieving the flower and carrying it inside. “I am muddled, because I do not understand the baron, and yet I want to.”
She rinsed out the mugs in the sink and filled the one the baron had used for his cider with water, then dropped the pansy into it and put it on her bedroom windowsill.
“I want very much to understand Baron Sutcliffe, and that is surely my worst folly yet.”
* * *
Thomas left Loris beheading pansies on her shady front porch, and took himself by the stable to confer with Nick. His quarry wasn’t hard to spot, for Nick towered over Jamie as they stood in the stable yard conversing.
“Gentlemen, have we sufficient privacy we won’t be overheard?” Thomas asked.
“We do,” Nick replied, and he was right. The open air was often the safest place to discuss any delicate matter, though the sun was brutal and not a breeze stirred.
“Miss Tanner has mentioned the possibility her horse was purposely fed a full ration oats as he was recovering from a colic,” Thomas began. “What do we know about that ration of oats and the person who fed it to the horse?”
Jamie spat in the dirt, an eloquent comment on any who’d mistreat a horse.
“I toss hay morning and noon and late afternoon,” Nick said, scraping a booted toe in the dirt, “and feed oats in the early morning after the horses have had their hay. Chesterton tossed hay in the morning and fed the oats at midday. He didn’t feed hay at noon, just hay in the morning, oats at noon. In this heat, feeding that way was ludicrous.”
“Miss Tanner didn’t question him about these peculiar practices?” Thomas asked.
“She took him on proper,” Jamie said. “Any damned fool knows you throw hay first and only then do you offer grain if a beast is in work. She told Chesterton to feed her horse according to her preferences, and she’d hold him accountable for trouble with the rest.”
Hold him accountable how? Thomas had wanted to hang a bullwhip over every entrance to Loris’s cottage, but she would have thought him daft.
“And yet, despite her clear instructions, her horse is the one who suffered a colic,” Thomas finished. “Let me guess: Her altercation with Chesterton over this matter was very public and quite loud.”
“She weren’t loud,” Jamie retorted. “Miss Tanner ain’t never loud, but Chesterton was sowing the whole discussion broadcast in a high wind. Him, they might’a heard down at the Cock, the way he was takin’ on.”
Nick remained silent.
“We have someone either hell-bent on striking at Miss Tanner,” Thomas said, “or we have somebody trying to incriminate Chesterton by striking at Miss Tanner. We also need to replace the lost stock, the sooner the better. I’m told Mrs. Pettigrew might be able to oblige.”
“Or,” Nick countered, “we have a couple of incidents of pure bad luck. Horses colic, and they spring shoes in every stable.”
Was Nick being reasonable, or was he protecting somebody? His former co-workers in the stable? Himself? He looked like a particularly healthy exponent of a fine rural Saxon heritage, but his blue-eyed gaze was fixed on the barn’s cupola, and his boots, while dusty, looked to be Hoby’s work.
“In all the time Greymoor owned this place,” Thomas asked, “did you ever have several horses colic in one month, much less fatally?”
“As far as I know, this summer is the first time we’ve put any horses down,” Nick said. “Why don’t I walk you back to the manor, Baron? We can discuss replacement of the horses lost in Chesterton’s care, and Jamie can keep an eye on the stable.”
A fine idea, when Thomas was getting nowhere interrogating them together. Come to that, where was the groom named Beckman, the third and final member of the staff whom Loris regarded as trustworthy?
Thomas and his stable master crossed the yard without Nick offering another word. When they reached the fountain in the middle of the circular driveway, Nick scooped up a handful of pebbles and perched on the fountain’s rim.
The sun was hot, but the sound of the splashing water was soothing, and here, not even Jamie would overhear them.
“A gentleman,” Nick observed, tossing a pebble into the water, “doesn’t kiss and tell.” He tossed another two pebbles, the rings rippling across the water. “I am a stable lad, not a gentleman.”
“Right.” A stable lad who recognized Vermeer, spoke with public school diction, and wore a pair of boots from the finest boot makers in London.
“You, are having too much fun playing baron to be as careful as you ought,” Nick said, “so I will be blunt. You mention buying horses from Mrs. Pettigrew and breeding Penny back to her stallion. Claudia Pettigrew is a troubled woman.”
She was, by reputation, a spoiled bitch, though Thomas knew better than to judge anybody by reputation alone.
“Mrs. Pettigrew will reel you in with the typical innuendo and flirtation,” Nick went on as the fountain splashed merrily along, “and you will trip happily to her bed, thinking to romp an afternoon away. She doesn’t want you to touch her for the sake of your pleasure or hers. She wants you to touch her so she can hate you. I can’t think of another way to put it, but I have it on the best authority that the woman deals in intimate hatred.”
This was not about ill-treated horses—or was it?
Men did kiss and tell. Hell, Thomas had managed a bordello for Lord Fairly. Men would brag about their conquests, their stamina, the responses they wrung from their partners, and the ease with which their quarry succumbed to their blandishments.
“And yet, I’ve been advised to breed Penny to the widow’s stallion,” Thomas said, “and look over her available riding stock.” He’d at least pretend to do the latter, because Claudia Pettigrew had authored Loris’s latest misfortunes, and yet, that matter had never been investigated either.
The rest of the pebbles went into the fountain in a shower. “You think you know what you’re doing,” Nick said, rising and dusting his palms together, “because you’ve navigated the social cesspool that is London society, but Baron, the woman is rumored to have poisoned old Squire Pettigrew. She’s cold, and the direction of her malevolence is unpredictable. Clearing Micah Tanner’s name would go a long way toward impressing Miss Tanner, but Loris won’t understand why you’re getting to know the widow better.”
Even Fairly would have had had trouble parsing Thomas’s motivations in this case, and yet Nick Haddonfield had divined them in a moment.
“Haddonfield, you are too damned smart, too quiet, too big, too handsome, too well-spoken. If I didn’t find you altogether too likeable as well, you’d be tossed out on your ear.”
“I have my charms,” Nick said, resuming their progress toward the manor, “and one of them is a nature that will demand an accounting if you trifle with Loris Tanner’s feelings.”
Oh, delightful. Chivalry from the stable, long after it might have done Loris any good.
“Haddonfield,” Thomas said, “you do not overstep, because you seek to protect a lady’s virtue, but she has already informed me quite explicitly we are neither of us entitled to protect her. She will make her own decisions, and she has no desire to marry when her own father demonstrated, and I quote, ‘the folly grown men can get up to.’ Mind that in defending her interests, you are not also trampling her privacy and her independence.”
Nick
paused to let Thomas pass through the French doors into the library first.
“A pretty little speech, Baron, but Loris Tanner is an innocent, and the momentary pleasure of romping with you will be little consolation to her when her heart is broken and her hard-won self-respect is shattered by your casual dismissal of her after the fact.”
An indignant retort about Haddonfield minding his own business, or not jumping to dirty little conclusions, was called for, but Haddonfield was only articulating what any man of conscience would say. Loris Tanner was not only innocent, she was lovely in her innocence, and vulnerable in her isolation.
More to the point, as Thomas’s employee, on his estate, she should consider herself under his protection.
“Please take yourself off to the Cock and Bull this evening, Haddonfield, and be as dumb as you credibly can be.”
Haddonfield executed an elaborate court bow. “I shall be a veritable dunce. As my baron commands, so shall it be.”
Thomas snorted at that foolishness and wondered again who Nicholas Haddonfield was, and why he was masquerading as the Linden stable master.
Chapter Eight
“The prospect of company has become something more than a threat,” Thomas said. “We are to entertain Viscount Fairly in the near future.”
Thomas invoked the use of the baronial we while sitting beside his steward on her porch swing, having escorted her there when their shift with Penny had ended.
“I can’t tell in this dark if you are looking forward to Lord Fairly’s company, Baron, or dreading it.”
“Both,” Thomas said, putting the swing in motion.
Based on the setting moon, he placed the hour at about four of the clock. Loris had lasted for most of their two-hour watch, but then succumbed to the lure of slumber just before Beckman had come to relieve them. Tall, blond, muscular, and taciturn, he put Thomas in mind of a younger version of Nick.
But then, rural populations, like the aristocracy, tended to inbreeding.
“Shall I put the kettle on, sir?”
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