Lady Lilias and the Devil in Plaid (Scottish Scoundrels: Ensnared Hearts Book 2)

by Julie Johnstone

  “I ride the way I live,” he said, his voice so solemn her breath caught and worry blossomed.

  “You should be more careful,” she said. If anything were to happen to him, she would be devastated. “But I will say, you are the best horseman I have ever seen.”

  “I believe I’m now better,” Owen said. His tone was boastful, and his expression irritated, like a petulant child.

  Lilias bit back the wish to retort, realizing Owen must be feeling as if he were in Nash’s shadow. She was certain no boy would wish to feel that way. Owen scowled at her. She placed a placating hand on his arm. “You are a fine horseman. I—”

  “Race me, Nash,” Owen demanded, shrugging off her hand. “Let me prove I’m better. Unless you are afraid to?” It almost sounded like a taunting challenge. She clenched her teeth at the foolish pride of men.

  “Owen, no,” Lilias said, certain he’d be embarrassed in a race against Nash.

  “Yes,” he clipped.

  “Nash—” she tried.

  “If he wishes to race, I cannot, as a gentleman, decline.”

  “Then don’t be a gentleman,” she fumed. But it was hopeless. Before she knew it, they took off, leaving her behind as they raced back toward the fallen tree Nash had just jumped.

  Lilias held her breath, watching, admiring Nash’s form and hoping Owen did not make too poor of a showing. To her shock, Owen pulled ahead of Nash and started to lengthen the distance between them. But then Nash seemed to gain ground as they moved like lightning toward the fallen tree. Her heart began to pound as they drew closer and closer to the tree, but to her relief, Nash pulled his horse to the right, away from the tree. She assumed Owen would do the same. But just as she was exhaling, her mouth slipped open as Owen jumped the tree and his horse came tumbling down on the other side, pinning Owen underneath.

  Chapter One

  London, England

  1837

  Guilt was a funny thing. Though the initial onslaught of it could set the course of one’s life, when one lived with it for so long, it eventually went unnoticed, like a shadow. That was, until something made one take note, like the sun overhead and a glance down to see the outline of oneself in startling perfection or like a man who used to walk perfectly straight suddenly leaning on a cane and walking unevenly toward the offender who caused the injury.

  Nash Steele, the Duke of Greybourne, raised his brandy and took a long drink. It slid down his throat, easing some of the knots as he waited for the Earl of Blackwood to make his way across the Persian rugs in White’s gaming room. The sound of Owen’s irregular footsteps scraped across Nash’s eardrums in the mostly deserted room. It was well before the hour that most of their peers frequented the club, but when Nash had contacted Owen to let him know he had returned to Town, Owen had written back quickly, asking Nash to meet him here.

  The belongings that had been with Nash at Oxford and then Scotland these past seven years hadn’t even made it up to his bedchamber before he had hurried out the door to meet Owen. Luckily, Nash’s mother and sister were not at home when he’d arrived from Scotland so he’d been spared explaining why he was rushing out so soon. To explain the call of guilt, he would have had to tell them of the day Owen had been hurt, and that, Nash would not do.

  Owen made his way past the large fireplace and to the table in the back corner where Nash was sitting. As he approached, Nash noted the grim set of his friend’s mouth, and fear twisted inside him. He sat forward, his pulse spiking. “What is it? Is it Lilias? Is that why you wrote that you needed to see me today?”

  Owen motioned to the server standing nearby to indicate he’d have the same drink Nash was having, and then he pulled out his chair, balanced his cane against the table, and said, “Yes.”

  Nash chest squeezed. “Is she hurt?”

  “No,” Owen said easily, his gaze flicking momentarily to Nash before he looked down at his hands, which were now resting intertwined on the table. “I wanted to see you in person to ask you not to contact her now that you have returned to Town.”

  “I wouldn’t,” Nash replied, his words harsher than he had intended, but everything about Lilias had always made him passionate. “You know I wouldn’t. So why this meeting? Why this request? Have I not refrained from contacting her for seven years, as you asked of me the day after your accident?”

  He could recount going to see Owen the next day with perfect clarity. Owen had been in his sickbed with a crushed leg and had looked at Nash with such pain in his eyes.

  You’ll win her if you stay, he’d said. You cannot help yourself. You saved her in the water that day, and she thinks of you as a character in one of those nonsense Gothic novels she reads. She thinks you honorable.

  The way Owen had said it, as if they both knew it were not true, had been seared in Nash’s memory, and Nash had feared Owen was right. Lilias had bestowed upon him some ridiculous qualities of a character in a book, a man he was not. So he had left without so much as a goodbye to her. It had felt as if he’d reached into his chest and ripped out his heart. He’d stayed away after that—mostly. He’d seen Owen through the years, and they had written letters. Nash knew Lilias and Owen had spent all their time together in the Cotswolds, and Owen had sometimes written about the things he and Lilias had done together.

  She had stayed with Owen every day after his accident. Owen had told him about how she had always been there when he awoke, how she had held his hand while reading to him. She had helped Owen push himself to walk and, eventually, had taught him to dance, even with his limp. That had filled Nash with a jealousy that had kept him up many nights, imagining holding her in his arms and twirling her around, making her laugh.

  As Owen’s glass scraped across the table and he picked it up, Nash focused on the man. “Have I not kept my promise not to come between you and her?” His head throbbed with his frustration.

  Owen’s mouth tightened. “You have. It will just be harder not to see her here in Town at balls and such than it was in the Cotswolds, where there was no reason for the two of you to interact.”

  Nash’s fingers curled into a fist under the table. There was no reason for him and Lilias to interact because he had ensured she would not want to speak to him. He’d only responded to one of her letters after he’d departed and that had been to tell her to quit writing him.

  He had purposely avoided her for seven years, only going back to the Cotswolds once a year and being very careful whenever he ventured out. He’d seen her twice by chance in those years, and both times had made him feel as if someone had plunged a knife into his gut. Once, when she’d ridden past their property on her horse, and then again last year, after Christmas, when he’d seen her walking with Owen past their home. It had taken all his will not to thunder down his stairs, throw open his door, swallow the distance between them, and rip Owen away from her. They’d been walking so close that their arms had been brushing. It had left Nash shaking.

  “How long do you wish me to avoid her?” he finally asked.

  Owen tugged on his neckcloth. “Well, I had hoped to be wed by now, but I feel sure it’s coming soon.”

  Owen might as well have punched a fist through Nash’s chest. “Oh. So you’ve asked for her hand?” He sounded supremely uninterested, which was good.

  “Not yet.” Owen’s mouth pinched. “I, well, she has been so independent, and I wanted to give her time to realize that she needed to settle into her lot as a woman.”

  Nash felt a tic start at that statement, but he bit back any comment. Lilias’s “lot” was not his concern. “And you feel she has settled?” He felt as if he had choked out the question.

  “I think she is very close to giving up her girlhood notions that women can flaunt all rules of Society, and I worry that your reappearance could remind her of a time she was recklessly independent,” Owen said.

  Nash gritted his teeth at that news, though he himself had worried what trouble her independent nature might bring her.

  “I thin
k she sees how loyal I am to her, how I have been there for her,” Owen continued. “I know how she feels about me, of course.”

  That sentence took Nash back to four years ago when Owen had written that Lilias had told Owen she loved him. The news had sent Nash into the first of many women’s beds. Initially, he’d done so in hopes of forgetting Lilias entirely, and when that hadn’t worked, to just forget her for a while. The brief moments never lasted, though. She always returned to his mind and his heart, tempting him to simply drift back to her. But it wasn’t real. She would not think him so wonderful if she knew the truth of what he’d done to Thomas and to Owen.

  “Yes,” he agreed, because what else was there to do? “It’s good that you know that. I’m certain it’s been hard to wait for her.” Though Nash would have waited a thousand lifetimes if there had been any way for him and Lilias to be together.

  “It’s not hard because I have always known she would eventually be mine.”

  The image of Nash’s hands around his friend’s neck startled Nash. Christ. He shoved his chair back, not wanting to be here. Owen glanced at him in surprise. “I’m sorry,” Nash said. “I just recalled that my mother has invited guests for dinner.”

  “That’s fine,” Owen said with a wave of his hand. “If you do happen to run into Lilias, it might be best to treat her with cool regard. No sense in stirring up a past that does not matter.”

  Was Owen referring to finding Lilias and Nash in each other’s arms? No, Nash would not want to stir up those memories any more than they already stirred themselves up within him. The damn things refused to stay buried.

  The rogue had returned.

  Lilias Honeyfield stood outside Nash’s home in Mayfair, her fist raised to grasp the knocker on his gleaming dark door. The clop of hooves on the busy lane hummed in her ears as memories assaulted her. Seven years’ worth of memories, to be exact. Seven years of longing, of hoping, of hating and loving. She was exhausted, and she wanted to put an end to it all. As horribly embarrassing as this would likely be, she had to do it. Yet, her gloved hand did not move. It stayed hovering just out of reach of the shiny brass door knocker.

  She couldn’t make herself do it. She was a founding member of the Society of Ladies Against Rogues, for heaven’s sake. She was a pioneer of stealthily doing things forbidden to women. For more years than she cared to recall, she had managed to avoid being forced to wed someone she didn’t care for. She was a strong woman, and yet, she was frozen with fear of what was to come, of what might have been, of discovering it had all been the fanciful imagination of a girl who had read—and still did—far too many Gothic novels.

  She had been in love, and she had been almost positively certain that Nash had felt the same, but she hadn’t gotten the chance to find out. He and Owen had raced, Owen had fallen, his leg had been crushed, and he had been left with a permanent limp. And before the dust had settled, Nash had fled without a word.

  She could still recall in numbing detail going to his house to see him, to cry with him over the horrible accident that had occurred, to take his hand and lead him to Owen’s home so they could sit with him until he was strong enough to get out of bed. She had pictured them helping Owen learn to walk again, and maybe someday to run and ride, but that was not to be.

  Nash’s mother, a woman as cold as the River Eye in winter, had answered the door and told Lilias that Nash had left that morning for Oxford, which had apparently been scheduled all along, and that she did not know when in the foreseeable future he would return.

  Lilias had been dumbstruck that he had left Owen in such a state, but then she considered Nash’s past with his brother, and she knew in her heart that guilt had driven Nash away. Still, she had thought he’d return. Not the next day, but certainly before seven years had passed. She’d been sad, then angry, then numb, but through it all, hope had remained. She was happy to say the hope was fairly dead now, but this—confronting him face-to-face, seeing him, looking him in the eye—was what she needed to put her love for him in the grave where it belonged.

  Owen thought her mad. She knew it. For years he’d been telling her to move on with her life and forget Nash. Even Nash had written her and told her to do the same. The last letter she had written him and the one he had written in response, the only one he’d ever written despite the numerous letters she’d sent to him at school, was seared in her mind and on her heart.

  Dear Nash,

  This will be the last time I write you. I know I said that in my previous letter, but this time I mean it. Owen’s accident was not your fault. Your brother’s death was not your fault. You are my best friend, and you are… Well, I thought perhaps we might… I miss you. I miss you horribly. Please write. Please come visit. Please don’t just disappear from my life. You are good. I know you said you weren’t, but I know in my heart that you are. I know you are hurting. I know you need me. You said I make you feel—What?

  Please write me back this time.

  Lilias

  Lilias,

  Please don’t write to me anymore. I’ve met someone else. And I’m not hurting. I’d have to feel to hurt, and I don’t feel anything.

  Nash

  Lilias inhaled a deep, steadying breath. It had been that last line—I’d have to feel to hurt, and I don’t feel anything—that made it so hard for her to give up hope. She’d believed that what had begun between them was something special, a love story for the ages like those she read about in her books, and not just the fanciful imagination of a lonely girl on the cusp of becoming a woman. She had not confessed that to anyone but Owen. She had not even admitted her real feelings to her closest friend, Guinevere.

  Owen was her closest male friend. Well, her only one really, and he had known Nash’s goodness just as she had. Bless Owen. He had dried her tears and been there for her as she tried to mend her broken heart, but it would not quite heal. She’d assured him at one point that it had, and he’d simply patted her shoulder and told her that in time it would, that eventually, Nash would return to England, she would run into him, and she would find that her heart did not flip in her chest. Her breath would not whoosh out of her lungs. Her lips would not tingle in anticipation of another kiss as perfect as the first one he had given her.

  And this was it—the moment seven long years had led her toward. She finally grasped the knocker and struck it, feeling as if she were holding the weight of her entire future.

  Within a breath, the door opened and a butler adorned in silver and navy livery stood at the threshold. “May I help you?”

  The question was polite, as was the look he bestowed upon her down his long, hawklike nose. He was a well-trained butler indeed. He didn’t even blink his dark brown eyes or show a hint of surprise that she was alone, standing at the doorstep without a companion.

  “I’m here to see Lady Adaline.” Guilt tugged at her that she wasn’t really here to call upon Nash’s younger sister. She did like the girl, who had been presented to Society this Season. Lilias had made a special point to meet Lady Adaline, compelled to do so for mostly selfish reasons at first. She had hoped that in getting to know Adaline, she might learn information about Nash. It embarrassed her to think upon now.

  She’d scarcely heard a word about him since he’d left seven years ago. She knew he’d gone to live in Scotland at one of his family’s estates after Oxford—Owen had told her so—but Owen didn’t seem to know much more since he and Nash rarely corresponded. She had overheard his sister say that Nash had not had any serious intentions toward any women and that she’d likely get married before her rogue of a brother did. Lilias had promised herself that she would not think it was because he was longing for her, but the promise was ridiculously futile.

  She also knew, as everyone in the ton did, that Nash’s father, the Duke of Greybourne, had recently died. She reminded herself to call him Greybourne and not Nash. No, she’d need to call him Your Grace. He’d likely not be anticipating such conformity from her, but times had changed a
bit. She had to think of her sister and mother and not just herself.

  The butler cleared his throat, snapping her attention back to him, and she noted him staring at her hand expectantly.

  She knew what he wanted: a calling card. But she did not have one. Even if she had not been in a state of shock upon hearing the announcement from Guinevere’s younger sister Frederica that she’d seen Nash in Town that morning, even if she hadn’t rushed straight here from the SLAR meeting at the home of Guinevere and her new husband, the Duke of Carrington, Lilias would not be in possession of a calling card. She and her mother had run out, and Mama had said they must wait to ask her Uncle Simon for funds for more. It was scandalous to her mother to be without a calling card. It was ridiculous to Lilias, but it was a fact of life in the ton that she should have a calling card to produce, and not having one would mean there would be those bored, vapid sorts who would treat her like a leper.

  She arched her eyebrows. “I’m without a calling card, but I am Lady Lilias Honeyfield.”

  She’d had doors shut in her face before for such boldness, but the butler stepped to the side. “Come in, my lady, and I’ll let Lady Adaline know you’re here.”

  Lilias entered, her heart nearly pounding out of her day gown as she moved across the threshold and into the grandeur of Nash’s Mayfair home. The entrance hall looked as she’d imagined it might through the years. The floors were a gleaming black-and-white marble, which the butler’s shoes tapped against as he walked, and marble pillars stood on either side of the interior hall like soldiers guarding the family within. The floors in Lilias’s own, much smaller townhome were dull and chipped. The whole home needed repair, but there was no money to do it, and her uncle had not offered.

  They paused, and the butler took her wrap, and as he left her to set the wrap aside, she gazed into the dining room, which was just barely visible. A beautiful marble fireplace was the centerpiece, and it was accompanied by crystal sconces and a breathtaking, shimmering chandelier. She imagined Nash sitting there across from his sister and mother. Were they close? She did not even truly know. He had not talked of his parents much except when he’d told her how they’d expected him to watch over his sickly brother and let him win at things. She was sure they’d only wanted to protect his younger brother, though they had done so at Nash’s expense.