Stephanie Laurens - A Lady of His Own

“Good. Good. I must get back to the accounts. If you’ll excuse me?”

With a brief bow, Nicholas escaped.

Penny watched him depart; the instant he cleared the doorway she swung to face Charles—

“Not yet.” He turned her to the hall. “Get your cloak, and let’s get out of here.”

In the past, she’d been quite successful at bottling up the feelings he provoked; now…it was as if letting loose one set of feelings had weakened her ability to hold back any others. By the time she’d gone upstairs, fetched her cloak, descended to where he waited in the hall, nose in the air allowed him to swing the cloak over her shoulders, then take her arm and escort her outside, she was steaming.

“ What in all Hades did you tell him? ”

The question came out as a muted shriek.

Charles looked at her, his expression mild, unperturbed; he knew perfectly well why she was exercised but clearly believed himself on firm ground. “Just enough to smooth our way.”

“ What? ”

He looked ahead. “I told him we had an understanding of sorts. Recently developed and still developing, but with its roots buried in the dim distant past.”

She stopped dead. Stared, aghast and flabbergasted, at him. “You didn’t tell him?”

“Tell him what?”

His clipped accents, the look in his eyes, warned her not to pursue that tack; he’d never breathed a word of their past to anyone, any more than she had.

She found her voice. “We have Lady Trescowthick’s party tonight. He’s invited. What happens when he mentions our ‘understanding’?”

He shook his head, caught her hand and drew her on. “I told him it’s a secret. So secret even our families have yet to hear of it.”

“And he believed you?”

He glanced briefly at her. “What’s so strange about that?” Looking ahead, he went on, “I’ve recently returned from the wars to assume an inheritance and responsibilities I never thought would be mine. I accept I need to marry, but have little time for the marriage mart nor liking for chits with hay for wits, and here you are—a lady of my own class I’ve known for forever, and you’re still unmarried. Perfect.”

She didn’t like it, not one bit. Taking three quick strides, she got ahead of him and swung to face him, forcing him to halt.

So she could look him in the eye. Study those midnight blue eyes she couldn’t always read…they were unreadable now, but watching her. “Charles…”

She couldn’t think how to phrase it—how to warn him not to imagine…

He arched a brow. They were almost breast to chest. Without warning, he bent his head and brushed his lips, infinitely lightly, across hers.

“Fowey,” he breathed. “Remember?”

She closed her eyes, mentally cursed as familiar heat streaked down her spine, then jerked her eyes open as, her hand locked in his, he towed her around and on.

“Come on.”

She let out an exasperated hiss. If he was going to be difficult, he would be, and there was nothing she could do to change that.

Granville’s curricle was waiting when they reached the stable yard, a pair of young blacks between the shafts. Charles lifted her up to the seat, then followed. She grabbed the rail as the curricle tipped with his weight, then he sat; she fussed with her skirts, helpless to prevent their thighs, hips, and shoulders from touching almost constantly.

It was not destined to be a comfortable drive.

Charles flicked the whip and expertly steered the pair down the drive. She paid no attention to the familiar scenery; instead, she revisited the scene in the library before luncheon, and luncheon, too, incorporating Nicholas’s belief in their “understanding”…Nicholas’s reactions still didn’t quite fit.

She drew in a tight breath. “You told him we were lovers.”

Eventually, Charles replied, “I didn’t actually say so.”

“But you led him to think it. Why?”

She glanced at him, but he kept his gaze on the horses.

“Because it was the most efficient way of convincing him that if he so much as reaches out a hand toward you, I’ll chop it off.”

Any other man and it would have sounded melodramatic. But she knew him, knew his voice—recognized the statement as cold hard fact. She’d seen the currents lurking beneath his surface, the menace, knew it was real; he was perfectly capable of being that violent.

Never to her, or indeed any woman. On her behalf, however…

She let out a long breath. “It’s one thing to protect me, but just remember—you don’t own me.”

“If I owned you, you would at this moment be locked in my apartments at the Abbey.”

“Well, you don’t, I’m not—you’ll just have to get used to it.”

Or do something to change the status quo. Charles kept his tongue still and steered the curricle down the road to Fowey.

They left the curricle at the Pelican and strolled down to the quay.

Penny scanned the harbor. “The fleet is out.”

“Not for long.” He nodded to the horizon. A flotilla of sails were drawing nearer. “They’re on their way in. We’ll have to hurry.”

He took her arm, and they turned up into the meaner lanes, eventually reaching Mother Gibbs’s door. He knocked. A minute later, the door cracked open, and Mother Gibbs peered out.

She was flabbergasted to see him, a point he saw Penny note.

“M’lord—Lady Penelope.” Mother Gibbs bobbed. “How can I help ye?”

Somewhat grimly he said, “I think we’d better talk inside.”

He didn’t want to cross the threshold himself, much less take Penny with him, but she’d already been there, alone; they didn’t have time to accommodate his sensibilities. Mother Gibbs would speak much more freely in her own house.

“ Dead , you say?” Mother Gibbs plopped down on the rough stool by her kitchen table. “Mercy be!”

It was transparently the first she’d heard of Gimby’s death.

“Tell your sons,” he said. “There’s someone around who’s willing to kill if he believes anyone knows anything.”

“Here—it’s not that new lordling up at the Hall, is it?” Mother Gibbs looked from him to Penny. “The one you was asking after.” She looked back at Charles. “Dennis did mention this new bloke had been asking questions and they’d strung him along like…” She paled. “Mercy me—I’ll tell ’em to stop that. He might think they really do know something.”

“Yes, tell them to stop hinting they know anything, but we don’t know that it was Lord Arbry. Tell Dennis from me that it’s not safe to think it was him, in case it’s someone else altogether.”

He would have to speak to Dennis again, but not tonight. He refocused on Mother Gibbs. “Now, tell me everything you know about Gimby.”

She blinked at him. “I didn’t even know he was dead.”

“I don’t mean about his death, but when he was alive. What do you know of him?”

It was little enough, but tallied with what the old sailor had told them.

Penny asked after Nicholas; Mother Gibbs had little to add to her earlier report. “Been down Bodinnick way, he has, talking to the men there again, saying the same thing—that he’s in Granville’s place now and anyone asking for Granville should be sent to him.”

“All right.” He took a sovereign from his pocket and placed it on the table. “I want you to keep your ears open for anything anyone lets fall about Gimby or his father, and especially about anyone seen near his cottage recently, or anyone asking for him recently.”

Mother Gibbs nodded and reached for the sovereign. “I’ll tell me boys to do the same. Those Smollets might not have been sociable-like, but there was no ’arm in them that I ever saw. That Gimby didn’t deserve to have his throat cut, that’s fer certain.”