He was the one who brought you home and he has scarcely left your side since your arrival. He was the one who spent the nights tending to your fever and making sure you were kept warm.’
Letty recalled the eldest Warriner had slept on the floor beside her last night. Clearly, he had spent a few nights on that hard floor on her behalf—odd when he had appeared so suspicious and put upon, although, for reasons she could not fathom, his diligence did not surprise her. ‘Then I shall extend my gratitude to him also, Dr Joe, as soon as I see him next.’
He had not been there when she had awoken this morning, which at the time Letty had been relieved about. Jack Warriner saw too much. Whether or not he really was a good man, as both of his younger brothers had suggested, she would have to see. However, neither Jacob nor Joe Warriner had been guarded in their answers this morning when she had bombarded them with a stream of questions. Thanks to them, Letty now knew for certain she was not a prisoner in this house. Jack Warriner had found her on the road and brought her home, and by doing so, had saved her life.
Home was a four-hundred-year-old manor house surrounded by thirty acres of park and farmland. Mostly farmland. The Warriners grew wheat and raised sheep, and hardly moved in the sort of circles Bainbridge and her duplicitous uncle did. Apparently, only the second eldest, Jamie, had been to London and then only once on a fleeting visit, so they would have no idea who she was either.
They all worked on the land, with the exception of Jamie who had only recently arrived back from the war, and was still recovering from the damage Napoleon’s army had done to his body. The three younger brothers also had enormous respect for Jack. It shone out of their eyes whenever he was mentioned in a conversation and they clearly deferred to his leadership on all matters of importance.
The Warriners were fiercely loyal and hugely protective of one another, the sort of tight family bond Letty had never experienced, yet always yearned for. They loved one another. It was plainly obvious and she could not help envying them for that. It must be nice to know there was always somebody there for you, ready to support you or simply to commiserate with when times were tough. To always have someone to turn to. Letty had not had such support since the untimely death of her parents at seventeen. She had ostensibly been all alone in the world—yet nobody had really pitied her because she was the Tea Heiress after all, as if her money could somehow fix her broken heart, or banish her loneliness and make everything bright in the world again.
If something happened to one of the brothers, the others would move heaven and earth to rectify things or would support each other in their grief. She had been missing from Mayfair for days—and sincerely doubted anybody had missed her at all. Not really. Her swathes of friends might comment on her absence at a ball or afternoon tea, but Letty was not convinced any of them genuinely cared enough to investigate the true cause of her absence. She did not possess one true friend, the sort a girl could confide in or depend upon. Nobody had ever assumed she might want one and she had no idea how to go about getting one. And that was a humbling thought, as well as a depressing one. She had more money than she could ever spend in one lifetime, yet she envied the Warriners.
She got the impression life was tough for the family—although such disloyalty had not been vocalised explicitly—and she suspected the main obstacle between Joe qualifying as a doctor, and not, was decidedly financial. That might work in her favour. In her experience, those in need of money were easily bribed and her father had often commented on the benefits of ‘greasing a few palms’. In a few weeks, she could easily fill the palms of all four Warriners with gold and still not make a dent in her reserves.
And then again it might not. If they desperately needed money quickly, they could well sell her back to Bainbridge if the opportunity presented itself. At least Bainbridge could pay them instantly—Letty would have to wait weeks to get her hands on her own money. The appointment was already made with the solicitor on the day of her birthday to sign the papers which would give her her longed-for independence. It was also the day she would consign a generous portion of it to the charitable trust she intended to set up in her name and begin carving out a new life filled with noble purpose rather than pampered inertia. Once that was done, she intended to begin searching for premises right away and nobody would be able to stop her.
Her uncle had always been most dismissive of her desire to put her money to work and had refused to allow her to spend it on anything apart from gowns and fripperies she did not need and had long ago ceased to want. But on that glorious day, in one month’s time, she could do with it whatever she pleased. The Warriners might not want to wait.
The fact that she had not been attended to by the family servants niggled. It was almost as if the brothers were intent on keeping her presence here a great secret. Why would they do that unless it was for sinister purposes? Was it for her protection or was it for theirs? The most pressing problem was that Letty really did not know if this family was to be trusted.
Until she did, it was probably sensible to have an escape route. As soon as Joe left her on a quest to fetch her some tea, Letty eased her legs over the side of the bed. After carefully testing her weight on her bad ankle, she hobbled across the room to the faceted, leadlight window and peered out.
Markham Manor was indeed in deepest, darkest, dankest Nottinghamshire. One side of the estate was fringed with dense woodland. The outer edge of the estate ran directly alongside the River Idle, so unless they came by boat or battled their way through the trees, the only way Bainbridge could enter the grounds was to the east, and via the narrow, rutted dirt lane her rescuer had found her on. A lane whose only destination was here.
In the distance, Letty could just about make out the high wall which she now knew enclosed the Warriners’ land. She also knew the huge gates were now locked because Jacob had moaned about the effort it had taken to do so and the splinters he had received in the process. A little further along, and purposely hidden behind tangled vines, was a smaller gate, a secret escape route which sounded positively medieval and very romantic. The Warriners of old must have needed such a device, as well as a great deal of fortified protection, if they had built such defences, yet those same defences now gave Letty a great deal of peace of mind. She had been here three days and nobody had come a calling. The more time passed, she hoped, the less likely it was they would do so.
Directly below her window was a cobbled courtyard which housed a large iron pump handle and a small mountain of buckets balanced haphazardly on top of each other. Other than that, the courtyard was bare. Her bedchamber must face over the kitchens then, in the rear of the house and well away from prying eyes in the lane. The drop from her window to the courtyard was significant enough to cause injury, she estimated, yet not quite high enough to result in death. There was trellis alongside her window, covered in the gnarled old branches of a wisteria left quite barren by the winter. If she had to, she could lower herself from it carefully and make a dash for the woods.
Satisfied the outside was safe, Letty turned and began to hobble towards her bedchamber door to investigate the layout of the house when the door opened and Jack Warriner strode in.
Then stopped dead.
She was wearing his shirt. That should not have come as a surprise because his brother had dressed her in his shirt when they had transferred her unconscious body to Jack’s bedchamber because the only other one in any habitable state had mould creeping over the damp, cracked walls. Except the sight of her standing there in it was simply staggering. She had legs. Lovely, shapely female legs which were bare to mid-thigh where the tail of the shirt hung. And the most wonderful golden hair Jack had ever seen. A tumble of corkscrew ringlets fell past her shoulders, the short curls around her face framing it like a halo. His words dried in his throat and his eyebrows shot up as he stared at the beautiful creature right in front of him.
Emerald-green eyes stared back at him in surprise before she crouched and her arms covered her thighs. ‘Would you mind turning around, please!’
