have an answer, Miss Smith. Do not underestimate me.’
‘There is no danger of my doing that, my lord,’ she responded, keeping her voice calm with an effort. ‘I can see that you are used to getting your own way in all things and that bullying and threatening one defenceless female, however politely, is not something you will baulk at.’
‘Bullying?’ His eyebrows went up. ‘No, this is not bullying, Miss Smith, nor threatening. I am merely setting out the inevitable consequences of your actions—or rather, your inaction.’
‘Threats,’ she muttered, mutinous and increasingly afraid.
‘It would be threatening,’ he said, getting to his feet and walking towards her as she backed away, ‘if I were to force you back against the bookshelves, like this.’ The back of Nell’s heels hit wood and she stopped, hands spread. There was nothing behind her but unyielding leather spines.
Lord Stanegate put one hand on either side of her head and glanced at the shelves. ‘Ah, the Romantic poets, how very inappropriate. Yes, if I were to trap you like this and to move very close—’ he shifted until they were toe to toe, and she felt the heat of his thighs as they brushed her skirts’—and then promise to put my hands around your rather pretty neck and shake the truth out of you—now that would be threatening. ’
Nell closed her eyes, trying to block out the closeness of him. Behind her were comforting scents from her early childhood: leather and old paper and beeswax wood polish. In front of her, sharp citrus and clean linen and leather and man. She tried to melt back into the old, familiar library smell, but there was no escape that way.
‘Look at me.’
She dragged her eyes open. He had shaved very close that morning, but she could tell his beard would be as dark as his hair. There was a tiny scar nicking the left corner of his lips and they were parted just enough for her to see the edge of white, strong teeth. As she watched he caught his lower lip between them for a moment, as though in thought. Nell found herself staring at the fullness where his teeth had pressed; her breath hitched in her chest.
‘Well?’
‘No.’ The thought of his hands on her, sliding under her chin, his fingers slipping into her hair…And the memory of Mr Harris came back to her and she shuddered, unable to stop herself, and he stepped back abruptly as though she had slapped him.
‘Damn it—’
‘My lord.’ The butler was in the doorway. ‘Dr Rowlands is here and Lady Narborough is asking for you. She seems a little anxious, my lord.’
Nell saw, from both their faces, that a little anxious was a major understatement. Without a word, Lord Stanegate turned on his heel and strode out after the man. The door banged shut behind him.
Her fingers were locked tight around the edge of the shelf. She opened her hands warily, as though they were all that were keeping her on her feet, then realized that the slam of the door had not been followed by any other sound. They had not locked it again.
Where was her reticule? She ran to the sofa and found the shabby bag, her skirts swinging wildly against the upholstery as she hastened to the door. It opened under her hand, well-oiled hinges yielding without a sound. Then she was into the hall, under the shelter of the arc of the sweeping stairs.
But the butler was by the front door, giving orders to a footman; so there was no escape that way. Nell shrank back into the shadows.
‘Wellow!’ a clear feminine voice called from a room to the right of the front door. The footman walked briskly past Nell’s hiding place and through the green baize door as the butler went to answer the call.
‘Yes, Lady Honoria?’
As he went inside the room, Nell tiptoed forward, steadying herself with one hand on a side table bearing a silver salver. The second post had obviously arrived. Ears straining, Nell glanced down.
Lady Honoria Carlow read the direction on the topmost letter.
She stood transfixed. Carlow? That was the name that her gentle widowed mother had spoken with such hate when her control cracked and she fell into sobbing despair. The name at the heart of the darkness in the past, the things that had happened when she was only a tiny child, the things that were never spoken of clearly, must never be asked about.
Lord Narborough’s family name was Carlow? Why she must fear that family she had no idea, but they undoubtedly would know and if they found out who she was they would never believe she had acted in innocence.
Nell tiptoed across the marble, her worn shoes making virtually no sound. The door was on the latch, she opened it and was out into the busy late-morning street. A few brisk steps and she was behind the shelter of a waiting hackney carriage. She kept pace as it set off at a walk, held up by traffic, then slipped into Stafford Street. There, I am safe, she told herself, fighting the urge to run. He will never find me now.
Chapter Two
The rope was safely locked in the bottom drawer of the desk. It might as well have been in plain view on the top and hissing at him like the snake it so resembled for all the good that hiding it away did. Marcus thrust the papers that littered the desk in the library back into their folder and contemplated going into the study. But he felt uncomfortable using it when his father was in town. The older man did virtually nothing on family business these days, but even so, to commandeer his desk felt uncomfortably like stepping into his shoes.
He tried to concentrate on writing to his younger brother instead. He would say nothing of the circumstances, merely that their father had suffered an attack, but was now resting and the doctor was sanguine about a recovery, given time and care.
There was no point in agitating Lieutenant the Honourable Hal Carlow. The last they had heard, Hal was confined to his bed in Wellington’s Portuguese headquarters with a nasty infection caused by a slight sabre wound in his side. His regiment, the Eleventh Light Dragoons, had been sent back to England from the Peninsula the previous year, battered and depleted. Hal, predictably, had pulled strings to find himself some sort of attachment to another regiment out there and had promptly disappeared behind enemy lines on a mission.
Marcus could only be selfishly grateful to whoever had inflicted the wound that was keeping Hal out of trouble, although once convalescent, a bored and off-duty Lieutenant Carlow on the loose was a worrying prospect. As an officer, Marcus was frequently assured, his brother was a paragon, destined for great things and possessing the courage of a lion. Under any other circumstances he was a hell-born babe, determined, Marcus was convinced, to drive his brother to drink or the madhouse.
The sounds of a door slamming and raised voices reminded him that his other siblings were more than capable of achieving that without help from Hal. The redoubtable Miss Price was presumably thwarting one of Honoria’s wilder schemes while attempting to preserve Verity, wide-eyed in adoration of her sister, from the sharp edge of Honoria’s teasing tongue.
He tried to imagine the man strong-willed enough to take Honoria off his hands, and failed. The Season loomed ahead, full of opportunities for one sister to get into outrageous scrapes through unquenchable high spirits and the other, through sheer naïvety, to fall victim to every rake on the prowl.
The fog had descended again, blotting out the promise of the fine morning. Now, in mid-afternoon, it was thick outside the long windows, filling the room with damp gloom
