seeking absolute perfection inside and out before you dare to jump, which I am coming to suspect you are, then you are doomed. It doesn’t exist. Nor should you use your aunt and uncle’s marriage as the benchmark to justify your exacting standards—or your fortune as a barricade to hide behind. Your uncle would never have given it to you if he’d had any inkling you would use it to shut yourself off. He despairs of your stand-offishness as much as I do.
‘Every human has flaws, but unless you allow yourself to properly get to know a gentleman, warts and all...and he, you...and cease being instantly suspicious or stand-offish, you will never come to know if they are minor flaws you can live with or major ones which will make you want to grind their face under your heel when they dare to say good morning. If you want to fall in love and be loved in return, then you have to give it a fighting chance to blossom. Nothing blooms in the desert. You have to take that gloriously abandoned leap of faith. Your greatest flaw is that you dismiss people out of hand instantly.’
‘I do not.’ Surely she wasn’t that pernickety? ‘I judge every man on his merit and give them all adequate time to show it. A little cautious suspicion gives them the opportunity to prove their mettle.’
‘Adequate time to prove their mettle? Really? Then I assume you are prepared to give our new neighbour a proper chance? Youngish. Handsome. Solicitous and local. His appearance is very fortuitous, seeing as you have given up all hope of any of the other bachelors in the county meeting your high expectations. Perhaps he is the one? He seems...’ Harriet grinned ‘...quite lovely.’
It was Thea’s turn to roll her eyes. ‘And typically, you judge a book solely by its cover.’
‘Not at all! While I’ll grant you he has a splendid cover, he was most pleasant after we caught him so magnificently naked—and his dog clearly adores him. We humans could learn a lot from dogs. Animals are rarely wrong.’
‘He’s a shameless flirt.’
‘I didn’t see him flirt.’
‘Well, I can assure you, he was certainly shamelessly flirting with Aunt Caro a few moments ago.’ Something which bothered her, despite her infinitely better judgement and professed lack of interest.
‘He’s here?’
‘Indeed he is. With his frowning cousin in tow.’
Harriet was up like a shot. ‘How positively splendid! Let’s hunt him down and monopolise him. I’ll dutifully extol your virtues like a good friend and you can probe with pertinent questions which matter to you. Start to get to know him... Why, we don’t even know if he is married or betrothed! And a young man who voluntarily lives with an older relative would naturally be more sympathetic to your dutiful attachment to your uncle. How serendipitous is that? The fates appear to be miraculously aligned for once.’
This needed to be nipped in the bud. Especially as Harriet was beginning to sound reasonable. ‘No, thank you. He doesn’t interest me in the slightest. Nor I him. He made no effort to impress me, yet every effort to charm my aunt.’ A lie; he had tried then lapsed into silence after she had been stand-offish because Impetuous Thea had been interested. ‘I’m afraid I have his measure already—and he comes up woefully short. If I’m being brutally frank, I’m not even sure I like him.’ Although she had, before she reminded herself of all the reasons why she couldn’t entertain it. She still had a penchant for parts of him.
‘Are you sure?’
‘Until you mentioned him, I had forgotten he existed.’ She held Harriet’s gaze, determinedly ignoring the image of Lord Gray’s pert, bare buttocks and broad, bare back which had apparently seared itself on to her mind.
‘Hmm...’ Harriet looked sceptical, then shrugged. ‘Only I cannot recall a time when I have ever heard you sound so waspish over a mere man after such a short acquaintance.’
‘That’s because it’s his fault my hair looks like this!’ Thea petulantly pointed at her head, but she was already talking to her friend’s retreating back. ‘It might have been a short acquaintance, but it was certainly eventful. Cavorting in the brook in his birthday suit was disgraceful!’ And thrilling. It had been quite the highlight of her dull year. Drat it all to hell.
‘All I ask is that you give the fellow a fighting chance, Thea! This might be exactly what the doctor ordered!’ Harriet stopped, spun and inhaled deeply. ‘I can positively smell the romance in the air.’ Then she was off again, striding with such purpose there was no point attempting to reason with her. There was nothing Harriet loved more than meddling. Especially in what she considered was for a person’s own good. As a mark of protest, sensible Restrained Thea remained exactly where she was and would remain so for the foreseeable future despite the baking sun.
Gray spent the better part of an hour with the Viscountess, being a very good spy, and learned nothing new whatsoever. She was amiable, if a little self-absorbed, her conversation mostly a ploy to receive a compliment. It was obvious she lived a small and inconsequential life. There was a brittleness about her, a need to be adored, which was quite sad for a woman her age and said a great deal about the state of her marriage. Gislingham himself had yet to make an appearance and his wife didn’t seem to know or care if he was likely to. Clearly, they lived completely separate lives, which meant she was unlikely to know anything significant about her husband’s nefarious business dealings. With Lord Fennimore the unwilling captive of the droning Colonel Purbeck and the deliciously smelling Miss Cranford mysteriously missing from the gathering, he found himself eager to move on as he extricated himself from the sofa.
If nothing else, he could have a little snoop around. This rose-covered mansion in the heart of the countryside, a good forty miles from the coast, didn’t appear to be the likely lair of England’s most wanted smuggler. Nor did the aged servants seem to be his criminal accomplices—but appearances could be deceptive. Look at Lord Fennimore. To all intents and purposes the world thought him a crusty old peer. One who turned up diligently at Parliament to vote and was a reliably reluctant guest at society events—yet for over twenty years had managed to hide the fact he ran the King’s Elite. Not that anyone in society circles or outside of it would know about that organisation either. Therefore, where better to hide than here? Who would suspect a respected country squire of high treason? In another life, he certainly wouldn’t.
Of course, in that other life he had no ambition either, other than to embrace whatever whims or pathways he took a fancy to and that had crept up on him unannounced. One minute he had been at a loose end on the cusp of leaving the merchant navy, the next he had accidentally fallen into working for the King’s Elite. Up until then, he had had no concept of possessing either the valuable skills necessary for covert espionage or the burning desire to see justice done. Yet because of things he had seen and his nagging conscience, he had approached the Excise Men with suspicions about the particular shipping company he happened to be working for at the time and inadvertently soon found himself spying on them.
After the resounding success of that first mission, Lord Fennimore simply assumed he would continue and Gray hadn’t corrected his assumption. For the last two years he had been working beneath Seb Leatham in the Invisibles, blending into the background, pretending to be someone else. Learning the trade and loving it. With Seb now working in a wholly different way alongside his new wife, Gray wanted more than anything to step into his friend’s shoes, knowing they would be the perfect fit. After an aimless life of searching for nothing in particular beyond what was happening in the moment, he had
