But just when Christine was ready to remove the ring, a sharp knock at the door startled her. A collective gasp sounded. Even Christine froze.
“Aren’t you going to answer the door?” Dolly whispered when Christine made no effort to move.
She pushed away from the desk. “Pull out your tablets,” she said. “This performance is at an end.”
Not normally superstitious, she could not entirely ignore the shiver that suddenly went down her spine as the door loomed in front of her. What exactly did she want more than anything?
Good grief, I am as bad as my students are.
She opened the door.
Lord Sedgwick stood in the corridor.
Chapter 3
“Lord Sedgwick…!”
Hearing Christine’s voice catch on a gasp, Erik had the distinct feeling she was about to slam the door in his face. “What are you doing here?” she breathed.
Erik tapped a quirt against a tall riding boot. “Miss Sommers. I have not come at an inconvenient time, I hope. I did not hear noise inside and thought you might be alone.” He peered past her into the classroom. Thirteen pairs of wide eyes stared back at him.
She stepped outside the classroom and shut the door, bracing the wooden portal with her body. “You most definitely have come at an inconvenient time. You aren’t even supposed to be in this corridor,” she rasped, even though he’d seen visitors coming and going through the main gate. “How did you get inside this building? How did you find me?”
Amusement lifted his brows. “This is Sommershorn Abbey, is it not? I rode through the front gate on my horse. The groundskeeper directed me here. I saw you from outside through the window.” His mouth twisted slightly. “It is only business that has brought me to Sommershorn Abbey this day, Miss Sommers.”
“Mr. Darlington isn’t here, if that is whom you came to see. In case you didn’t know, he and Amelia eloped last night. Furthermore, I am teaching her class now. So if you will excuse me…”
He did not excuse her. In fact, he stuck his quirt between her and the doorjamb, preventing her easy escape. Conscious of the prim scent of lavender clinging to her clothes, he cocked a dry smile as she twisted around to confront his actions. “Thank you, Miss Sommers, for that bit o’ information.” His breath stirred the hair at her temple. “Is there a place we can speak privately?”
“I…”
Squeezed as she was against the corner of the door and the jamb, she gave him a vague smile. “What is it you want, your grace?”
“You, Miss Sommers. I need the opinion of an expert to tell me exactly what my people have found on my land. Honestly”—he shrugged, a surprisingly boyish action for the stern taskmaster of the Sedgwick empire—“you are the reason I came to London. You were the first person I could think to come to who would not think me completely mad.”
“Then you give me more credit than I deserve.” She paused and seemed to reverse her thoughts. “What is it you have found?”
“In private.”
She peered up and down the hall. “Very well. Upstairs. My office is on the left, you can’t miss it. We’ll have privacy. Wait there.” Her hand closing on the doorknob, she narrowed her eyes. “And don’t touch anything.”
Before he could reply, she opened the door, then shut it in his face. Both his brows arched. Her scent lingered in the narrow space where she’d stood. Feeling momentarily bereft of thought, Erik stepped away. Then he turned and looked toward the staircase. He was restless and his restlessness disturbed him.
He found Christine’s cramped second-floor office at the top of the stairs. The door was unlocked and he stepped inside only to snag his boot on the carpet. Pulling aside the faded chintz curtain to let light inside, he returned his attention to the dull room.
Dusty old books spilled from overflowing bookcases and were piled high against the wall. Engraved plaques, diplomas, and etchings covered oaken-paneled walls, along with snippets of articles cut from newspapers and framed periodicals. There was not a hint of brightness on the floor or the walls or found on the shelves. He picked up a human skull sitting next to a stack of papers and a bound manuscript and turned it over in his hand. Some things did stay the same, he realized. Christine always did fancy the macabre.
“I found that skull in a cave in France,” she said from the doorway, catching him like a child with his hand in the cookie tin after she’d told him not to touch anything. He replaced the skull where he’d found it. “I was eight at the time. Papa said it is probably thousands of years old.”
She remained just outside the light filtering through the window behind him. “Everything in here is old,” he said.
She twisted at the ring on her finger and seemed to hesitate as if debating the choices presented her. But obviously having no patience with coyness, she stepped into the room and shut the door. “I have a student watching the class, but I can’t remain here long.”
She placed herself behind the desk. Not only behind the desk, but also behind the cracked leather chair. Her hair looked on the verge of slipping her chignon and hung loosely at her nape. He’d never known a woman who could walk into a room no matter the occasion and always appear as if she’d just been tumbled in a loft somewhere.
“I don’t expect that we are children or should go about behaving as if we should be strangers,” she said. “Especially since we do know each other.”
Intimately, her voice intoned and which he inferred even before he’d read the thought in her eyes.
She brought her attention around to the boxes stacked against the walls and frowned. “Would you care for a drink before you sit down and tell me why you are here? I think there is a bottle of Scotch somewhere around here. I’m sure I could find it.”
“You need not go to the trouble.”
They stood across the desk from each other. “You said you needed my opinion about something found on your land?” she asked.
With an impatient curse, he shoved his gloved hand inside his coat to remove the packet, the reason he’d made the trip to London—or one of them anyway. The other stood in front of him.
“Surveyors working for me found most of this some weeks ago.” He set the palm-sized packet on the desk next to a taxidermied young caiman and unwrapped the contents for Christine to view. “An engineering crew for the railroad set off a massive landslide last summer. Since then my people have been finding all manner of ghoulish discoveries washing up on the bottomlands after the rains push the river from its banks. My sister is now an expert fossil collector.” He stepped back to allow her to view the packet.
She stepped around the chair to better look at the bones and sundry other fragments, including teeth. The flash of a shiny bauble lured most women to men. But not Christine. Give her death and destruction and a bone yard to explore, and she was your friend for life. “Survey crew?” she asked.
“I am building a levee. I intend to shift the river in an attempt to save a thousand essential acres of bottomland.”
He watched the corner of her mouth crook as she looked up from her study. “Leave it to you to presume you can change the course of a mighty river.”
He eased his hands into his pockets. “Actually it is my intent to push the river back to its original course before that bloody, incompetent crew blew up half a mountainside to build tracks through the southern edge of my property. The levee project I’m working on is essential to the survival of a dozen farms that will not withstand another summer of flooding.” He pointed to the loose pieces. “Work has practically halted since that was discovered.”
She opened a top drawer in her desk and pulled out a large magnifying glass to resume her study. “Why? People are always finding such things. Britain is filled with archeological sites.”
“Not like this one.”
She peered up at him, her hair framing her face.
“This is different,” he said. “During the past year two of my workers have simply vanished.” He cleared his throat and walked to t
he window. “It seems the Sedgwick dynasty’s curse now extends beyond my personal life.” He turned back and faced her. “I came here because I don’t have to worry about you believing in such supernatural rubbish. I need an opinion.”
“I see,” she murmured and returned her attention to the bones.
He settled his gaze on her profile. “I need answers.”
“This is human and…” She held up the jaw fragment, to which all the upper teeth were still attached. She unwrapped the second specimen, raising it slowly to the light. “Obviously, not human.”
Her interest piqued, she eagerly unwrapped the other pieces. “The explosion probably unearthed some ancient burial ground, which is why the two are mixed,” she said to explain the human remains. “Not only is the rest not human”—he watched her hand hesitate on what looked to be a single five-inch-wide flat-pointed tooth. Becca had found it six months ago after a flood deposited shale and rock all over the bottomland south of Sedgwick Castle—“they look…”
“Like something never found before?” he said. “Something that might be found in your father’s book?”
She raised her head. He glimpsed both the flush of confusion and excitement in her face before she tucked the emotion behind her blue eyes and straightened. “Where did you say you found these?”
“Near a riverbank about two miles from Sedgwick Castle. The river empties from the higher elevations surrounding my land, much of it inaccessible.”
“This is why the Fossil Society interests you.” Her gaze dropped to the human jaw fragment. “Yet why do I get the impression you aren’t just interested in the paleontology aspect of this find?”
“True,” he said. “That is my sister’s passion.”
“Then what is it you are after?”
He faced Christine with the desk a barricade between them and stepped nearer. “Answers,” he said quietly.
“You think you know to whom these teeth belonged,” she said.
“I do not think anything. I know to whom that fragment belongs.”
“Your second wife.”
He peered at her intently. Elizabeth had been missing almost seven years. There would not be much left to identify. But teeth were distinctive. He knew in his gut that upper jaw belonged to his wife.
“Why not go to your constable?” Christine asked.
“Because there is something on my land responsible for killing people. A cave, a hole, a crevice. Hell, some people think it is a monster, a ghost, or the Sedgwick curse. I need someone who knows how to follow the right clues and resolve this question. By the dimension of the tooth you are holding, something else large is buried up there.”
“May I keep these for a few days? I would like to study this find.”
His first instinct was to tell her no for she had already given him what he had come here for.
With the recent bones found on his property, Erik needed someone who could give him answers. But her request demanded that he answer to himself his real motives for being here, which had only partially to do with fossils and his need to absolve himself of a crime he did not commit. It had not been an accident that he had contacted Darlington after Charles Sommers passed away.
Erik picked up his hat and riding quirt from the chair and walked to the desk. He settled the hat on his head, then reached across the desk for the pen and dipped the nib in ink to scratch out his address in Mayfair. From the corner of his eye, he caught a glimpse of her skirt. In the dull light, he’d thought it a drab gray, but it was blue with little white flowers falling like random snowflakes. She was wearing a petticoat, one at most, for her skirt merely covered her hips and did not hide her shape. Following the path of this thought, he raised his gaze to find her looking at him with equal intensity. The air seemed to warm around him, and over the smell of old books and dust that filled the room, something more enticing than a hothouse herbal garden touched his senses.
Forcing himself to concentrate, he scribbled on the piece of paper where he could be reached this next week. “I will be in meetings over the next four days,” he said, writing furiously, “after that, I cannot tell you for sure where I will be. If you need to make an appointment, it might be best to go through my man of affairs.” He held out the slip of paper and waited for her to take it.
There was a sudden heavy silence. She slid it from his fingers. “Your social appointment calendar must be brimming over.”
His lips curled into a self-deprecating smile that briefly touched his eyes. “Are you asking in a polite, unobtrusive way if I have come to London to secure myself another bride, among my other business of meeting with financiers, solicitors, and visiting you?”
She flushed, and he could see that was exactly what she was asking.
“Why?” He grinned. “Are you interested?”
“I most certainly am not.”
Her reaction might have amused him had he suddenly not found himself insulted by the swiftness of her answer. But something told him Christine had not survived the last decade living in a man’s world because her innards were made of fluff. She had learned long ago that there was no room in her world for frailty.
“What happened to you, Christine? You used to laugh and enjoy life. Where is your sense of humor?”
“Why are you here, Erik? Not in London. But why are you here at Sommershorn when you have the entire museum staff at your disposal?”
He set down the pen on the desk. “Besides the fact that I need this find to remain secret, I came to hire the most qualified expert in the field to identify and trace the source of those bones. The work will be hard and arduous, as the crags around my home are not inviting of a Sunday picnic. Six months ago, I had written to your father about the possibility of his coming to Scotland. At the time, I did not know he was ill. He recommended Darlington.”
The smooth line of her jaw went rigid as an ax. “As you already know, Mr. Darlington has been contracted by the museum for a dig in Perth.”
Erik smiled, though no one of intelligence would construe the action as friendly. “I’m rich, Miss Sommers. I can offer him a hundred times what the museum is willing to pay. If I am not mistaken, my find will prove to be far more lucrative to his career than anything in Perth. Everyone has a price, Christine.”
“You have not changed. You still think people can be bought and sold like commodities. Do you always win, your grace?”
He looked around the cluttered office that held the remnants of so much of her life, then at her. “Do you, leannanan?”
How dare Erik Boughton presume she was not qualified to lead an expedition, that she was too delicate to find her way among “arduous” Scottish crags, as if she had not climbed a real mountain before. His insult about her lack of humor came back to jab her as well and she sniffed in defiance of his insult. She had humor and laughed easily enough when she understood the joke.
Hurrying across the grounds, Christine paid little attention to the wind that had picked up since that morning and now whipped at her skirts as though the humidity and her emotions had conspired to create a storm. Head down, she persevered through the long grass as she swept past the pond.
How dare Erik give away quite possibly the greatest find of the century. Why would Papa even suggest Joseph Darlington’s name? Men! Six of one, half a dozen of the other. They were all the same.
“Miss Christine! Miss Christine!”
She came to an abrupt halt and looked up suddenly at the heavy, black clouds forming on the horizon behind the wind-whipped oaks. Looking around, she caught her hair with one hand and vaguely wondered if she had imagined someone calling her name, or if God—or the devil—had whispered her name.
“Miss Christine!”
Christine turned in the direction of the school. Babs, Dolly, and the impish blond Sal, three of the girls who had been in class were running toward her with six other girls in tow. Only one thing in life struck fear into Christine more than standing in front of a classroom filled with intrepid students wh
o asked a question she could not answer. And that was being caught outside in the open with those very same daunting students.
Putting on her optimum teacher smile, she greeted the girls. Dolly was the first to speak, her red curls bouncing around her flushed face. Each of them was carrying books. “You did not return to class. We have been waiting to speak with ye, mum.”
All the girls flocked around her. “Everyone is talking about Lord Sedgwick’s visit,” Dolly said before Christine could find her voice.
“Will he steal you away from us, just like Mr. Darlington stole Miss Amelia?” Sal asked.
“It isn’t stealing if she wants to go away with him,” Babs said.
“But you believe in the ring now?” Dolly’s hopeful voice persisted. “Why else would a rich, handsome duke visit Sommershorn Abbey?”
Christine had completely forgotten the ring. Heavens.
She stared down at the braided band of silver that seemed to be glowing blue in the dreary gray light. The thing had got stuck on her finger and she’d forgotten about it in her vexed emotional state.
“You must have been thinking about his grace before you put on the ring,” Babs insisted, her voice fraught with awe. “Or he would not have appeared at our classroom door. What did you wish for, Miss Christine?”
Silence gathered around Christine at last, as anxious eyes awaited her reply.
It was true that morning she had been thinking about Erik, but that was only because of their meeting last night at the gala. She had merely been woolgathering this morning—something she rarely did—when he’d popped into her thoughts again. But thinking about a man did not mean she wanted him to show up on her doorstep.
And, yes, she admitted that she had told Aunt Sophie she wanted to make an earth-shattering discovery. A discovery so magnificent…the entire world would stand up and take notice.
Clutching the packet to her chest, Christine knew that what Erik had brought was indeed something magnificent.
She suddenly felt dizzy.
But none of this meant the ring was magic. The idea was ludicrous.
Beauty and the Duke Page 4