by Julia London
Oh, but he’d loved Eira dearly. Her death had devastated him completely, sending him into black moods again. He retreated into himself, staying away from society by sequestering himself at Llanmair. And then Owen Percy had come into his life, bringing tragedy with him at every turn.
Since then, Margaret had tried desperately to bring light to Rhodi’s world again. She had introduced him to several female acquaintances, but he would have none of it. He was never impolite with her, but was quite firm in his desire to be left alone. And he remained a solitary figure, riding about the forest on his enormous black horse, a lone, almost sinister figure in the minds of the very superstitious Welsh people.
And now, to be forced to endure Owen Percy again.
“I am right sorry to hear it,” Margaret said sympathetically when he had said all he would about Percy’s arrival. “Is there anything we might do to help?”
He shook his head. “I shall gladly be rid of him soon enough.”
Margaret graciously let it go at that, but she fervently hoped he would be rid of the reprobate quickly, for his sake.
But Owen Percy was obviously weighing heavily on his mind—he did not seem to be in the mood to converse and said little else the rest of the evening. Margaret felt compelled to review her recent journey to the seaside resort of Aberystwyth, which had begun on a brilliantly sunny day, but had ended with a raging rainstorm, as often happened in Wales.
As she spoke, however, she couldn’t help noticing the tight clench of Rhodrick’s jaw and the hard look in his eyes. She fretted that the deep-seated anger was coming back to him, and that concerned her. No one knew as well as she how quickly and completely that blackness could descend on him.
Aware that he was poor company, Rhodrick left the Awbreys early. He was up at dawn the next morning, off to settle a dispute between two of his tenants. It took longer than he anticipated—the two men were related by marriage and their dispute seemed to have more to do with the wife of one man than the grazing land in question.
He pretended to listen attentively, nodding at all the right places, but in truth, he could not seem to think of anything but Miss Fairchild’s blustery blue eyes, or the way her hip curved into her waist, or the elegance of her long fingers and the slender column of her neck.
That wasn’t all. He was having awful, decadent thoughts of Miss Fairchild; he imagined her naked, her lithe body bent over his desk, her back arched in ecstasy as he took her.
It was she who troubled him, of course, she who brought more than a shock of blue into his faded world. At a stream, where he had stopped to water his horse, he took her handkerchief from his pocket and held it to his nose for a moment, then put it back in his pocket and closed his eyes, his head filled with the scent of woman.
Such thoughts disturbed him greatly—he was a grown man, not a boy—but he couldn’t seem to stop them from coming. She had kindled something in him. At first, he’d believed it was fury, rage, but now he was beginning to realize that it was something deeper and baser than that. That kiss had awakened a beast that had lain dormant in him for years, a man’s desire.
The turn of her fear of him into defiance had prodded the beast, too—she didn’t look at him with pity or revulsion. She looked at him with impertinent scrutiny, unafraid to assess him openly.
That had aroused an uncommon curiosity in him, had diverted his mind from life’s more practical side, and, in fact, had obsessed him.
It was afternoon before Rhodrick returned to the castle, at which point he was asked by his gardener to examine a weakness in a retaining wall.
Rhodrick had built many of the terraces in his vast gardens over the last twenty years with his own hands. He was quite proud of the gardens and the fact that they were renowned throughout Wales. He could not see the full beauty of them, really, as he was unable to distinguish so many of the colors. But he knew them to be impressive.
He and the head gardener determined that the wall could be shored up, and as he often did, Rhodrick unthinkingly removed his coat and waistcoat, rolled up his sleeves, took a shovel from one of the workers, and began to dig a trench where they would leverage posts to support the wall.
He was knee high in mud when he paused to drag the back of his hand across his damp brow and happened to catch sight of Owen Percy and Miss Fairchild above him at the terrace wall. They were leaning over to see what the work was about.
The sight of them caught him off guard; Percy was smirking—but that wasn’t what made him feel so absurd. It was the expression on Miss Fairchild’s face. She looked at him not with animosity, but surprised wonder, as if her mind could not quite grasp how a gentleman could be enticed to such hard labor.
For an uncertain moment, Rhodrick wondered that himself, and all at once he felt egregiously pedestrian. He passed the shovel to a boy and stepped out of the hole they had dug—his bad knee buckling slightly as he did so—and unrolled his sleeves. He stole a glance up at the terrace again and noted Percy’s mouth was near her ear.
Miss Fairchild’s gaze was still on Rhodrick, and for her, he could only scowl. Yet she did not turn her gaze from him until Percy put his hand on her elbow and turned her about. Even then, she glanced over her shoulder as if she was awed by some grotesque thing she was seeing.
Rhodrick picked up his coat and waistcoat, slung them over his shoulder, and strode away, leaving his men to finish the work. He walked into the ground floor of the castle and through the storerooms, hoping to avoid his unwelcome guests. The path took him up to the main floor and through the formal entry, where he was met by a very large gilded mirror.
He had never once paused to look at himself in that large mirror, but he did now, quite unable to keep from doing so. He was repulsed by the sight of himself—it was little wonder that Miss Fairchild had looked at him as if he were a beast. He was covered in mud, and his hair, which had been properly combed this morning, was in terrible disarray. His shirt, open at the collar, revealed hair matted with sweat.
Miss Fairchild surely thought him no better than a common gravedigger.
What incensed him was that he should care one whit what she thought of him.
He angrily yanked on a bellpull, then tossed his coat and waistcoat aside. Ifan appeared almost instantly; Rhodrick ordered water to be drawn and heated for a bath at once. He ascended the stairs two at a time, oblivious to any pain, his thoughts as far from his bloody knee as they could possibly be.
Seven
A fter their tour about the gardens—which were indeed stunning, and surprisingly so given that the approach to the castle was so stark and cold—Percy led Greer back to the drawing room in which they had been practically confined during their short stay here.
“You see how he is,” Percy said as Greer took a seat on a divan. “Very ignoble,” he added with the same smirk he’d worn all day. “Digging about like a common laborer.”
Greer didn’t know if the prince was particularly ignoble, but she did know that she’d never seen a gentleman quite so…potent. It surprised her, really, to see a prince covered in mud, unafraid of work—she’d never seen a gentleman exert himself so. She had no idea that it could be so…stirring. She could not forget the sight of the muscles in his thick arms and his broad back, clearly evident through his lawn shirt, pasted to his body with the sweat of his exertion. He had removed each shovel of mud effortlessly, had worked as quickly and stoically as men who had been born to do it.
Oh yes, the sight of him had indeed aroused her on some level, had awakened what seemed to be an innate knowledge of men, and had made her feel strangely and wildly feminine.
“He has never understood the boundaries of propriety,” Percy continued as he walked to the window, not a hair out of place, and braced his arm against the frame of it in a manner that did not stretch his coat.
It occurred to Greer that perhaps Percy had never known the boundaries of honest work, for which she immediately chastised herself. Percy was her protector. The prince was her enemy
.
He glanced over his shoulder at her when she did not respond. “You look quite fatigued, darling. This ordeal must be so very tiresome for you. We really must consider going to Rhayader to hire the services of a solicitor so that we might bring this matter to the proper justices. I fear that your health will be affected if we do not.”
That was patently ridiculous. Why did he always assume she was wilting like a fragile flower? “I am perfectly fine,” she assured him. “And as I have told you, I cannot afford the services of a solicitor.” She had told him that more than once, actually, yet he stubbornly continued to press the point. Of course she understood that, like her, Percy was anxious to be on his way, to be out of this awful castle with the strange sounds and the cold, and the awful musty smell that seemed to permeate certain rooms. But surely he could understand that without even a five pound note between them, hiring a lawyer or taking a suite of rooms in the nearest village was out of the question.
“Then I shall speak to him again,” Percy said authoritatively, and pushed away from the window. He strolled to where Greer was sitting, and with a flip of his coattails, he sat beside her, his arm stretched along the divan behind her. “I admire your bravery, you know,” he said soothingly, and leaned over to kiss her. His arms around her felt warm, his lips soft, and while Greer knew it was wrong to encourage him in the slightest, she allowed it. She felt a certain comfort in his arms, and she desperately needed to be comforted.
More cold rain fell that night, making Greer’s room feel even drearier, if that was possible. To make matters worse, the fire in the hearth died at some point in the night. Greer drew the bedcovers up over her head and tried to sleep, but she was shivering too hard to relax.
She was miserable, floating between sleep and wakefulness. It seemed as if she had barely slept at all when a sound awoke her. Greer thought it was Lulu come to rouse her, but when she pushed the bedcovers from her face, she was shocked to see her mother standing in the doorway, her long black hair wound up at her nape, wearing a red gown that seemed out of fashion. But she was smiling, too, her smile as warm and inviting as Greer remembered it, almost as if she’d never left.
A sound at the window startled her, and Greer jerked around. It was wind, she realized, and turned back to the door, but her mother was gone. The door was gone. In its place was the white mansion nestled in the trees, and standing at the entrance was the prince, half his face in shadows. His eyes were so hard and green and cold that she couldn’t help but shiver uncontrollably.
She woke with a start and bolted upright. She was shivering with cold, not fear. There was no one about—not her mother, not the prince—and in fact, morning had come. The first thin shafts of light were filtering in through the window.
Nevertheless, it had seemed so real, as if she could reach out and touch him. “Sweet heaven,” Greer muttered, still trying to catch her breath. She wrapped a blanket around her shoulders, winced at the cold when she put her feet to the floor, and scurried to the hearth to attempt to revive the fire.
Her efforts were not working, however, and she was still at it a quarter of an hour later when she heard a knock at the door and a gray-haired woman entered Greer’s room. She took one look at Greer, then at the hearth, and said, “Oh dear. You must be quite cold.” She smiled and moved to help Greer revive the hot coals into fire.
“Thank you,” Greer said, and looked at the woman curiously.
“I am Mrs. Bowen, the housekeeper,” she said in response to Greer’s look. “Lulu is working in another part of the castle this morning, so I came to tend you.”
“Ah,” Greer said, thankful that she spoke English, albeit with a heavy accent. She watched as Mrs. Bowen used a hand bellows to fan the flames, grunting with the exertion of pressing it over and over. But when she had the fire going, she stood up, dusted her hands on her gray gown, and smiled at Greer. “I pray you weren’t too uncomfortable…or that any ghosts paid you a nocturnal visit.”
Greer stilled. “Ghosts?” she asked, suddenly feeling very ill at ease.
“Oh, ‘tis an old Welsh tale,” Mrs. Bowen said as she moved to the bed to make it. “They say spirits douse the fires so they cannot be seen, you know, so that they may move freely among us. That is why it is best never to speak ill of the dead.”
“But I didn’t,” Greer said, feeling even more uncomfortable.
“Oh, of course not, miss!” Mrs. Bowen said with a warm smile. “I meant generally speaking. ‘Tis an old folk tale. Naught more.”
An old folk tale, perhaps, but it prompted Greer to dress quickly.
She joined Percy in the breakfast room, and even he claimed to have spent a sleepless night. He once again pressed Greer to seek help in Rhayader. But Greer was adamant she could not. Of the thirty pounds with which she had left London, she had less than four pounds remaining. It wasn’t even enough to see her back to London, what with the cost of a hired coach and inns along the way. She didn’t want to stay here, but at the moment, it seemed the lesser of two evils—the spirits and dreams and sounds notwithstanding.
She and Percy spent the remainder of the morning walking the grounds—her hand in his, for he could not seem to leave her hand be—and when they tired of that, they repaired to the drawing room to wait for what Greer assumed would be another interminable day.
She stood at the window that overlooked the gardens, calculating how long it would take her letter to reach Phoebe and Ava in London. She determined it would be three weeks at the very least due to the rainy weather and rural roads. Once the letter arrived, it might be as much as a week before they could arrange everything and send for her. If they replied straightaway, the reply might take another three weeks to return to her. That was assuming that Ava was even in London. She might be in the country, with the marquis.
Seven weeks in all, if luck was on her side.
Seven weeks and very little money. Greer was determined she could find a small room and manage to live on her paltry three or four pounds over seven weeks. But she could not support Mr. Percy as well.
It struck her as odd that she should be thinking of Mr. Percy’s support at all, particularly given her dire circumstances. Certainly he had not asked it of her, but she had a strange feeling that it was somehow expected, as if they had struck a tacit agreement.
But they had not…had they? Had she given him any indication that they would continue on together, once the issue of her inheritance was solved? She was mulling that over when Mr. Percy surprised her by catching her shoulders in his hands.
“Ah!” Greer cried out. He chuckled, put his arms around her, rested his chin on her shoulder, and hugged her as they looked out the window. “And what do you see out that window to fascinate you so, Miss Fairchild?”
She focused on the garden below her, saw the men working on the terrace wall again today, and was greeted with the memory of the prince, glistening with the sweat of his efforts. “Gardens,” she said.
He laughed low in her ear, his breath warm, and a slight shiver trickled down her body. “Nothing more?” he asked.
“Is there something more?”
“There is the horizon—do you see it?” he asked. “And nestled within that horizon is Rhayader. If I were a gambling man, I’d wager that perhaps one more day of this bleak house and you will agree that we must get to the village before we quite lose our minds.”
She wasn’t certain they hadn’t already. “And if I were to say yes…how would you suggest we pay for our keep, sir?”
She could feel him shrug at her back. “Have you nothing of value, darling? A trinket you might sell, perhaps?”
“Have you?”
Mr. Percy said nothing at first, but then took her firmly by the shoulders and forced her around to face him. His hazel eyes shone brightly, which only reminded her of the prince. The two men shared the same thick dark lashes, the same piercing gaze.
Percy smiled sympathetically at her. “Greer, dearest. When we’ve settled this wretched busin
ess with the prince, I shall replace your trinket with a thousand. You must have faith—we will settle this business, for the law is most decidedly on our side.” He dipped down, so that he was eye level with her. “You trust me, do you not?”
“Of course.”
“And you realize, don’t you, that were you to accept my offer, he could not possibly refuse your claim?”
“He couldn’t?” she asked, uncertain how an engagement to Percy would change the prince’s feelings about her inheritance.
“He could not.”
“But I…I don’t…”
“And I won’t be able to bear it if you refuse me,” he continued. With a kiss to her forehead, he rose up. “I cannot bear to be away from you for even a day, much less a lifetime,” he added, and kissed her on the lips.
It occurred to Greer that she ought to tell him she’d not decided anything—not even where she would be for a day, much less a lifetime—but the touch of Percy’s lips silenced her. The feel of a man was so…comforting. It made her feel a little fluttery inside, and frankly, she felt safe. Much safer than when she was shivering under the covers in that dreadful room.
When Percy’s hand boldly found her breast, she gasped, surprised by the sensuous thrill of it.
She could not honestly say how they ended up on the divan, her arms around his neck, his hand on her breast, and his mouth on her neck. She just remembered a bit of moving about and then the feeling of sinking with a man’s hard body pressed against hers. That was not an entirely new sensation to her—after all, she had been out for two years among London’s best bachelors—but rarely had anything in which she’d been engaged progressed to such shameless fondling.
Her thoughts vacillated between an awareness of her lack of decorum and nothing but a desire to continue on with the physical pleasure she was experiencing. Perhaps it was the diversion from the sheer tedium she had suffered the last two days that propelled her, but whatever it was, she quite forgot herself and was, therefore, humiliated beyond repair when Percy suddenly lifted his head, grinned at her, and turned that grin to something or someone on the other side of the divan.