by Nichole Van
“Lady Kildrum.” He bowed.
“Mr. Campbell.” She nodded, ever so politely.
And then she turned her head, a flustered blush climbing her cheeks, as if she found his presence distressing.
She said nothing more, holding her spine with rigid precision.
Ah.
So she had been deliberately avoiding him.
Ewan had overstepped the bounds of gentlemanly behavior with their last interaction, and she was now understandably concerned that he might assume liberties.
Every taut line of her body proclaimed her to be the Countess of Kildrum, reaffirming their respective places in Society.
It was for the best.
He chanted this over and over as he directed her to resume the position he had formulated during their previous sitting: Violet standing with one hand on the back of a gilded chair, her hip sinking into the embroidered upholstery.
He took his seat behind his canvas and picked up his charcoal. He had transferred his sketches loosely to the larger format.
He sketched.
Violet watched.
The ease that had existed between them in his studio had vanished. In its place, a coiled beast crouched. The lurking strain of their past confidences hiding in the shadows, waiting to pounce.
Violet held herself stiffly, her limbs utterly lacking the relaxed fluidity of their previous session.
The silence stretched and pulled until Ewan was sweating from the tension of it, his palms damp.
Every tick of the clock on the mantel testified to the heavy weight of the words unspoken between them.
The problem, of course, was that he still had to draw her.
Portrait painting was agonizingly intimate . . . staring for hours into another’s eyes, asking questions of their soul.
In this case, every brush of his charcoal traced another part of Violet that he admired. The elegant bent of her jaw. The gentle swell of her bosom. The nip and curve of her hip as she leaned her weight into the chair.
Each line flowed as surely as if he were touching her. A hand wrapping around her waist. A finger trailing up the soft skin of her arm. A thumb following the curve of the pearls lying against her neck before rising to brush across her lush lips.
Every mark was unbearably intimate.
Worse, it was as if she could sense the wayward nature of his thoughts.
Her gaze skittered across his skin, generating wee shocks of electricity where they landed: chest, throat, mouth.
If she were to touch him, would it give them both a jolt? Like the friction of a wool blanket on a winter’s day?
A sleepy snore sounded.
The noise ricocheted through the room. Violet startled, her hand raising to her bosom in alarm. Ewan barely stopped himself from flinching and making an errant mark with his charcoal.
He twisted to see the maid asleep in the corner, her head leaning against the wall, her mending sprawling onto the floor.
He turned back to Violet’s blue gaze, expecting her to say something to awaken their sleeping chaperone.
Instead, he found her blue-green eyes brimming with laughter, her lips tightly pinched.
The maid snored again, the noise even louder.
Violet giggled, lifting a hand to her mouth to stifle her mirth.
Ewan smiled, rolling his eyes as if to say, This is ludicrous.
Violet giggled harder, tucking her head against her shoulder.
Ewan chuckled, waiting for Violet to raise her head and meet his eyes again.
Instead, she remained with her head bowed, her chin turning to the left, her nose practically buried in her clavicle.
Violet twitched her shoulders.
Why was she—
Oh!
The twist of her head suddenly registered the problem.
“Are ye stuck, my lady?” he whispered, walking to her.
“Yes.” She lifted a hand to her ear, tugging.
He quickly saw the problem. When Violet had ducked her head to stifle her giggle, the movement had tangled a pearl earbob in the stiffened lace collar, somehow pulling the strand of pearls into the mix.
In short, she was thoroughly entangled.
She shot him a sideways glance, a blush climbing her cheeks.
“I cannot seem to free myself,” she said with a rueful chuckle, motioning helplessly toward her ear. “The maid falls asleep, startles me half to death, sets me to giggling, and then I manage to snarl my jewels into a Gordian knot.”
She rolled her eyes at the absurdity of her predicament, her shoulders sagging and expression becoming one of self-deprecating humor.
Abruptly, she morphed into Violet Kerr. His Violet. The woman who delighted and fascinated and made him wish for things that Could. Never. Be.
“It does appear tae be a bit of a mess.” Smiling, he stooped over her. “Here. Allow me.”
The instinct to help her felt as natural as breathing, and so he reached for the earbob without thinking through the ramifications.
It was only as the backs of his fingers accidentally skimmed her impossibly-soft cheek that he realized—
He was touching her.
And . . . he would have to continue to touch her if he wished to help.
Violet had gone preternaturally still.
He would have thought her afraid or wary but a quick meeting of her gaze told him otherwise. She was anything but wary.
Her vivid blue eyes had bled nearly to black. Her tongue peaked out, wetting her bottom lip.
Like himself, she was breathing in short rasps.
It was all the permission he needed to continue.
Swallowing, Ewan nodded and moved closer, his fingers continuing their slide along her jaw. Perhaps more deliberately now.
The curls at her temples threaded through his fingers, soft brushes of sensation.
He could feel her breath on his cheek as he worked. Or had she leaned closer to him, inhaling deeply?
He gently worked the earbob free from the lace collar, tugging lightly, the motion causing the back of his hand to brush against her neck over and over.
His skin thrummed from the contact.
“How . . . ,” she began, her voice a puff of air against his chin.
He fully freed the earring before glancing at her.
She licked that bottom lip again. Did her eyes drop to his throat?
Heat scoured him.
Dinnae ponder the charms of the lovely lass.
Ewan sucked in a deep breath. It was supposed to be bracing, but instead sent a blast of her lavender scent straight to his head.
He was nearly dizzy from the sensory glory of her.
He swallowed and focused his work, extricating a section of the pearl necklace from the netting of the lace. In the process, his fingertips skimmed the bare skin where her neck met her shoulder. The touch scalded him.
“How was your trip to Aberdeen?” she murmured.
Concentrate on the necklace, ye glaikit oaf.
“It was excellent,” he replied, proud his voice emerged steady and not brokenly hoarse.
A moment of silence.
He finished untangling the final pearl from the lace, laying it gently against her neck.
“There. All done,” he whispered.
“Thank you.” Her words were a puff against his cheek.
He stepped back, closing his fists to trap the lingering memory of her skin on his fingertips.
Their eyes met.
She stared up at him, mouth slightly parted, her heartbeat a fluttering pulse in her lovely throat.
Energy hummed, a bouncing zig-zag of brilliant gold.
What he wouldn’t give to be welcome to take a step forward, cup her face between his palms, and bend to touch her lips. Would she gasp at the contact? Would her body rise to meet his? Would her mouth be as warm and soft as he suspected—
He turned away and returned to his easel, putting ten feet of space and a wide canvas between them.
“H
ow have ye fared?” he asked a wee bit too loudly, causing the maid to snort in her sleep. He lifted his charcoal. “Are decisions still weighing on ye?”
“I have made no decisions, as of yet.” She sighed, shooting him another rueful grin, relaxing and leaning more naturally into the back of the chair. “No, that is not true. I did read a bit about agriculture.”
“Aye? Ye did?”
“Yes. And I decided that the state of farming in rural Berwick is appallingly boring.”
“Berwick?! Well, of course it is.” Ewan gave a bark of laughter. “Does anything interesting ever happen in Berwick?”
She laughed, a lovely throaty sound. “I suppose not. But I did read a fascinating discussion about elms.”
“Elms?”
“Yes!” Her eyes lit with interest. “They are most effective as wind breaks for new plants. Did you know that there are at least four different ways to sow them?”
Ewan felt his grin stretch wider and wider as Violet waxed philosophical upon the virtues of elm farming.
All awkwardness vanished, as if mist evaporating in warm sun.
As he sketched, Ewan told her humorous stories about his time as a student at the Royal Academy.
Violet regaled him with the escapades she and Dahlia used to get in to, particularly running amok in Old Kilmeny Castle, playing lords and ladies with Aster and Rose.
“Of course, I was always the lord, defending the ladies. And the twins were young, as you can imagine, but they still joined in,” she said on a sigh. “Aster, in particular, has a decidedly piercing scream. And Rose was insistent she was helpless, needing a knight to save her.”
Ewan chuckled, tracing the outline of her shoulder on his canvas. “’Tis always good to take up arms in defense of a lady, I suppose.”
“Yes.” Violet paused, her lips quirking to the side. “Would you take up arms to defend a lady?”
“Of course,” Ewan shrugged, thinking back to Mrs. Massey and the Brotherhood’s commitment to helping her. “I would defend any person—man, woman, or child—who needed it.”
“Mmmm. But what about more . . . figurative dangers?”
Something in her tone had shifted. He lifted his head.
Her expression was abruptly serious.
He set down his charcoal. “Well, figurative dangers are perhaps different. I suppose it would depend if the woman in question needed assistance in defending herself.” He paused, gathering his thoughts. “I see it like this. If a woman asked for my help, I would offer it, as far as was proper. That said, as a former prizefighter, I recognize the value in knowing how to defend one’s self from attack. I would want any woman in my life to have the skills necessary to choose her own destiny, as it were. There is power in knowing ye can fight your own battles, if ye ken what I mean.”
She studied him for a long moment. And then smiled.
He picked up his charcoal and continued to sketch. Their conversation moved on from that point, ebbing and flowing, but never ceasing.
Ewan floated between emotions he found, quite bluntly, terrifying.
He could not afford to develop a strong attachment to Violet Kerr, Lady Kildrum.
That path led only to heartache . . . a path he feared he was already treading.
Because as Violet shot him a grin and exited the room, it felt like watching his own heart walk out the door.
17
There is power in knowing ye can fight your own battles.
Ewan’s words would not let Violet be.
She liked the idea of being thought strong enough to accomplish difficult tasks on her own.
How different from Lord Graham’s insistence that he would protect her at all costs.
Ewan’s phrase rang in her ears over the next couple days: as rain battered the windows, as she refereed vampire arguments between her sisters, as she met with Mr. Lawyerly and Mr. Shambles to decide what to do with her lands, as she listened to her father’s increasingly loud insistence that she accept Lord Graham’s offer.
Of course, the painter’s words weren’t the only Ewan-related thing distracting her.
Flotsam bits of memory had this unnerving habit of swirling through her brain at the most inopportune times, rendering her light-headed.
Ewan lounging like a wealthy pasha, half clothed, draped in red silks . . .
The touch of his eyes moving over her as he sketched, setting gooseflesh skittering . . .
The feel of his knuckles dragging down her jaw . . .
She was teetering far too close to the precipice.
The view from the cliff kept becoming more and more spectacular—adding a vibrant sunset and companionable birdsong, all beckoning her to linger and rest awhile—ignoring the very real peril of tumbling over the edge.
A week after Ewan’s return from Aberdeen, Violet found herself again in her study, facing a stack of agricultural texts. The endless dreich days had given way to a hesitant, wary sunshine.
Her father and sisters had been invited to attend a house party in Aberdeen. Normally, her father would decline such an invitation, but he was currently attempting to garner opinions on his recent religious tract—a (tedious) dissection of the moral purpose in Paul’s journeys around the Mediterranean Sea. And Aster had been vocal in her wish to meet more ‘suitable’ gentlemen.
Thus, a rural house party provided fodder for both their aims. Rose, it should be noted, had simply been pleased to leave Kilmeny Hall.
Fortunately, Violet had been able to formulate excuses to not accompany them.
Soon after their carriage rolled down the gravel drive, Violet barricaded herself in her study, determined to use the abnormal quiet to balance some ledgers and study her agricultural texts.
She was interrupted two hours later.
“Lord Hadley and Sir Rafe Gordon are here to see you, my lady,” Irvine announced.
“Pardon?” Violet’s head snapped upward from the book she had been reading . . . ehr, attempting to read.
“Lord Hadley and Sir Rafe Gordon to see you, my lady.” Irvine said the words with stately aplomb, but the excitement in his eyes betrayed his delight at having such august visitors. “They have asked specifically to speak with your ladyship. Will you receive them?”
Heavens! Lord Hadley? Sir Rafe?
Here?!
“Thank you, Irvine,” she said, managing to contain her own shock. “Please show the gentlemen into the drawing room and instruct Cook to send up a tea tray with refreshments.”
She tapped a finger on her desktop for a moment after Irvine left.
She was . . . astounded.
Sir Rafe Gordon? Did Irvine refer to the former Lord Rafe Gilbert, son of the Duke of Kendall? The broadsheets had been full of that shocking affair last autumn. She had heard that the king had granted Lord Rafe a baronetcy in January, hence his name changing to Sir Rafe.
She recalled dancing with Sir Rafe once or twice during her two Seasons in London. She vaguely remembered a dark-haired man with a roguish smile and quicksilver tongue.
As for Lord Hadley . . . Violet had not met him.
The bigger question—why were the gentlemen here? It was highly unusual for two such illustrious persons to just happen into the neighborhood for an unannounced social call.
She could only assume this was related to Ewan somehow. After all, he received letters from Hadley with some regularity.
But if they were here for Ewan, why were the gentlemen asking after her?
Ten minutes later, Violet walked into the drawing room. She had sent a footman to fetch Ewan from the castle. But first, she would ascertain the purpose behind the gentlemen’s visit.
Two men instantly sprang to their feet.
“Lady Kildrum.” The taller of the two bowed in greeting. “Lord Hadley, at your service.”
Though Debrett’s had informed her that Hadley was an English earl, the man in front of her was decidedly a Scot. From the dark tartan of his great kilt to the lilting roll of his speech, Lord Hadl
ey took his heritage seriously.
“My lord.” Violet curtsied.
“Permit me to introduce Sir Rafe Gordon.” Lord Hadley motioned to his companion.
“Sir Rafe.” Violet curtsied again. “It is a pleasure. I do believe we have a prior acquaintance?”
“Aye,” he grinned, as affable as she remembered. “I recall dancing a country dance or two many years ago.”
Though not as overtly Scottish as his friend, Sir Rafe still sported a sash of the same dark tartan, brighter bands of white, red, and green standing out against the black fabric.
Both men were aristocrats to their bones. The superfine coat underneath Lord Hadley’s great kilt bore the stamp of the finest tailor. Sir Rafe’s waistcoat appeared to be gold-shot Venetian silk.
Of course, none of this explained why the men were here. Why they had asked to speak with her.
“Forgive this intrusion, my lady,” Lord Hadley said, “but we were passing through the area, returning south from Fraserburgh, and wished tae call and pay our respects.”
“That is very kind of you both,” Violet said as they took their seats. Abnormally kind, she did not add.
Sir Rafe and Lord Hadley exchanged a look, sinking into chairs opposite her.
“We recognize, my lady,” Sir Rafe said, “that our presence here must appear somewhat unusual.”
Violet’s eyebrows shot skyward. The man was forthright, she would give him that.
“I admit to being surprised to finding you both on my doorstep,” she carefully hedged.
“We shan’t take too much of your time, my lady.” Lord Hadley sat forward, expression somber. “To get straight to the point, we are concerned about our friend, Mr. Ewan Campbell.”
“Mr. Campbell?” Violet parroted back, though why she could not say. She had surmised this to be the true purpose behind their calling, had she not? “You are . . . concerned?”
“Aye.” Sir Rafe nodded his head. “Ewan is quite dear tae us both.”
“A friend of the heart.” Lord Hadley tapped his chest.
“But, ye see, Lady Kildrum, he’s a sensitive soul, our wee Ewan.” Sir Rafe said the words in deadly earnest, not a trace of sarcasm.
Surprise tangled Violet’s tongue. “Your . . . wee . . . Ewan?”