A Wicked Pursuit (14 page)

She looked up sharply, and he knew he had her attention.

“‘Miss Augusta’ must be a dreadful burden to bear,” he continued softly. “It’s a name for elderly maiden aunts with small, noisy dogs and barley-sugar twists tucked in their pockets. But Gus—Gus is spritely and charming and most excellent company. Gus likes Vivaldi, although she didn’t know it until a quarter hour ago. Gus has freckles across her nose like a dusting of nutmeg, and hair with more colors in it than Welsh gold, and the softest, most innocent hands in the—”

“Dr. Leslie, my lord,” announced the footman at the doorway, shouting the name to be heard over the music.

Gus almost catapulted from the chair in her haste to separate from him, and to greet the doctor as he came bustling into the room.

“Dr. Leslie, good day,” she said breathlessly. To Harry’s eyes, she looked rumpled and flustered and desirable, while Harry knew he must appear so frustrated that he expected the doctor to want to start bleeding him again.

“Good day, my lord, Miss Augusta,” Dr. Leslie said, fortunately so stunned to see the musicians that he took no notice of either Gus’s fluster or Harry’s frustration. “Heavens! I did not expect to find a
musicale
in progress here in your bedchamber, my lord.”

“It’s done,” Harry said curtly, growing more and more irritated. Blast Leslie! If he hadn’t interrupted, Harry would have had Gus sweetly calling him by his name, and maybe even—well, he wasn’t sure how far he would have taken things with her, considering he shouldn’t have been doing any of it, but it would have been far better than what had just happened.

He nodded to Vilotti, and the three musicians abruptly stopped playing. “My apologies, my friends,” he said, “but I’m afraid Leslie here is determined to poke and prod at my leg.”

“If you will please come with me, gentlemen,” Gus said quickly, falling back into her customary efficiency as she regained her composure. “I’ll have a light refreshment arranged for you while your rooms are being readied.”

Harry watched her go, the musicians happily following her with more bowing and complimenting at the prospect of food and drink.

Not once did she look back at him.

He hated being chained in one place like this, unable to leave this bed or go after her to explain. For a few precious moments, he’d forgotten he was a prisoner, forgotten he was a broken cripple, forgotten he was anything other than his old familiar self, flirting with a winsome girl.

The self that was gone forever, with a girl who would never be his.

Blast, blast,
blast
.

She was
a coward. There was no other way to look at it. A bumbling, babbling, incompetent
coward
.

Gus stared up at the pleated silk canopy of her bed, her head too full of guilt and recriminations for sleep. Soon it wouldn’t matter if she slept or not, for by her last count, the tall clock in the hall had chimed four times. Soon the birds would begin to sing in the trees outside her window, the roosters would crow beyond the kitchen garden, the sun would slowly appear over the fields to the east. The house would begin to wake, too, with the scullery maids starting the kitchen fires under Mrs. Buchanan’s direction and the parlor maids opening blinds and sweeping out grates, and by then Gus should be up and beginning her own day.

But none of that changed the fact that she was an abject and absolute coward.

She groaned and buried her face in her pillow. Why hadn’t she told him about Julia when she’d had the chance? Why had she let him be so—so forward with her? Holding his hand while he’d been suffering was one thing, but what he’d done last night was entirely,
entirely
another. And what he’d said as he’d toyed with her hand, all those pretty, meaningless words that no man had ever said to her before, words that she’d had no business listening to.

He was the Earl of Hargreave. He was going to marry her sister. He was going to be her brother-in-law.

Or much worse, he wasn’t.

When she told him that Julia had fled, it was going to come out all wrong. How could it not? He’d know that she’d known, and hadn’t told him, but because she hadn’t pulled her hand away when she should have, he’d think she was encouraging him because Julia wasn’t. Which she wasn’t, but he couldn’t know that, and neither of them knew what Julia would know if she were here. The more she tried to figure it out, the more muddled she became, and the worse she felt about how she’d behaved.

She shouldn’t have left the way she had. She did run away, which was why she was such a coward. Talking to him had been easy because he was bed-bound, and by leaving she could control when to end a conversation. There’d been a cowardly comfort in that, too, especially as he’d begun to recover and had become less of a patient and more of a man.

Which would be bad enough if he’d been an ordinary man. But there was nothing ordinary about Harry. He was instead the most sinfully handsome man she’d ever seen. She thought of him sitting in the middle of the bed with his dark hair tousled and the throat of his nightshirt falling open and his sleeves pushed up over his forearms, his slow smile with the dimples—
dimples
, on a man who was otherwise so hard and lean—lighting his extraordinarily blue eyes as he watched her move around the room and—

No, she must not think of him, not like that. She mustn’t think of him at all, and she thumped her fist into the pillow with the sheer misery of her life at present.

It was at some point in this early-morning despair that Gus first heard the dogs.

Dogs, barking furiously, and in the house. Her father’s house, where dogs were not permitted. Because dogs had made her older brother sneeze and weep when he’d been a boy, Mama had banished them from the house, and from habit her father had maintained the banishment even after Andrew outgrew his difficulties.

Thus there was no reason for dogs to be inside the house, and especially not at this hour. The first light of dawn was filtering through the house, so at least she wouldn’t need a candlestick. She slid from her bed, swiftly tied her robe over her night shift, and hurried out into the hall and down the stairs, following the sound of the barking dogs.

She didn’t have far to look. For the second day in a row, there were unexpected strangers causing a commotion in her front hall by the wavering light of the night-lantern. A very sleepy-looking Mr. Royce and a footman without stockings and his shirt still untucked from his breeches were standing before two travelers. The first man was obviously some form of gentleman, dressed in sober clothes and with a large leather portfolio beneath his arm. The second, shorter man accompanying him was definitely not a gentleman, but a groom or other stable servant, in a heavy woolen jacket, a neat cap, and boots.

But more noteworthy than this man’s dress was the pair of large spotted dogs that he held on leashes—or rather, the dogs appeared to be holding him, straining against their collars as they leaned eagerly toward the butler and the footman. The dogs weren’t menacing, not with their feathered tails whipping furiously in unison, but they were noisy, and cheerfully determined to raise the rest of the house with their barking. Mr. Royce and the first man were both attempting to speak over the dogs, with the result that they were shouting against each other, and no one was hearing anything.

Gus flipped her long braid back over her shoulder and marched into the fray. The two men stopped speaking as soon as they saw her, but the dogs were not so easily intimidated.

“Hush,” she said sharply, scowling down at them. “Hush, if you please.”

To the surprise of the four men, the dogs immediately stopped barking, contritely sitting and hanging their heads with remorseful guilt.

“Hah, ma’am, I’ve never seen that before,” marveled their handler. “Mostly they only obey his lordship.”

“‘His lordship’?” Gus repeated. She should have known. Really, she should have. “Tell me, please. Are these Lord Hargreave’s dogs?”

The other man stepped forward and raised his hat.

“Good day, ma’am, and pray forgive our intrusion at this unseemly hour,” he said. “I believe I can explain. I am Mr. Arnold, ma’am, agent to the Earl of Hargreave, and I have come at his request.”

The butler could bear this informality no longer; even if Gus was standing barefoot in her night shift, proper introductions should be made.

“Miss Augusta, Mr. Arnold,” he intoned, as if Arnold had not just introduced himself. “Mr. Arnold, Miss Augusta Wetherby, the lady of this house. Mr. Arnold is his lordship’s agent.”

“Good day, Mr. Arnold,” Gus said. “Though it is just barely day. Is it his lordship’s usual practice to summon his people in the middle of the night?”

Arnold bowed, clearly embarrassed. “Forgive me, Miss Augusta. We would have arrived last evening at a more reasonable hour, if not for a broken axle on our conveyance. But yes, his lordship did express some urgency. His affairs have been unaddressed since his accident, and I have numerous papers that require his immediate attention.”

“I can imagine,” Gus said drily. She was sure Harry did in fact have business matters that needed his attention; a gentleman of his wealth and property would. But it would have been generous of him to have warned her that he’d invited yet more visitors to the abbey, visitors that she would be expected to house and feed.

And the dogs. She looked pointedly at them again, so pointedly that one of them whimpered and lay down. It was not that she didn’t like dogs, because she did. What she didn’t like was having them appear unbidden in the front hall before dawn, and against her father’s wishes, too.

She sighed. “Did his lordship request the dogs as well?”

“Oh, yes, Miss Augusta,” said Arnold hastily. “It was entirely his lordship’s idea that his two favorite dogs be brought here, to help lighten his spirits. This is Hollick, from his lordship’s household in town, who will be keeping the dogs. The dogs are Patch and Potch.”

Hollick made a kind of ducking bow, as much as he dared while holding on to the leashes.

Gus sighed again, this time with resignation as she considered how she’d explain to Mrs. Buchanan that she’d have two more men to feed.

“I’m sure you’d both like breakfast after your journey,” she said. “It will be some time before his lordship is awake and ready to receive visitors. Royce, please show Mr. Arnold to the green parlor. John, show Hollick and the dogs to the servants’ hall for now. They’ll have to stay in the stables, of course.”

Hollick looked stricken. “The stables, miss? His lordship won’t like that, miss. His lordship’ll want his pups with him, same as home.”

“I’m sorry, Hollick,” Gus said, “but in this house, dogs live in the stable, not—”

“Mr. Arnold, good day!” Just as he had yesterday, Tewkes appeared at the top of the stairs, making a dramatic entrance like a character in a play.

But today it wasn’t the newly arrived men who charged up the stairs to him. It was the dogs. Patch and Potch immediately recognized him—or at least recognized him as a sign their master was near—and lunged forward, pulling their leashes free from Hollick’s hand. Barking with excitement, they raced up the stairs with their leashes trailing behind them, lingering only a moment before they disappeared down the hallway with Tewkes in pursuit.

“No!”
Gus wailed, gathering her skirts to run up the stairs, too. As unhappy as she was with the dogs breaking her father’s orders, what concerned her much more now was the thought of them leaping up onto their master’s bed in a frantically joyous reunion. Although Dr. Leslie had kept Harry’s broken leg tightly bound in the splints and resting on the leather sling inside the break-box, he’d also warned that any sudden movement could dislodge the healing bones, in effect breaking them all over again. Patch and Potch practically defined sudden movement, combined with sizable weight, too.

It would, in short, be disastrous.

Likely Tewkes had the same fear, for Gus could see him ahead of her at the far end of the hall, moving faster than she’d ever thought possible, toward Harry’s bedchamber.

But when she reached the doorway, there was no sign of the boisterous mayhem she’d dreaded finding. Instead the two dogs were sitting quietly with their front paws on the edge of the bed, their eyes blissfully closed as Harry stroked their heads and rubbed their silky ears. If the dogs looked happy, then Harry looked ecstatic, softly crooning nonsense to them.

He glanced up when Gus appeared. “Have you met my boys?”

“I thought they’d jump on the bed,” she said. “I thought they’d hurt your leg.”

“What, my fine boys?” he said. “They’d never hurt anyone, especially not me. They’re the best-mannered pups in Christendom. Isn’t that right, my pretty fellows? Isn’t that right?”

What was right was the sight of Harry with his two dogs. She’d never expected to see him display this kind of tender affection, and it made her smile happily, too, even as she realized it spelled the end of Papa’s no-dogs policy.

“Papa says dogs belong in the stable, not in the house,” she said halfheartedly to appease her conscience. “They shouldn’t stay here.”

“Then send your father to me if he objects,” he said. “I’ll show him what perfect gentlemen my boys are.”

Almost too late, Gus remembered that Harry still didn’t know Papa was in London with Julia.

“I suppose he’ll make an exception,” she said. “It wouldn’t be fair, considering how you couldn’t go down to the stables to visit them.”

But Harry wasn’t listening. “Why, Gus,” he said, his smile turning rakish. “How agreeable of you to come visit me in your nightclothes.”

The way he was looking at her, his gaze sliding all over everything below her chin, made her feel as if she were standing there naked. What was worse was that she realized she didn’t dislike his scrutiny. In fact, to her dismay, her heart was quickening and she was breathing a little faster from it, the same as she had last night when he’d run his fingers along her wrist. Self-consciously she tugged the sash of her robe more tightly around her.

“I had no choice,” she said. “Your dogs roused me from my bed with their barking.”