Linda Needham (5 page)

He hoped to bloody hell. He grabbed five off the shelves randomly, in rapid succession and would just have to hope for the best.

“Ah! One of my absolute favorites, Huddleswell!” Breame appeared at Jared’s side and tapped the cover of the top book in the stack. “
The Blue-Winged Olive and How to Tie It.
Know it by heart, myself. Rereading it to inspire yourself, I expect?”

“Indeed, Breame.”
To inspire me.

Jared left the library for the privacy of his own room, where he could sit alone and investigate the particulars of flyfishing.

On his wedding night.

Don’t say we didn’t warn you, Hawkesly.

Damnation!

“Y
ou want me to pack up his lordship’s what, my lady?”

Kate outstretched the linen shirt, shoulder to broad shoulder. Enough to clad that brawny chest she remembered from her wedding day. “His drawers, Tansy. His underclothes.”

“Then his lordship’s come home, has he?”

“No.” Thank God for that! “To be loaned to one of the guests at the lodge.”

Yes, plenty of shirt here for the colonel. In fact, a perfect fit. Trousers, waistcoat, and jacket, right down to fancy gilded buttons.

“You’ve a guest who forgot to bring his own drawers?”

“Not exactly, Tansy. Misplaced baggage.” Or some such story that she didn’t believe. “I hate to ask this of
you so late, but would you please send the lot down to the lodge sometime tonight?”

“Gladly, my lady.” Tansy was already folding the shirts, humming.

Kate left the closet where she had stored away Hawkesly’s wardrobe, and ducked again into the infirmary to take another look at Margaret, and found Rosemary in a chair beside the huge bed. Both were fast asleep.

Never able to keep away from the new ones, she peered into Margaret’s sleeping face, searching for those dreadful signs of a failing heart. But her hollow little cheeks were beginning to pink and her breathing was steady and deep. And she had actually smiled earlier.

“Sleep well, angel.” Kate held back a kiss on the forehead, not wanting to wake her, and made it out into the corridor without disturbing Rosemary, either.

Kate and her pony knew the long lanes between the hall and Badger’s Run as well in the deepest midnight as she knew it at midday. She also knew that a light burning this late in the main room of the game house could only mean that Magnus was working far beyond his regular hours, when he had no reason to be.

His gratitude time, he called it. Repaying a debt to her that she refused to recognize, that he insisted upon.

“Ya saved my life, m’lady,” he would always say, “and my dear ma’s.”

She hadn’t really, had only offered him a job that she desperately needed doing. But Magnus would always frown at her denials, so now she let him mutter his gratitude and put in his extra hours.

But not tonight—at least she’d try to convince him to retire. It was nearly eleven and she feared for his health, though every day he was looking more and more as though he were merely lean, rather than a victim of the famine in Ireland.

She hitched the pony and the tilbury near the patch of daisies at the fence rail in front of the game house, crossed the planked porch, then unlatched the door and entered the vestibule to odd sounds coming from the large room beyond, with its carefully stored tackle and traps and lures.

“Magnus, what are you doing here so late?”

But it wasn’t Magnus.

Colonel Huddleswell stood in the middle of the barn, stripped down to his crisp white shirt, his breeches and his boots.

His neckcloth was gone entirely and his shirt unbuttoned to the center of his chest.

He was standing like a dashing fencing master, poised in mid–
en garde
. Only instead of an epee, the colonel was wielding a clunky old greenheart fly rod, a loop of line caught up in his left hand.

A breathtakingly fine-looking man, his black hair slightly askew against his high forehead. His stance perfect; arrested motion. Long, powerfully corded thigh muscles, clad in black buckskin.

Absolutely stunning.

When she finally stopped her unseemly tour of the man’s form and found his eyes, her heart gave a clunk and then started thudding against her ears.

“Can I help you, Colonel?”

He relaxed his stance and his grip on the fly rod
some, his brow dipping from something like slight surprise to his usual brooding impatience. “No, Lady Hawkesly. You can’t help me at all.”

“You shouldn’t be in here.”

He flicked that brow again. “And you shouldn’t have lost my luggage.”

“I—” She didn’t lose anything of his, but she was long past arguing the point. “And what exactly are you doing? Casting indoors, in the middle of the night?”

“I’m…testing.”

“For what? Termites?”

“For quality. And fit.” He rested the butt end of the rod against the floor, loose elbowed, his dark scowl a stark challenge.

“Why now?”

“Since I’ll be using a fly rod which is entirely new to me—not my own custom-made to my exacting specifications Henderson’s greenheart, I thought it wise to take my time in choosing the very best among your”—he flicked a dismissive hand toward the wall of her very finest rods—“rental items.”

Irked at the man’s insult, Kate went to the rack of fly rods and lifted out the best of them.

“If you’re looking for the best we have, Colonel, then you might like to try this one. It’s a split bamboo, with agate guide rings, a ridged-cork grip.”

He scowled at her, suddenly reminding her of someone that she knew—though she couldn’t quite put a name to him. “The one I have will do.”

Such an odd choice. An ancient fly rod, when he’d just touted the grandness of his own.

“Still, you might want to use a better reel than that old brass thing.”

“What I want is the time to acquaint myself with this particular fly rod.”

She didn’t know what to make of his strange attitude, or the fire in his glare as she gazed up at him.

“Are you purposely trying to handicap yourself for tomorrow’s tournament?”

He grunted and deepened his scowling. “My intentions are none of your business.”

Jared wanted nothing more than for the woman to leave him alone because time was short and she was distracting. Because he was battling a red-hot urge to lean down and taste her mouth, to indulge in the dampness glistening on her lips.

So inviting. Warm. And damn, if it wasn’t beginning to plague the devil out of him that he had completely forgotten to kiss her the day they were married.

And that he couldn’t really make up for it right now.

What a hell of a way to spend his wedding night. He couldn’t let her stay here any longer. He damned well couldn’t let her see him try to cast the lure. Not with this relic of a fly rod, which had looked like the drawings in the book, but was apparently, simply laughably old.

And damned dangerous. He’d already hooked the seat of his trousers with the nasty furred and feathery weapon that was on the end of the line. He’d only just released the hook when the woman walked in on him.

Now she was drawing up the end of the line, expertly pinching the small feathered object between her fingers and giving it a careful inspection.

“Ah, a hackle red spinner.”

Damnation, he understood dozens of exotic dialects, but the woman seemed ever to be speaking nonsense.

And studying him too closely.

Still he couldn’t let her know who he was. Not until he discovered what the devil she was up to with her guests and her secrets and this so-called spinner thing.

“Exactly,” he said, wondering if there was such a thing as a book of fishing flies. And forever hearing Drew’s wager echoing inside his head.

“You’re not planning to use this tomorrow, are you?” His bride looked amused and scandalized enough for him to know the correct answer.

“Of course not.”

She laughed and let go of the fly. “Good! After all, what would a trout or a salmon make of an April-hatching fly in the middle of September?”

“Indeed.” He felt entirely stupid, his pride laid flat. “The thing was already on the end of the line when I picked up the rod. I merely—”

“Well, that explains it.” She
tsk
ed and shook her head. “Doubtless one of the boys left it on after using the rod last spring.”

One of the boys?

“You didn’t by any chance bring along your own fly box, did you?”

He gave her a purposeful frown, pleased with the flexibility of his lost luggage cover story and the fact that he had read up on fly boxes and knew exactly what she was talking about this time.

“No, madam. It was packed along with my other gear. Now if you’ll excuse me…” He needed her to leave him to his practicing. The night was waning and this flyfishing was turning out to be more difficult to master than he’d expected.

“Then I suppose you’ll be needing to borrow one of our fly boxes.” Before he could answer, she left him for a tall cabinet against the opposite wall, and he followed her like a pup. “We have an excellent selection of William Blacker’s salmon patterns, developed specifically for Badger’s Run’s three chalk streams.”

“Have you?” Damn she smelled good—like moonlight and talc and warm sheets.

She opened the wire-meshed cabinet door, pulled down a flat wooden box, and lifted the lid to a wild display of bundled feathers and fur and bright dangly things. “We’re very up to date here at Badger’s Run.”

“I should hope so.”

“You’ll find everything you need here for landing a trout: sedges for evening, and spinners and—” She touched the ends of other boxes on the shelves. “Duns and smuts and quills.” She turned back to him, obviously pleased with herself. “Everything you need.”

Thoroughly beguiled by the gentle lilt of her voice, the length of her fingers and all that marvelous hair, Jared rested the rod against the edge of the cabinet, and then leaned in to his wife. “Where did you learn all this?”

“All what?”

“Flyfishing and game birds and deer parks. These are men’s pursuits.”

She fit the lid back on the box. “And I’ve had to make my way in a man’s world, haven’t I?”

“Why is that, Lady Hawkesly?” he asked, feeling accused and tried and found guilty all in one breath.

“My dear father passed away nearly two years ago, I have no brothers or uncles, and as for my husband…” She shrugged and turned from him to shut the door. “Well, as I said, I’ve had to learn to live in a man’s world.”

“But why open a sportsman’s lodge? Surely Hawkesly has no pressing need for money.”

“Why would you assume something like that?”

Because you’re married to me, and I’m as rich as Croesus.

“A supposition,” he said instead, shrugging, not quite ready to hear her explanations.

“I can assure you that marriage to an earl doesn’t mean unlimited wealth.”

Bloody hell, it certainly did with
this
earl! It meant that she had plenty to eat without fishing for it. Or shooting it or trapping it. A limitless wardrobe, a magnificent, one-hundred-room roof over her pretty little head. “Then what does it mean, my lady?”

“Marriage to an earl?”

“Yes.”

She shrugged and then leaned back against the counter as she slowly exhaled the weight of the world. “I’m sure I wouldn’t know.”

Bloody hell! “What does that mean?”

And what the devil was she doing with all this money she was making?

“It means that…well! It’s just plain none of your business.” She fixed him with a glare, then brushed past him. “Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ll be on my way.”

Blasted woman. “I need a landing net.”

She stopped with a harrump, then pointed to a wall of nets. “Take your pick, sir. Take anything you need with my best wishes. Good night.”

Jared watched the woman leave, flinched at the crack as the door slammed behind her, at the softly lingering scent of her.

“Good night, wife,” he whispered, wanting more of his bride than just her scowling impatience. He wanted to understand her and her suspicious enterprise. Something was making her work like a demon and he was damn well going to uncover the reason.

He spent the next hour wrestling with a nastily barbed fly on the end of an utterly uncontrollable horsehair line. He hooked his trousers twice more and then his shoulder, until he finally lodged the hook in the back of his hand.

“Damn and blast!” Cursing the woman and her bloody lodge and every trout in the bloody kingdom, Jared gathered up what looked to be a reasonable tangle of rod and reel and fly boxes and a landing net—whatever its purpose—and hiked back to the lodge.

His
lodge.

To
his
bed. His empty bed.

And he’d only just piled the ungainly stuff into the tiny chair in the corner of his misshapen room when he heard a light knock on the door.

And his wife’s soft, sultry voice from just beyond the panel, calling his name.

“Colonel Huddleswell.”

No—the
other
man’s name. Damnation! He yanked open the door. “Yes?”

She was standing like a supplicant—hair askew and still damp from the moonlit air, her arms loaded down with a pile of folded clothes.

“The clothes I promised you.” She brushed past him and lay the pile out on his bed. “Two days’ worth. I’ll see that you get more.”

“Where did you get these?”

“Up at the hall.”

“When?”

“Earlier.” She looked up and cocked her head at him. “I hope they’ll fit you. I’m pretty sure they will.”

“You were there tonight? At the hall?” Without telling him? Though she had no reason to tell him anything about her activities.

“Yes. Fortunately, you and my husband are nearly the same size.”

“Are we?” Imagine that.

She studied him, then held up a pair of trousers, and studied him again. “Very nearly, Colonel.”

“Yes, how fortunate for all of us.” For him, his bride, and that neglectful husband of hers.

“Yes, well. I’ve brought you a goodly supply of everything you should need. Shirts, collars, waistcoat, trousers. Outerwear and…under.” She flicked a glance over him, an assessing heat that licked like fire. “Um…and socks and, well, everything a gentleman might need for a weekend’s proper sporting.”

Ah, wife, if we were sporting properly, we’d have no need for clothes at all.

A riotous thought that roused him and plucked at his resolve.

“I suppose I should say thank you,” he said. For offering him his own clothes from his own wardrobe in his own hall. And yet his heart seemed to be softening toward her, making excuses, rationalizing.

“Say whatever suits you, Colonel Huddleswell. But you’re welcome.” She righted the tottering pile of shirts, smoothed the suede lapel on his favorite tweed jacket, and then worked her way around the bed, toward the door. “Breakfast is served at four—”