She’d be prickly almost certainly, but prickly-yet-willing-to-join-forces, or prickly-and-wanting-nothing- whatever-to-do-with-him? With ladies like her, it wasn’t easy, or safe, to guess.
He did know how
Since he’d left to join the army, he’d seen her a few times in ’14, and then again over the past six months, but always at a distance with family, both his and hers, all around. Nothing remotely private. Tonight, he’d come upon her unexpectedly alone in his house, and desire had come raging back. Had caught him, snared him, sunk its talons deep.
And shaken him.
Regardless, it was unlikely there was anything he could do to ease the ache. She’d finished with him thirteen years ago-cut him off; he knew better than to hold his breath hoping she’d change her mind. She was, always had been, unbelievably stubborn.
They would have to set that part of their past aside. They couldn’t entirely ignore it-it still affected both of them too intensely-but they could, if they had to, work around it.
They’d need to. Whatever was going on, that matter he’d been sent to investigate and that she, it seemed, had already discovered, was potentially too dangerous, too threatening to people as yet unknown, to treat as anything other than a battlefield. Once he knew more, he’d try to separate her from it. He didn’t waste a second considering if she, herself, was in any way involved on the wrong side of the ledger; she wouldn’t be, not Penny.
She was on the same side he was, but didn’t yet trust him. She had to be protecting someone, but who?
He no longer knew enough about her or her friends to guess.
How long before she decided to tell him? Who knew? But they didn’t have a lot of time. Now he was there, things would start happening; that was his mission, to stir things up and deal with what rose out of the mire.
If she wouldn’t tell him, he’d have to learn her secret some other way.
He strode along the ramparts for half an hour more, then returned to his room, fell into bed, and, surprisingly, slept.
CHAPTER
HE AWOKE THE NEXT MORNING TO THE SOUND OF HOOFbeats. Not on the gravel drive circling the house, but farther away, not nearing but retreating.
He’d left the French doors to his balcony open, a very un-English act, but in Toulouse he’d grown accustomed to open windows at night.
Fortuitous. Rolling from the bed, he stretched and strolled across the room. Naked, he stood in the balcony doorway watching Penny, garbed in a gold riding habit, steadily canter away. If the doors hadn’t been open, he’d never have heard her; she’d left from the stables, a good distance from the house. Sidesaddle on a roan, she was unhurriedly heading south.
To Fowey? Or her home? Or somewhere else?
Five minutes later, he strode into the kitchen.
“My lord!” Mrs. Slattery was shocked to see him. “We’re just starting your breakfast-I had no idea-”
“My fault entirely.” He smiled charmingly. “I forgot I wanted to ride early this morning. If there’s any coffee? And perhaps a pastry or two?”
In between muttering dire warnings over what was sure to befall gentlemen who didn’t start their day by sitting down to a proper breakfast, contemptuously dismissing his proffered excuse that he’d grown accustomed to French ways-“Well, you’re a proper English earl now, so you’ll need to forget such heathenish habits”-Mrs. Slattery provided him with a mug of strong coffee and three pastries.
He demolished one pastry, gulped down the coffee, scooped up the remaining pastries, planted a quick kiss on Mrs. Slattery’s cheek, eliciting a squawk and a “Get along with you, young master-m’lord, I mean,” and was out of the back door striding toward the stables ten minutes behind Penny.
Fifteen minutes by the time he swung Domino, his gray hunter, out of the stable yard and set out in her wake.
He hadn’t had the big gray out since early March; Domino was ready to run, fighting to stretch out even before he loosened the reins. The instant they left the drive for the lush green of the paddock rising to the low escarpment, he let the gelding have his head. They thundered up, then flew.
Leaning low, he let Domino run, riding hands and knees, scanning ahead as they sped southwest. Penny, sidesaddle and believing herself unobserved, would stay on the lanes, a longer and slower route. He went across country, trusting he’d read her direction correctly, then he saw her, still some way ahead, crossing the bridge over the Fowey outside the village of Lostwithiel, a mile above where the river opened into the estuary. Smiling, he eased Domino back; he clattered across the bridge five minutes later.
Returning to the high ground, from a distance he continued to track her. Fowey, her home, or somewhere else, all were still possible. But then she passed the mouth of the lane leading west to Wallingham Hall, remaining on the wider lane that veered south, following the estuary’s west bank all the way to the town of Fowey at the estuary mouth.
But the town was still some way on; there were other places she might go. The morning was sunny and fine, perfect for riding. She kept to her steady pace; on the ridge above and behind, he matched her.
Then she slowed her roan and turned east into a narrow lane. Descending from the ridge, he followed; the lane led to Essington Manor. She rode, unconcerned and unaware, to the front steps. He drew away and circled the manor, finding a vantage point within the surrounding woods from where he could see both the forecourt and the stable yard. A groom led Penny’s horse to the stables. Charles dismounted, tethered Domino in a nearby clearing, then returned to keep watch.
Half an hour later, a groom drove a light gig from the stables to the front steps. Another groom followed, leading Penny’s horse.
Charles shifted until he could see the front steps. Penny appeared, followed by two other ladies of similar age, vaguely familiar. The Essington brothers’ wives? They climbed into the gig. Penny was assisted back into her saddle. He went to fetch Domino.
He reached the junction of the Essington lane and the Fowey road in time to confirm that the ladies were, indeed, on their way south. Presumably to Fowey, presumably shopping.
Charles sat atop Domino and debated. At this point, Penny was his surest and most immediate link to the situation he’d been sent to investigate.
She was concerned enough to follow men about the countryside at night, concerned enough to refuse to tell him what she’d discovered, not without thinking and considering carefully first. Yet there she was, blithely going off to indulge in a morning’s shopping with such concerns unresolved, circling her head.
She might be female, but he’d grown up with four sisters; he wasn’t that gullible.
Penny stayed with Millie and Julia Essington for the first hour and a half of their prearranged foray through Fowey’s shops-two milliners, the haberdasherer’s, the old glove-maker’s, and two drapers. As they left the second draper’s establishment, she halted on the pavement. “I must pay my duty call-why don’t you two go on to the apothecary’s, then I’ll meet you at the Pelican for lunch?”
She’d warned them before they set out that morning that one of the retired servants from Wallingham had fallen gravely ill and she felt honor-bound to call.
“Right-oh!” Julia, rosy-cheeked and forever sunny-tempered, linked her arm in Millie’s.
Quieter and more sensitive, Millie fixed Penny with an inquiring gaze. “If you’re sure you don’t need support? We wouldn’t mind coming with you, truly.”
“No-there’s no need, I assure you.” She smiled. “There’s no question of them dying, not yet.” She’d managed not to mention any name; both Millie and Julia were local landowners’ daughters, had married and continued to live locally-it was perfectly possible anyone she might mention would have relatives working at Essington Manor.
“I won’t be long.” She stepped back. “I’ll join you at the Pelican.”
“Very well.”
