Gentlemen Prefer Mischief (7 page)

He cocked his head. “Did she put you up to this? I wouldn’t have thought—”

“No! She wouldn’t be happy that I mentioned it to you. But she doesn’t know you like I do.” Her face softened and she reached for his hand. “I know you are good.”

No, I’m not
. His sweet, indulgent sister would never acknowledge that in the copybook of life, his pages were well blotted. “El, you needn’t worry about Lily. This is a trifling matter.”

She frowned. “I’m not so sure. Why don’t you give it to me, and I’ll return it for you so there won’t be any awkwardness?”

And
what
would
be
the
fun
in
that?

“I’ll think about it,” he said, intending nothing of the sort. “Good night.”

He kissed her cheek and went into his room before she could come up with any more thoughts to share. His sister had been six when both their parents died of illness, though since they’d been like distant planets to their children, he’d always supposed it hadn’t been so much of a loss for her. She’d grown up in the care of an indulgent governess who’d allowed her to do as she liked, but as Eloise was such a good-hearted young lady, it rarely mattered if she was also rather convinced of her own way of doing things.

He put the candle down on his desk and frowned. He was certain he’d left the journal there, and he’d felt easy about doing so because he’d locked the door to his room. With a staff and visitors, privacy was not assured, and now that the journal had come to light, he hadn’t wanted anyone poking around in his room.

He opened the desk drawer but wasn’t surprised not to find it there as he had left it on the desk. An astonishing suspicion was taking shape in his mind, and as he looked around the room, he noticed that the window was open wider than he’d left it. Taking his candle, he examined the area. A smudgy footprint now decorated the sill.

With a dark grunt, he realized that half a mile away, a blond woman was surely gloating. The minx had climbed the tree outside his window!

Extremely daring. And very, very intriguing. He wondered if she’d made the practical decision to wear pants while climbing, and entertained an image of her, fair chin set in determination as she worked carefully upward through the branches, her legs encased in fabric.

As the spotty moonlight shifted across his fields and lifted the shadows beyond that blanketed Thistlethwaite, he considered that her trip to his room tonight and the non-appearance of the Woods Fiend might be related. It was obvious that she was determined to thwart Hal’s efforts to catch him, and she’d likely warned the man not to come tonight.

Between her interference with his efforts to catch the Woods Fiend the night before and her trip to his room tonight, the gauntlet had been well and truly thrown down. She’d engaged him in battle, and there was no way he was going to let her win, no matter the game afoot.

He had advantages over her. For one thing, she’d obviously had a serious passion for him once—and he knew he wasn’t the only one feeling the crackle of attraction between them when they were together.

Oh, who was he kidding? He was a little smitten with her. There was something astringent and pure and unembellished about her that fascinated him, like the notes of a single violin cutting through the babble of conversation at a party.

Well. Once he’d made certain she felt that old magic for him and he’d gotten her to admit it, he’d have the upper hand. Then it would be a matter of
beguiling
to find out what she knew about the Woods Fiend.

When he sat down on his bed to remove his boots, his hand pressed against something wet. He lifted it and blinked at the evidence that a bird had been in his room.

He didn’t know if Lily had had anything to do with that as well, but he was more than willing to believe it.

Lily was standing near the top of a little hill at the edge of the pasture the next afternoon and discussing sheep shearing with Malcolm, their shepherd, when Buck, who’d been keeping watch over the sheep from under the shade of a tree, jumped up and ran barking over the other side of the hill.

He returned with surprising company: Roxham.

She was startled to see him at Thistlethwaite, and after reading her own words about him in her journal the night before, the sight of him made her insides jump a little. Was he coming to confront her?

He strode toward her on his long legs, of whose muscular firmness she now had personal knowledge. In his beautifully tailored buckskin breeches and gleaming black top boots, he ought to have looked as out of place among the sheep and mud as a decorative Hepplewhite chair taken from a London drawing room and set down in their muddy fields, but he looked at home. His shirt was snowy white, the cravat tied in a snappy knot, and his coat was a distinctive, forget-me-not blue. Ha, a visual joke, as she doubted any woman who’d ever seen him had forgotten him.

He offered a warm greeting to old Malcolm, who looked disreputable and cantankerous with his grizzled beard and knotty hair.

To Lily, he said, “Delia told me you’d be out here.”

Malcolm, who in general was interested in little beyond the welfare of animals, nonetheless seemed intrigued by the viscount’s presence in their pasture. She sent him away to see to a broken gate before turning to Roxham. Knowing that her journal was now sitting in her desk drawer made her want to gloat, but she resisted the urge.

“To what do I owe the pleasure of your visit?”

Buck was circling around their visitor, who crouched down and ran his hands generously over her dog’s fur. He cast a glance up at her.

“As if you didn’t know.”

“Indeed I can hardly imagine why my lord should favor us with a visit to our pasture.”

He left off petting Buck and stood up. “My lord?” he repeated, the corner of his mouth ticking upward and something wicked lighting his eyes. “So formal. ‘I am going to write here about Hal…’” he quoted, squinting as if to remember the rest.

She wanted to put her finger right across his lips and stop the flow of her own words from them, but that would pose its own problems. She forced a light tone and tried not to wonder how much he’d read. “Goodness, what does any of that signify now? I was but a child.”

“A child. Of sixteen.” Those arrogant green specks in his blue eyes mocked her, said
he’d
never written such things to anyone. “Funny, I’ve seen ‘children’ that age married. I’d say you were merely a younger version of the woman you are now. Though the years have, I grant you, been exceedingly kind to you.”

It was out of her mouth before she could stop herself: “Is that why you find it more appealing to have a conversation with me now than you did then?”

He absorbed her words. She wanted them back.

At the same time, though, she wanted him to be uncomfortable, and he did look uncomfortable. Briefly.

“I don’t remember avoiding your conversation, Lily. I was simply busy.”

After he’d taken her journal four years ago, she’d told herself he was only a butterfly of a man, flitting from flower to flower looking for nectar. “Yes, you were,” she agreed, though it didn’t seem like an entirely accurate appraisal now—there was that shadow she’d seen once or twice now in his eyes, as if he’d seen hard things. And of course he would have, in the war. Still, he seemed to have put it all behind him; he joked and teased as much as he ever had.

“Was there some reason you came today?” she asked.

He crossed his arms and stared down the blade of his nose at her. “What the devil are you up to?”

“I, my lord?”

He raised an eyebrow at “my lord.”

She smiled, as if to indicate she had no hard feelings toward him. No feelings of any kind. A lie, but if she had an untidy residual attraction to him, along with a growing awareness that he was a very entertaining man, it was something she would conquer with no one the wiser.

“There was no sign of the Woods Fiend last night, but
you
came to my room and removed something.”

“Surely,” she said, “you’re not suggesting I’m the Woods Fiend?”

“I’m suggesting,” he said drily, “that you’re in league with him.”

“In league. That sounds serious.”

He gave her a very haughty look in reply, which drew his golden brows together at bossy angles and made the planes of his face more taut in a perilously interesting way. Her imagination treated her to an image of him in his captain’s uniform, dressing down army recruits.

“Don’t try to distract me from the issue at hand, which is people sneaking into my room at night. People like you.”

“I, my lord? In your bedchamber? How absurd!”

“Lily…” His voice held a note of warning.

“Well,” she said, “if something happened to the journal in your possession last night while at the same time nothing happened in the woods, anyone would say that was merely coincidence.”

Like reinforcements, Rosemary, who’d been wandering nearby, drew close to him and began to sniff the edge of his forget-me-not coat, while Parsley came at him from the other side; the two were invariably interested in new people. In the way of sheep, the others were not far behind. She hid a smile as he looked down to find himself surrounded.

“The shirt I was wearing the other night,” he said as he laid a hand atop Rosemary’s cream-colored head, “still smells of violets.”

“Violets?” Though she made her own violet water scent to keep her clothes fresh, she pretended ignorance. “I’m not certain I even knew they had a scent.”

“They do. It comes and goes. It’s known to be exasperating.”

Rosemary stuck out her tongue just then and licked his little finger, which drew his attention even as Parsley leaned in to him. Parsley was prone to leaning on people, and Lily liked the idea that Roxham would leave Thistlethwaite smelling of sheep. Thyme pressed forward to see what was so interesting. Roxham moved his sleeve out of the way of Parsley’s questing mouth while still pinning Lily with his eyes.

“Roxham.” Her tone said,
darling
boy
. “Putting aside the absurd charge of being at fault for retrieving something of my own that had been taken from me, I can assure you I am not in league with an evil spirit.”

“Just tell me what is going on in my woods, and with whom you are working.”

She swallowed hard at his directness, and his eyes locked on hers, as if willing her to fall apart and confess the truth.

Ha, she was made of sterner stuff, and she held his blue-green gaze with a bland look that offered nothing. Nonetheless, the cost to her was having to absorb the full blast of Lord Perfect’s male beauty. Those thick eyelashes that gave his eyes a boyish hint of mischief…

Buck barked sharply just then, scattering the sheep as her brother Rob came over the hill.

“Rob! You’re back!”

She was very, very glad for the interruption of his arrival. And glad he was home, too, of course.

“Welcome home,” she said, embracing him.

“It’s good to be back.” He and Roxham exchanged cordial greetings. “It’s good to see you after all this time, Hal. Delia said you were out here visiting our sheep, but I thought she was jesting.”

His tone was friendly, but Lily could read in his eyes that he thought it odd that Roxham, with plenty of his own sheep, had come for that reason.

“Yes, I’d heard that Lily had some very good ointment used for hooves,” Roxham fibbed effortlessly. He
would
be good at fibbing, she thought, overlooking how much skirting of the truth she’d done since he’d returned to Mayfield. “I came to ask after a sample myself, hoping that might induce her to part with it.”

Rob cocked his head at her. She smiled. In for a penny, in for a pound, but she couldn’t help but feel that she would pay in some way for all the moral lapses in which she was finding herself engaged. “We were just going to the stable to get it.”

“I’ll join you,” Rob said, falling into step with Hal.
Old
Duffer
. It was getting harder to remember to call him that in her mind, which kept whispering
Hal
. It was the familiarity, she told herself. He
was
familiar. But it was also the lying on his front the other night that was undermining her. And the mischief sparkling in his blue-green eyes.

They found hoof ointment in the stable—fortunately, they did have some. It was in a large container, and she took it with the intention of putting some in a small jar from the kitchen and sending Hal on his way. But as they approached the manor, Rob obliviously invited their guest to tea. He accepted, shooting her a gloating look.

Ian was already in the sitting room with Delia, and he jumped up when they came in and embraced his sister and shook hands with Hal.

“Why, here we are, just like years ago when you used to come to tea all the time, Hal,” Ian said as they sat down. “Except Delia was little and had no conversation, and Lily always used to be scribbling in her journal.”

Hal accepted a cup of tea from Delia. “I remember. Although I wouldn’t say that Delia had no conversation—she was doubtless preoccupied with more important things than what was being discussed by boring older gentlemen,” he said, winking at her. Lily was almost certain she heard her sister sigh in admiration.

The battle of Oporto was discussed—Rob asked Hal for a firsthand account of the victory—but while Hal spoke highly of his men, he didn’t linger on the account but steered the conversation to crops and books.

Delia, to Lily’s dismay, brought up the woods problem, of which their brothers knew nothing as yet, and said how people thought their sheep were possessed so Hal and Ivorwood were trying to capture the trespasser at night.

Rob was, predictably, not amused. “Good Lord, how ridiculous.”

“It is, of course,” Hal said, “but I wouldn’t want anything to do with my woods harming the Thistlethwaite shawl business.”

Rob shot Lily a look. “That’s very good of you. I’m sorry you’ve been put to the trouble. Ian and I will take over now for you since we are the ones most affected.”

“Sorry,” Hal said, “but I can’t allow it. For one thing, it’s also causing trouble at Mayfield—some artisans I hired to build a folly have run off in fear of the Fiend. I’ve wagered John that I’ll discover who the trespasser is, and I’m afraid the terms can’t be altered. I must be the one to catch him.”

“I say, Hal,” Ian deposited an enormous spoon of clotted cream on his plate, “speaking of wagers, that was quite a match you won against Dorcot. Read about it in
The
Tattler
. You made him look like a schoolboy.”

Hal chuckled. “Well, he is only twenty-one or two.”

Lily couldn’t resist saying, “That
is
a surprise that you did so well, you being so old.”

Hal, along with her brothers, looked at her with a puzzled expression. Delia giggled.

“Hal’s only two years older than me, Lily,” Rob said. “Hardly old.”

“Well,
you
do keep in good form, Rob, with all that you do.” She let the implication that the viscount was in poor condition hang in the air, though it was preposterous, especially considering how well his blue waistcoat hung from his broad shoulders and hinted at the lithe, battle-tested muscles of his chest and abdomen. She made herself look into her teacup. She could feel herself reverting to the young fool she’d been, and she was getting to the point of being just about unable to stand herself.

“I’ll get a jar for the ointment,” she said, excusing herself.

When she got back, carrying a small jar filled with the ointment Hal supposedly wanted, Delia and Ian were the only ones left in the room.

“Where did Roxham go?” she asked.

Ian waved his hand airily before plucking what was at least his fifth sandwich off the tea tray. “Rob was going to show him some dazzling new tool that should save the work of four men or some such. I suppose you can just take the ointment out to him.”

But at the back of the house she could see through the open door that Rob was talking to one of the servants, with the viscount nowhere in sight. He must have left.

She was tired from her recent late nights—
that
was why her relief that he was gone was mixed with disappointment. Surely otherwise she wouldn’t be thinking about those words she’d written in her journal, words about touching him…

Leaving the ointment on a hall table, she decided to go up to her room and lie down. If she were well rested, she’d feel more like herself.

She opened the door to her bedchamber and had walked partway in when she stopped and gasped. Hal was standing by the window, reading her journal. He looked up at her and grinned.

Quickly she shut the door behind her.

“What on earth are you doing in here?” she demanded in a low voice. “What if someone saw you coming in?”

“I was discreet,” he said mildly, “and I think it should be obvious what I’m doing in your room. You’re hardly in a position to complain, having been in
my
room last night.”

“You had something of mine.”

He glanced down at the journal and turned a page as casually as if he were flipping through a book of prints. “I notice that either your maid is a fiend for symmetry, or you line up your combs and brushes with a ruler.”

He was trying to make her squirm. She very much didn’t want him to know how effective he was being. She folded her hands tightly in front of her and pushed down her disappointment that her triumph over him hadn’t lasted. “There’s nothing wrong with liking order.”

He turned another page. Surely he couldn’t actually be reading it right now? Surely it would take him time to decipher?

“What about disorder? Doing the wrong thing, the thing you don’t think you should do?” His eyes scanned the page before him.

“Why would I want to do something I knew was wrong?”

“Maybe because you were questioning whether it really was wrong? Whether it really is so awful, for instance, to have made a fool of yourself over a man?”