My Lady Rival (17 page)

“No, what worries me is that he died in here at all, and that smell— How did he die?” She sounded suspicious. Nauseated, too, but still suspicious.

“He . . .” A lex cleared his throat. Solemnly. “It is believed Lord Holcombe had too much to drink.”

“A nd that killed him?”

“It was most likely the inciting factor. The groom found him facedown in his own vomit and excrement upon arrival at Holcombe House.” Willa gagged. “Blehhhh—”

A lex flinched, immediately contrite. “I’m just teasing you. The physician said he A lex flinched, immediately contrite. “I’m just teasing you. The physician said he died from an issue with his heart. There was no vomit or excrement in the carriage.”

He eyed her with concern but was relieved to find her more focused on glaring at him than casting up her accounts. He grinned. “I’m sorry.” Her mouth pursed. “Then what is the smell?”

“We don’t know.”

A nd it didn’t matter, not right now. His hand was still holding hers, tugging her gently, insistently. His fingers remembered the shape of her hips beneath her boys’ clothes, the daze he’d felt when she’d suddenly disappeared to retrieve the fallen key. “Sit down before you fall, Willa.”

A t that moment the carriage took a sharp turn and she pitched to the side. She would have crashed into the door if not for A lex’s strong grasp. He growled and leaned forward to wrap his arms around her waist, hauling her back and onto his lap. “How can you become even more infuriating and obstinate the longer I know you? I didn’t think it possible.”

“I can sit on the seat, Mr. Laurie,” she said stiffly. “There’s no need for you to hold me.”

He chuckled and placed his lips at the curve in her neck, near the top of her spine. “But I find I always have a need to annoy you, Willa.” He couldn’t resist saying her name. Over and over.

She froze.

A moment later, A lex went still, then eased his mouth away.

“You kissed me,” she said calmly.

He sucked in a slow breath. “I did.”

“You don’t like me.”

“No, I don’t.”

He’d spoken the truth before: she was beautiful, intelligent, and charming. A nd sometimes she could be amusing. But he still didn’t like her. He tolerated her—

quite a bit.

A nd he wanted her; he couldn’t deny that.

Neither of them mentioned their conversation in the study.

“I’m fairly certain I don’t like you very much, either,” she said.

“Oh, I think you’re wrong.” A lex breathed across her shoulder and angled his head to study her, watching for any reaction: a shudder, perhaps, or a quick breath. He smiled when, in the faint light, he saw the slight ripple of her throat as she swallowed. “I think that deep down inside of your little black heart, there’s an infinitesimal, tiny little part of you that wanted me to kiss you.” Willa turned her head. She was so close that they nearly bumped noses. “A nd what if you’re correct? What if I did want you to kiss me?” Her voice was low, sounding like more of a confession than a curiosity.

He smiled and brought his mouth to her ear—a whisper away. “Then I have even more of an advantage over you than I thought.”

She lurched off his lap and tucked herself into the opposite corner of the She lurched off his lap and tucked herself into the opposite corner of the carriage again. “I should have stolen one of your horses to follow you.”

“Is that an admission regarding the kiss, then?”

She reached down and threw her shoe at him.

It hit his chest and he caught it as it fell, laughing. “It’ll be our little secret, Willa.

I promise not to tell anyone.”

“Might I remind you that you are the one who kissed me just now, Mr. Laurie?” He waved her shoe, then lowered it to the floor of the carriage and sent it sliding toward her. “A momentary lapse. Won’t happen again.”

“Hmph.” Willa put her shoe back on and crossed her arms. “See that it doesn’t.” Italy and the memory of that kiss—of everything he now knew it meant—echoed between them.

She peeked behind the blinds. “We’re traveling through the countryside. The meeting’s not in London?”

A lex smiled. “Hence the carriage.”

She didn’t respond but continued staring out the window, and A lex turned his head slightly to once again pretend he was staring out his window. He watched her out of the corner of his eye, and it seemed as if the entire world had suddenly become a most glorious, wondrous place and he had been named king.

Willa Stratton had kissed him in Italy not because of strategy, but because she desired him. The truth had been present tonight when he came too close in the study, at the slight stutter of her breath and the quick aversion of her gaze. It was true that she had hidden it for a long time and had hidden it well.

A nd it was a shame that he wasn’t a nicer man, for a nicer man would surely have allowed such things to remain in the past. But A lex decided the role of the scoundrel suited him just fine; her secret was his now, and he intended to never let her forget it.

It was a small cottage in the country, surrounded by trees in all directions. As they walked toward the front door, Willa breathed in the faint scents of foxglove and lavender, roses and honeysuckle. She sneezed.

Oh, no. No matter—she would breathe through her mouth. She must find a way to convince Woolstone to give her the dye instead.

“God bless you,” A lex said, then knocked on the door.

A man whose head came higher than the doorway stood on the opposite side.

He stooped to see them, and when he did his eyes narrowed at her. “Who is she?” he asked A lex.

“Mr. Woolstone, may I present Miss Willa Stratton? She is the daughter of the A merican dye maker who is also interested in your dye.” Woolstone, not a servant? True, he had the black hair and pale eyes of the Earl of Uxbridge and Lady Marianna, but he was much thicker, much larger. A s he turned and led them into the cottage without saying anything else, she saw that he easily topped A lex by at least six inches. The man was a giant!

How was she to charm a giant who didn’t even acknowledge her presence beyond a “ho-hum”?

Willa glanced around the inner room of the cottage—for it was a true cottage, very small and simple, with one main room and only two doors leading elsewhere. A bedchamber, perhaps? A kitchen?

But worse—much, much worse than the fact that the giant didn’t seem to like females—was the fact that nearly every surface of the room was covered with plants. Flowers, ferns, potted trees, small bushes, ivies. They crept along the floor so that Willa and A lex had to hop from open space to open space to avoid crushing them underfoot; they climbed up to the furniture, entwining their leaves and branches to create a domestic forest; they stood on thrones and pedestals from one corner to the next: on chairs, on tables, on a small ladder and a very old, very worn gardener’s workbench.

She was in hell. God had tired of all her lies and manipulations and now he was doling out his judgment.

“A hhhhhhhh-CHOO!”

A pparently breathing through one’s mouth didn’t help.

Both Woolstone and A lex whirled toward her, the first wearing a scowl and the second an expression of surprise. It had been an especially loud sneeze.

“A re you all right?” A lex asked. Woolstone had already turned around and continued stomping his way—careful of his precious plants, of course—to a continued stomping his way—careful of his precious plants, of course—to a haphazard group of chairs.

Willa nodded, then sighed as he, too, turned around.

She hated sneezing. She hated sneezing worse than she hated snakes, or spiders, or playing the pianoforte, or even—yes—even more than she hated blood pudding. She hated the tickling feeling that started at the top of one’s nose that made one aware that the sneeze was impending. She hated the inevitability of it, and that no matter how hard she tried not to sneeze, it was doomed to happen.

She hated the awful squealing sound she made when she sneezed, the occasions when she didn’t have a kerchief to put over her nose before it actually happened—

and it seemed she always sneezed when there wasn’t a kerchief nearby, such as now.

She hated sneezing more than anything else in the world, but the swelling in her throat was much scarier.

“A h, A lex. I mean, Mr. Laurie.” She sneezed again. Three times.

He’d already sat down across from Woolstone, and this time his expression was one of growing annoyance as he looked up at her.

“Yes, Miss Stratton?” Then he stared, his mouth open in horror, and Willa tried to surreptitiously put her hand to her nose to make sure it was clean. It was. Then she looked down, to make sure there weren’t any—blemishes—on the front of her clothes. There weren’t.

“What is it?” she asked. “Why are you looking at me like that?”

“Miss Stratton,” Woolstone said, because of course he had to look at her, too. He stood abruptly from his stool. “It appears you are having a reaction to something.

Your face is swelling.”

“It is?” She put her palms to her cheeks, then to her forehead. Her eyes felt small and dry. She tried to swallow and winced. Her throat was worse.

“I need to leave,” she said, then whirled and ran out the door, most likely killing some of his vicious little plants on the way.

She stopped in the drive, the ribs of the corset pressing against her own as she tried to breathe. Wait, no—she wasn’t wearing a corset. “Dear God,” she said, planting her hands on her waist and panting up at the sky. “If you let me live, I promise to—”

What could she promise? A lex wanted her to return to A merica and leave him be so he could have his precious dye. Her father wanted her to marry Eichel and help him expand the company through their alliance. She didn’t have anything to give up, nothing except her dreams for her own independence and happiness.

A nd it appeared that she wouldn’t even have those since Woolstone was most likely handing A lex the dye information right now.

She started crying. She couldn’t breathe—whether from running or because she was about to die from the plants inside—she was still sneezing even as tears rolled down her face, and she was fairly certain the squishy substance beneath her foot was a small part of a rather large pile of horse manure.

Then suddenly A lex was there, his hand on her shoulder, his face blurred before Then suddenly A lex was there, his hand on her shoulder, his face blurred before her eyes. “Willa, are you all right? Why are you crying?” She cried harder, gasping for breath.

“Willa?” Both of his hands were on her shoulders now. He shook her. “Willa, answer me.” He cursed and left her there, and she heard voices shouting, felt a cool cloth on her face, turned her head and glimpsed the statue-shadow of a tulip a few feet away, rising to the sky above . . .

She heard whispers. The not-so-very-hushed, loud-trying-to-be-quiet whispers of children.

Willa opened her eyes, frowned at the yellow canopy above her head, and sat up.

Upon sitting, she became aware of three odd and equally disturbing things: first, her head seemed to want to collapse upon her neck every direction she tried to turn and ached like someone had taken a wooden plank to it; second, the walls were also yellow, which meant that unless the Woolstone giant had a very cheerful conscience inside his gruff exterior, she now lay in someone else’s bedchamber entirely since she was most certainly not in her suite at Mivart’s; and third, the two girls and one boy whispering back and forth from one side of the bed to the other looked remarkably like A lex. A t least, the younger girl and boy did. The older girl was blond with blue eyes.

Willa watched as the girls whispered. “She’s awake,” the younger one said. Willa turned her head slowly to the other side of the bed as the boy whispered in response.

“I know she’s awake, don’t I? I can see her sitting up, can’t I?”

“What does she look like?”

A t the eager question from the older girl, Willa searched her gaze. Sightless eyes stared back at her.

The boy looked up at Willa, squinting. “She has—”

“I have blond hair that is very similar in shade to yours. Though mine is wavy and your hair is very nicely curled. Blue eyes like yours, although mine have some green in them, too, whereas yours are the clear, shining color of the sky. My nose is a trifle blunt, my lips too wide, and my forehead high.” The girl had started grinning when Willa complimented her in comparisons of their hair and eyes, but now she frowned at the latter description, her brows puckered. Then she looked in the direction of her younger sister and whispered,

“The first part sounded nice, but I’m not sure about the rest. Is she pretty, Tor?” The girl named Tor grinned up at her, proudly displaying her missing two front teeth. “She forgot to mention her face is all puffy,” she said. “Sorry about your face, Miss Stratton. A lex said that flowers attacked you. Is that true?”

“He did not!” said the boy, squinting at her again. Did he have spectacles he’d misplaced? “He said that she attacked the fl—fl—flow—”

“Flowers,” Willa finished for him, smiling at A lex’s version of the story. Of course he’d painted her as the villain. The smile disappeared when the boy course he’d painted her as the villain. The smile disappeared when the boy scowled at her.

“He doesn’t like it when people try to correct him,” the blind girl said. “You have to wait and let him finish it. Even if it does take hours.”

“Oh, I apologize,” she directed to the boy. “I didn’t realize . . .” She’d thought he just couldn’t remember the word, not that he had a stutter.

He turned his scowl toward his sister. “You don’t have to go about telling everyone and the whole world, P—P—P—”

The blind girl shook her head, then turned toward Willa and made a small curtsy. “It’s nice to meet you, Miss Stratton. My name is Miss Philippa Laurie. You may call me Pippa, though. I like how you described my hair and eyes.” She paused. “But is the rest of my face all right, too?”

Willa swallowed a laugh and realized her throat felt amazingly better, almost normal again. “You are quite beautiful, Pippa.”

The girl’s open expression turned suddenly shy for a moment as she ducked her head.