The Wedding Night (7 page)

A piece of twine would do nicely.

Jack left the house through the rear door, relieved at the head-clearing
mission,
and traversed the graveled garden walk to the
toolshed
. He found only bailing wire there—strong, but hardly suited to hanging about a woman's neck. He tried the stable and the laundry and finally located a thin length of hempen cord in the cook's pantry.

Jack let himself into the library, lit the lamp at his desk, and noticed the broken pot, sitting like an indictment. Beside it was a brush-
stoppered
bottle of cement.

"Thank you, Sumner," Jack said to the bottle, "you've just saved my hide." He would glue the bowl back together in no time, and Miss Faelyn would be none the wiser.

He sat down at the desk and found a shard that looked as though it would fit perfectly—well, almost perfectly—in the space near the lip of the bowl. He
unstoppered
the cement and was about to dab the sharp-smelling goo against the first piece when the library door opened.

"What the devil do you think you're doing, Rushford!" Miss Faelyn was on him in the next blink, a cloud of peach-scented fury as she grabbed the bowl out of his hand and cradled it as though it were a baby chick and he were a slavering wolf.

"It's … broken," he said, feeling foolish as hell for stating the obvious.

"It isn't
broken
, sir. It's
Pictish
!" She held the thing up to the lamp, inspecting the finish as though suspecting he had bruised it.

"
Pictish
?"

"
And
irreplaceable. What were you going to do?"

Jack felt like a child confessing to roughhousing in the parlor. "I was trying to repair the bloody thing."

"Repair it? Sweet blazes!"

She clutched it tighter, abject horror on her face. This wasn't going well. He'd best confess all.

"The breakage must have happened in the course of shipment from
Oxford
. Look for yourself, in here." Jack pointed to the shards still tangled in the shavings, prepared to ride out her displeasure and then buy her another pot or two. "Shattered in two dozen pieces."

She obliged him by peering into the box of rubble,
then
stared up at him as though he'd grown a second nose. An airy, indulgent smile bloomed in her eyes and made them twinkle like the evening star.

"
Which is exactly the state in which my father found it thirty years ago.
"

Inscrutable woman. She was testing him. There would be a lot of that between them; she hadn't come to him gently.

"Your father found the pot shattered?" he asked, willingly walking into her trap to best learn how she set them, how they could be sprung.

"Yes, shattered. Imbedded in clay, in a burial mound near
Dundurn
in
Scotland
."

A plausible trap, and utterly absorbing, this antiquarian of his. "Your father kept all these pieces of a broken bowl? Why?"

"Not a bowl, actually. A bevel-rimmed cook pot. Papa kept and cataloged the pieces because he was a scholar of antiquities, just as I am." As thorough and forbearing as a mother lion, Miss Faelyn gathered up all the pieces that Jack had spread out on his desk and replaced them one by one in their nest inside the crate.

"How, madam, do you know this cook pot was
Pictish
and not Wedgwood?" She smelled too much of the woods and his own roses, too fine to keep him from peering over her shoulder into all her nesting.

"The pot is red slipware, imported by the Romans from the
Mediterranean
. But the painting is"—she held up the rounded end and drew her finger along a series of black slashes as though she were lecturing to a room full of twelve-year-old boys—"here, Rushford, this raven design is
Pictish
. Third century, A.D."

Yes,
a fine trap
. An even finer fragrance. He sighted down her arm, up the curve of her wrist to her hand. "Ravens are
Pictish
then?"

"One of their most common designs. The raven was thought by the
Picts
to give power through omens and sneezing."

"Sneezing?" There were limits to his gullibility. He'd been willing to believe the
Picts
, the broken pot, the burial mound, and the omens. But sneezing ravens? "Not bloody likely, Miss Faelyn."

"Think what you will, Rushford. But considering your inexperience in the preservation of antiquities, you'd best leave the unpacking to me."

Mairey heard Rushford blow a curse from under his breath and fancied that she could feel it on her neck as she dug in the nearest crate and retrieved a bundle of eighteenth-century guides to county antiquities—one of the first purchases she'd ever made with her own money. She'd been twelve at the time, and proud as cinnamon pie.

"I'm more concerned over the matter of security, Miss Faelyn." He reached into his coat pocket and dragged out a double length of bristly twine. A key dangled from its center.

"Security for what? Hey!" He abruptly turned her away from him, then stepped in so close behind that his chest and all that heat met her back like a caress. Before she could protest he surrounded her completely with his arms, his broad hands holding the loop of twine out in front of her.

"You'll wear this always, madam." The weight of the key and the twine fell into place over one of her breasts, a buoyant pressure that could have been his caress. But his hands were busy behind her, wrestling with her hair and the knot he was tying.

"So
you're trusting
me with a key?" She centered the loop, trying to sound unperturbed, but the key matched the thrumming of her heart and echoed it in a pulsating swing.

He took her by the shoulders and turned her, frowning down into her eyes.

"This is not a game. Nor is it a scholarly grant where you can wile away the hours with your nose so deeply buried in a book that you can't tell
midday
from
midnight
. I've made an investment in you—"

"As I have in you."

"Exactly. I am what
is
known in the world of British finance as a mining baron."

A devil. A dragon. "So I understand."

She hated them all and appreciated his reminder, but not the intensity of his dark gaze and all the shards of crystal color she could count there.

"Investors and adventurers watch me closely in everything I do; they follow when my viewers appraise a coalfield. If my competitors or anyone else discovers that Viscount Jackson Rushford is looking for Celtic silver, every barrow and stone circle, every museum vault and private collection in the country, will be swarming with treasure-seekers. Holding
my
silver for ransom! Where would that leave us?"

His
silver. Mairey exhaled. She had never imagined this kind of threat to the glade and to her village. The vestiges of the
Willowmoon
legend were still whispered in the hills of the northern marches. Scavenging scholars like Arthur
Brawlings
would beat the woods for its mysteries. Rushford might just as well hire a circus parade and reporters from every rag in Fleet Street to tag along behind them.

"If you'd left me in
Oxford
, where I could have continued my work in secret—"

"In secret, Miss Faelyn? Where this collection of pot shards and rabbit pelts and untold treasure was housed behind a paper-thin door, which was hanging badly on pig-iron hinges and secured by a lock that had rusted open eons ago?"

"We never once had
so
much as a bottle of ink stolen." Yet she had never given much thought to thieves.

"Until someone like me, with a large enough wad of bank notes, came along to tempt the impeccably ethical Dean Hayward and his trustees?"

"You are the exception to every rule, my lord."

"Think what you will. If rumors should arise about our little enterprise, this library—bloody hell, this entire estate—will become a target for robbery. We need locks and we need privacy. I'm having a cupboard safe delivered tomorrow."

Rushford went to his desk, stripping out of his jacket—a wholly improper action, given the late hour and the fact that they were alone. But
Mairey's
objection never made it past her admiration. The man's shoulders were broad enough when bound by the sturdy seams of his jacket, but they grew massive and straining under the stark white of his shirt and silken waistcoat.

She grabbed a breath. "A cupboard safe, for what?"

"For locking up your notes when you're not with them." He studied her from under his brow as he unlinked his shirt cuffs and pocketed the studs. A thoroughly intimate
sight,
made of bedchambers and rumpled counterpanes … his male scent on her pillow, on her breast.

"Rushford!" He'd rolled his sleeves to his elbows; past his corded forearms, and had taken up a pry bar. "What are you doing with that?"

"Unpacking." He
thunked
the bar into place under the lid of a crate and yanked downward. The nails came away with a squawk. "I'll open and you can put things away."

Rather than fling
herself
across the crate and demand that he stop right there, Mairey smiled with as much gratitude as she could muster. "I'd rather unpack myself."

"And I'd rather help you. Here." He eyed her pointedly and handed her a bristly armful of wood shavings out of a crate marked Desk Drawers. He nodded in the direction of the enormous hearth. "For the firebox."

The nosy beast was going to pick through everything. All her notes and private papers from her father, exposed to his questions. She deposited the wad of shavings. Erecting a fortress against the man was going to be more difficult than she had imagined.

"I'll take that, Rushford." Mairey scooped the small desk drawer filled with letterhead and envelopes out of his hands.

"And while you do, you can tell me how your father came to have such an interest in this
Willowmoon
Knot."

She'd already planned the answer for that most unanswerable of all possible questions.

"He just fell into it, I suppose." She fit the drawer into the desk and then scooted past him, on his way with two drawers stacked together. "He heard about it somewhere and liked the idea of finding a vast treasure of silver."

Knowing with complete certainty that her father would approve of her defaming his character in this instance, Mairey shoved the drawer into its place on the right side of the desk and noticed that the lock had been pried open with the point of a knife. Her life and her destiny had been exposed without her permission. Would the man search her laundry, as well?

Rushford stood up from his muttering at the ill-fitting drawer full of pens and clips. Mairey backed up as he rose, but he was still as tall as the sky when he looked down his long, slightly crooked nose at her.

Cedar and citrus, she thought absurdly. "Your father heard about the
Willowmoon
somewhere? From his own father, perhaps?"

How could he know that? "Possibly." What else could she say? The man was a mind reader! Mairey slid out from beneath his heady scent and returned to the open crate before Rushford could dig around in it. She hurried back to the desk with another drawer, careful to hide its cache of pocket notebooks that her father used in the field. He hadn't been the neatest record-keeper, and she often found a stray note about the Knot in them.

Rushford was waiting for her, and snagged one of the books as she was shoving in the drawer.

"What are all these little books?" he asked, fanning the pages hard enough to ruffle the hair off his forehead. "You had one at the mill."

Mairey knew better than to grab it from him, though she dearly wanted to. "Field notes," she said.

He walked toward the lamp, blessedly distracted. "Yours?" he asked, frowning as he turned the pages. The book looked like a toy in his hands.

"Mostly." Mairey used his distraction to carry another drawer to its rightful place in this oh-so-wrong library.

"What the devil is a 'can-wall
gorif
'?" A harmless enough question. It would be good practice to answer him, if she was going to learn to dodge the man's curiosity without him noticing.

"
Canwyll
gorif
," she said. "A corpse candle."

Rushford raised a brow at her in reply.

"A
sourceless
light that foretells a death. It's a Welsh term. Also called a fetch-candle in
Scotland
."

"And
Nekha
lights by the people of the
Mekong
River
."

Mairey couldn't have been more surprised. "Truly?"

He nodded lightly, looking vastly proud of himself. "Truly."

The ends of
Mairey's
fingers began to itch to write it down.
Nekha
lights.
Mekong
River
. She found a pencil and scribbled Rushford's definition onto a stray shred of packing paper, folded it, and stuffed the piece into her bodice.