She faced him then, tilting her head and watching him as though he were a creature under glass, fascinating and disgusting all at once. “That’s impossible.”
“Why?”
She lifted one shoulder and lowered it. “Because love is for the lucky among us.”
“What does that mean?” he said, her words rioting through him, unwelcome in their eerie truth.
“Only that I am not counted among the lucky. Everyone I have ever loved has left.”
He did not have time to reply, because she was through the door and gone, leaving him with his dogs, the words echoing in the empty room.
Englishwomen were supposed to be meek and biddable.
No one had told Lillian Hargrove such a thing, apparently.
When Alec had told her he was willing to give her a dowry that would get her married to any man she chose, it had occurred to him that she might embarrass him with thanks. After all, twenty-five thousand pounds was a king’s fortune. Several kings’ fortunes. Enough to buy her and the man of her choosing—whoever that was—the life she wanted. An approximation of the love she’d desired.
Granted, Lillian Hargrove was not the swooning type, but the woman would not have been out of bounds to be grateful. A tear or two would not have been unexpected.
Instead, she’d declined the offer.
He’d left her alone for the day, giving her time to change her mind—to come to terms with the idea and realize that his decision had been benevolent if nothing else. After all, she’d wanted marriage once—albeit with an utter ass—and if she considered his solution, Alec was certain she would agree it was best.
These disastrous events could end with marriage and children and the kind of security of which women dreamed.
I am not counted among the lucky.
Bollocks. Luck changed.
If the woman wanted love, she would get it, dammit. He might not believe in it, but he’d will it into being if need be.
He was her guardian and he would play the role, dammit. He would repair her reputation, and he would return to Scotland. And she would be another’s problem. And that would be that.
They had no choice. There was no way to run from the painting, unless she was willing to live life as a hermit. She certainly couldn’t spend the rest of her life rattling around number 45 Berkeley Square, a ward of the dukedom. She was too old to be a ward now—what would it look like when she was forty? Sixty?
It was ridiculous. She would no doubt see that.
Alec had arrived early to the afternoon meal with plans to read his correspondence until she arrived, preferably with an apology and sense on her lips.
After a quarter of an hour, he called for his luncheon. After a half an hour, he finished his letters, but remained with them, pretending to read, not wanting her to think he was waiting for her. After three quarters of an hour, he called for a second meal, as the first had grown cold in the waiting.
And after an hour, he’d called for Hudgins, who took another ten minutes to arrive at a virtual crawl.
“Is Miss Hargrove ill?” he asked the moment the man entered the room.
“Not to my knowledge,” Hudgins replied. “Shall I fetch her?”
Alec imagined that it would take the old man the same amount of time to reach Lily’s rooms as it would take Alec to search the entire house. And so he declined the offer and did just that.
She was not in the kitchens or the library, the conservatory or any of the sitting rooms. He climbed the stairs and began to search the bedchambers, beginning with the floor where he slept in the suite that had been described to him as “the duke’s rooms.” Sharing the corridor were door after door of perfectly neat, beautifully appointed, large, airy, clearly unused spaces. How many people were supposed to live in this damn house?
And where was Lily’s chamber if it was not among these?
He climbed to the third floor, imagining that he would find rooms similar in size to his own, massive and filled with her things. It occurred to him that there was nothing in the common areas of the house that indicated that she lived here at all. In the two days that he had shared the space, he hadn’t seen a single thing out of place. A book left on a side table. A teacup. A shawl.
Hell, Cate produced trails of items throughout the Scottish keep, as though she were leaving breadcrumbs in the forest. He’d just assumed all women did the same.
The third floor was darker than the second, the hallway narrower. He opened the first door to discover what must have been a nursery or a schoolroom at some point, a large room with a lingering scent of wood and slate, golden shafts of afternoon light revealing dust dancing in the space. He closed the door and headed down the dim corridor, where a young maid replaced candles in a nearby sconce.
“Pardon me,” he said, and whether it was the Scots burr or the polite words or the fact that he was nearly two feet taller than she was, he shocked the hell out of the girl, who nearly came off the floor at the sound.
“Your—Your Grace?” she stammered, dropping into a curtsy worthy of a meeting with the Queen.
He smiled down at her, hoping to put her at ease. She shrank back toward the wall. He did the same, to the opposite side, suddenly deeply conscious of the fact that he was so out of place in the narrow space. Wishing he were smaller, as he always did in this godforsaken country, where he threatened to crush furniture like matchsticks.
Pushing the thoughts to the side, Alec returned to the matter at hand. “Which is Miss Lillian’s chamber?”
The girl’s eyes went even wider, and Alec immediately understood. “I am not planning anything nefarious, lass. I’m simply looking for her.”
The girl shook her head. “She’s gone.”
At first, the words did not make sense. “She’s what?”
“Gone,” the girl blurted. “She’s left.”
“When did she leave?”
“This morning, sir.” After their disastrous breakfast.
“When will she be back?”
Those wide eyes gleamed white. “Never, Your Grace.”
Well. He did not like the idea of that. “Show me her chamber.”
She immediately obeyed, walked him down the turning hallway, all the way to the back corner of the house—to the place where the servants’ stairs climbed in narrow twists to their chambers on the upper levels of the house. To such a strange location in the home that he nearly stopped her to repeat his original request, certain he’d terrified the young woman into miscomprehension.
But he hadn’t. She knocked on a barely there door and opened it a crack, immediately leaping back to allow him entry.
“Thank you.”
“You—you’re welcome,” she stuttered, the surprise in her voice leaving Alec hating this country anew, with its ridiculous rules about gratitude and the servant class. A man thanked those who helped him, no matter their station. Hell. Because of their station.
“You are free to go,” he said softly, pushing the door open, revealing Lillian’s quarters, tiny and tucked away, so small that the door did not open all the way, instead catching on the foot of the little bed.
One side of the room shrank beneath a deeply sloped ceiling, beyond which the servants’ stairs climbed, threatening the entire space with a sense of deep, abiding claustrophobia. The sunlight that had streamed into the nursery made the tiny room warm, but that could also have been the result of its contents.
Here were all of Lillian’s things, the breadcrumbs that were missing from the forest of the rest of the house: books piled everywhere; several baskets of needlepoint, filled with threads in a rainbow of colors; a little wooden hammock overflowing with old newspapers; an easel with a half-painted view of tile rooftops and trees in spring—the view that lived beyond the narrow little window that dwarfed the opposite wall.
The bed was covered in blankets and pillows, more than Alec had ever seen on much larger beds, each coverlet in a bright color that seemed to run at odds with the others.
That was, perhaps the most shocking thing about this room—not the size, nor the clutter, nor the fact that it was as far away from the rest of the house as possible, though certainly all those things surprised—but the color. There was so much of it.
It was so different from everything he’d seen of her before.
So opposite the rest of the house she’d decorated according to the latest styles and the demands of myriad ladies’ magazines. Here, in this wild, wonderful space filled with clutter and color and . . .
Stockings.
Alec’s gaze fell to the foot of the bed, where a pair of pretty silk stockings was draped over the plain wood frame, so carelessly that he imagined Lillian had removed the long sheaths of silk with distracted speed.
He would be lying if he said he did not pause for a moment to consider such an action, Lily one foot up on that colorful bed, untying the little white ribbons at the tops of the stockings and rolling them down her legs, tossing them over the rail before tossing herself into the pillows to rest.
Not that rest was the first thing he imagined her doing in that bed after removing the stockings. He imagined her there, spread across that little bed, hair wild over her pillow, eyes half-closed, lips parted, beckoning.
To him.
He was instantly hard, and entirely furious with himself. He cleared his throat. He was her guardian. And she was his ward. His missing ward.
And he was in this room to locate her, with or without her stockings.
He shifted at the discomfort of the thought. With. With her stockings.
He turned away from the offending garments, ignoring his body, instead looking to the rest of the room, so clearly Lillian’s sanctuary, so much so that he felt like the worst kind of criminal entering the space. A burglar with the crown jewels. A layman in a sacristy. Later, it would occur to him that even if he’d attempted to stop himself from entering that strange little room, he would not have been able to do so.
Alec stepped in, leaving the door as open as it could be left, his attention falling to the little wooden desk tucked under the low ceiling, where a pile of paper sat in organized chaos, a pen atop it, having left a blotch of ink on the pristine sheet. He ducked into the space and ran his fingers across the ecru, thinking on other letters—the ones that had summoned him south to this woman, who could drive him mad if he allowed it.
Certainly, standing in this room, she seemed the madwoman. She had a half-dozen bedchambers to choose from and a dozen more rooms in which to live, and still she chose this little hole.
There was a large hinged trunk against the wall next to the desk, left unlatched. Alec leaned down to open it. It was filled with letters, it seemed, a collection of well-worn envelopes that had obviously been opened and reopened, each with a letter that had been read and reread.
He lifted one, knowing that he shouldn’t, knowing it made him a scoundrel, but too riveted to Lily’s name and the bold, black direction scrawled across the envelope to stop himself. He opened it, his eyes immediately falling to the signature.
Hawkins.
It was remarkable how quickly one man could loathe another.
His gaze scanned the words . . . a mountain of pretty gibberish.
The loveliest lady in London.
My muse.
Someone had sketched a flower in the margins of the letter, a beautiful, bold lily, fluted and perfect. Alec supposed it was Hawkins who had done so, even as he wished the man’s talent was less than purported.
My Lily.
Alec balked at the nickname, scrawled in that bold, confident hand, and her words from the previous day echoed through him. Don’t call me that. It’s not for you.
Well, it certainly wasn’t for this Hawkins imbecile, either. And she sure as hell didn’t belong to Hawkins.
She belonged to him.
Alec shot straight up at the thought, cracking his head powerfully against the ceiling, so hard that he swore in a loud, long, utterly inappropriate string of Gaelic.
One hand to his head, Alec stood, continuing his colorful invectives. As the sting subsided, it occurred to him that he should be grateful for the blow to the head, however, as it had literally knocked sense back into him.
Lillian Hargrove did not belong to him.
Indeed, he was working quite hard to ensure that she was firmly in his past.
What if he did give her the money? Not the five thousand she was due—the twenty-five? Fifty? Enough to take herself from Britain. To the Continent, to the Americas, to somewhere else entirely. She would have a fortune large enough to secure a future as a queen anywhere she liked.
He imagined her in silks and satins in Paris, in a wig that fairly touched the sky, the world at her feet, and no one there caring a bit that she had once been in London, living beneath the servants’ stairs.
She wasn’t his sister, after all. Cate was a child, barely eighteen, with no sense of the world beyond. Lily had the knowledge that came with age and womanhood. She’d sat for a damn nude, hadn’t she?
She’d gotten herself into this particular situation, hadn’t she? And while she was old enough to know better. She had to have known what might have come of it.
The shame would still follow her.
He knew better than most how it would, burrowing beneath the skin and never leaving. Whispering in the night. She’d never escape it, even if she escaped those who would cloak her in it.
Just as he never had.
He leaned down to replace the letter, noting the place where the paper had once been, and what it had revealed. He crouched, collecting the layer of correspondence that hid a mountain of white fabric. Of white clothes.
Tiny, white, child’s clothes, all embroidered linen and lace collars, gowns and caps and blankets. Instinctively, Alec reached out to touch them—to hold them up, these pristine, clearly unused clothes. The little dress in his hand had a row of pretty blue flowers embroidered along the hem. Another had a row of brown rocking horses, with golden saddles and halters. A third, the moon and stars in fine yellow.
He knew without hesitation that these clothes had been made by Lily. For her children. Likely for those she expected to share with that imbecile Hawkins.
Without thought, Alec continued to dig through the trunk, finding little caps and socks and soft cotton boots with red leather bottoms. In a state of utter madness, he tipped the boots up and put the soles to his nose, breathing in the scent of fine leather, feeling the softness against his skin. Like a madman.
He dropped them like they were aflame, and yet, somehow, remained unable to look away from them when they landed on a layer of satin and lace that did not look like it was for a child at all.
He looked over his shoulder to the open door, fleetingly imagining what he would say if a servant happened by, but not entirely caring if he were discovered. He was too far down this particular road at this point.
He lifted the dress from the trunk and knew immediately what it was—pristine and white, as untouched as the children’s clothes he’d found above and somehow, oddly, far more precious. Far more important.
This was Lillian’s wedding dress. No doubt sewn with dreams of happiness and a future filled with love and family.
She wanted to marry.
She dreamed of it, and of the family that would come with it.
As he held this garment in his hands—proof of her desire, of the fact that she did not wish to be alone, that she had not spent her life dreaming of being alone with none but herself for companion, he found his commitment to his plan renewed.
She was his to protect. To care for. And he would do it. He would get her married. He’d fulfill her dreams.
Of course, to do that, he had to get the girl found, which wasn’t going to happen as long as he stood around in what would kindly be referred to as a cupboard beneath the servants’ stairs. She’d likely gone to visit friends.
A noise punctuated the thought, a little bang, followed by several thuds and a peal of muffled lau
ghter, and Alec realized that the room wasn’t just minuscule. It was loud. He could hear the servants on the other side of the wall.
Why on earth did she sleep here?
He did not have time to consider the question, as it occurred that the proximity to the servants was a boon in this particular moment. He left the room and poked his head out into the servants’ stairwell, catching a footman and two maids descending. “You there.”
They went stone still, and one of the young women squeaked.
The footman spoke first. “Your Grace?”
“Who are Miss Hargrove’s most frequent visitors?”
Silence.
Alec tried again. “Her friends. Who visits her?”
One of the girls shook her head. “No one.”
His brow furrowed. “No one?”
The other shook her head. “No one. She does not have friends.”
The words came heavy in the dark stairwell, and surprising enough for Alec to have to work to hold back his instinctive How is that possible? Lillian was beautiful and clever and had the power of a dukedom behind her. How could she possibly lack friends? Perhaps they simply did not come to the house.
He nodded once. “Thank you.”
“Your Grace?” the footman asked, confusion in his voice.
“Och,” Alec replied. “In Scotland we’re more grateful than they are in England, apparently. You needn’t peer at me like a lion in a cage.”
The servants blinked in unison. “Yes, Your Grace.”
Alec returned to the landing as the trio passed. “Oh!” one of the girls cried a split second later before she popped her head around the door frame. “She sees the solicitor.”
It was Alec’s turn to blink. “I beg your pardon?”
“Older man. Wiv spectacles. Starswood or somefin’,” she said.
“Settlesworth?”
The girl smiled. “That’s it! Comes once a month. One of the other girls says it’s ’ow Lillian—” She corrected herself. “Miss Hargrove—gets her blunt.” Another pause. “Her money.”
Of course it was.
She couldn’t leave home without funds. And Settlesworth held the purse strings. Alec turned to leave the girl before another thought occurred. He turned back to find her watching him. “Why does she sleep here?” he asked, indicating the room.