Page 19 of The Earl of Christmas Past
He closed his eyes and stepped back, allowing her space. “I shouldn’t have said that.”
Squirming with shame and regret, she instantly buried her face in her hands. “No. That is—the fault is mine. I asked you the vulgar question. I don’t know what’s gotten into me.”
“I order you to stop feeling shame,” he said with a stern frown.
She looked up at him askance. “You can’t command emotions, that’s not how they work.”
“I can and I will,” he shot back, looking to goad her past her mortification. “I insist the blame for our—indelicate interaction be placed on my shoulders. I’ve forever been a man too plain of speech. Too blunt and coarse and forbidding. It made for a successful Lieutenant Colonel, a mediocre nobleman, and well… ripe shit at relationships.”
The tremulous tilt at the corner of her mouth told him his candor was working. “Which relationships?” she queried, her relentless curiosity returning. “With women, you mean?”
“’Twas doubtless why I remained a bachelor at five and thirty. I assumed one took a wife like one took a hill in combat. It was all strategy and espionage, if not an all-out battle. I was built to win, not woo, and I frightened many a maidenly noble lady into the arms of some gentler, more civilized man.”
She wrinkled her nose at that rather adorably. He wasn’t certain how to interpret the expression, but that didn’t stop him from continuing, if only to put conversational space between their previous fraught interaction.
He marched around her, exploring the space of his chamber with his hands clasped behind him. He did his best not to prowl like the predator he was. To draw his tense shoulders away from his ears. “My social ineptitude reached past the fairer sex to anyone, really. My parents. My brother, James. Even after everything, he came to claim my remains all those years ago. Or perhaps he only returned for the ring, and taking my benighted bones back to the de Lohr crypts was an afterthought, though I couldn’t say I’d blame him.”
“The ring?” She grasped onto the one subject he’d only mentioned as an afterthought.
“A de Lohr signet. Given to my templar ancestor—the Lion Claw, they’d called him—by his ladylove so many generations ago.”
John summoned a picture of the piece into his mind. The head of a lion had been etched into the precisely crafted purest gold; rubies set into the ocular cavities as if the blood spilled by the apex predator reflected in his eyes.
“Surely your brother came to collectyou, and the ring was the afterthought.”
“You underestimate the significance my family put on that ring,” he said gruffly. “And you didn’t know my brother. We did not part on the best of terms. I regretted that. I was a hard man to know, and I did not understand his impulsive passions. His depth of emotion. And, if I’m honest, I envied him his freedom as the second son, his shoulders unencumbered by the weight of the de Lohr name.” Unbidden, John looked into the past, seeing the familiar face of his brother, the disappointment in his eyes the last time they spoke. “I am confident James made a better Earl than I might have. At least, I hope he did.”
“The Earldom of Hereford is still one of the most wealthy and respected titles in the Empire,” she explained gently. “If that is any condolence to you.”
It was, actually. “You’re kind to say so. I don’t get word of such things up here. It’s mostly clan gossip and peasant revelry.”
Something about that elicited a giggle from her, and when he looked, her silver eyes were twinkling like the little diamond bobs in her ears. “We don’t call them peasants anymore. Not that it should matter to you much, I suppose.”
He chuffed out his own sound of mirth. “Yes. A more enlightened age, you’ve mentioned.” He was about to ask her to tell him about it when she began to pace as if puzzling something out.
“So not even your remains are here in Scotland. I still find it extraordinarily peculiar that your bones should rest in the de Lohr crypts but your spirit should berestlesshere of all places. Did you visit this inn before you died?”
“Never.”
“Perhaps you killed the previous proprietor in the war?”
“No, I’m certain it has something to do with Carrie Pitagowan and her blasted curse.” He’d been over and over it in his mind, and he wasn’t exactly excited to rework it with her. “Do you happen to know any witches who might be able to break it?”
She ignored his dry sarcasm. “What about her Chamber of Sorrows?”
At the mention of the room, he went still.
She continued, pacing the length of the bed. “I asked Bess, and she told me that Carrie went to Jacobite battlefields and took things, especially from English officers. I’ve noticed you have no saber nor hat nor medals upon your jacket.” She whirled on him, ceasing her pacing as she held her hands up in a motion that might stop the entire world so it might listen to her next sentence. “John! What if she took your ring?”
Christ but she impressed him. She’d been here all of five minutes and she’d discovered what it’d taken him decades of eavesdropping to find out.
“I have no doubt my body was looted after the battle, by starving, angry highlanders. But I’ve searched the Chamber of Sorrows. Nothing in it belongs to me.”
John had done many distasteful things in his life as a soldier, and also in his short tenure as the heir to an Earldom, but smothering the enthusiastic light shining from Vanessa Latimer’s open, upturned face had to be the worst.
Still, he could tell he’d not defeated her as the wheels and cogs of what he was coming to understand was a sharp and restless brain didn’t cease their machinations. “Can you take me to this Chamber of Sorrows?”
“Certainly, though it’s not far.” He motioned to the wardrobe, a piece of furniture almost as tall as he was. “The Pitagowans have merely covered the door with this.”
