Page 31 of Brave New Earl (The Way to a Lord's Heart 1)

Jean gazed at him.

“The resemblance.” He indicated the portrait with a gesture. “It…flashes out at me. There and then gone. He looks just like his mother, and then he doesn’t. If it was one or the other, I’m sure I’d grow accustomed. But I find it hard to take the…sudden blow.”

She nodded. Her dreams were like that. Some memories as well.

“I’m very glad you’re here to help,” he added.

“You are?”

“Yes.”

“I’d thought you seemed to be doing well. With the pony and all. Perhaps I wasn’t needed.”

He sat straighter. “We agreed to work together, for Geoffrey’s sake.”

“But I’m not sure what I can do.” She wanted to help him, Jean realized. She wanted a number of things she hadn’t recognized until tonight.

Lord Furness turned away. “I ran today,” he said in a harsh tone. “I had to get away from him. My own son. I hid in this room as I’ve been doing for far too long. I wanted never to come out.”

“But you did.”

“And I was a bear at dinner. Surly and curt.” He turned back to her. “Do you see that hiding is easier?”

Jean couldn’t look away from those blue-gray eyes. They were mirrors and temptations and beckoning abysses. “Yes,” she whispered.

He blinked. Jean felt as if she’d tripped on a missed step. She felt Alice staring down at her. In a confusion of emotion, she stood. “I…I should go up.”

He didn’t argue. Was he finding it just as difficult to speak? Shaken, Jean took her candle and went.

When she entered her room—minutes, eons, later—Tab was sitting on her bed. He gazed at her in seeming reproach and mewed. “Where were you?” cried Jean. “I looked everywhere.”

“Mew,” said Tab. He kneaded the damask coverlet, pulling a thread of the pattern loose.

“Don’t. Oh, I’ll have to ask for a plain bedcover.” She put the candlestick on the bedside table and ran a hand over the kitten’s silky fur. He flopped over and offered his pale belly, tiny paws waving in the air. Jean laughed and petted him.

Seven

When Benjamin rose the next morning, after a restless night, he discovered that someone had slipped a scrap of paper under his bedchamber door. He picked it up and read the unfamiliar handwriting:

Kitten found.

The terse message made him smile, and then frown. She’d really been there—in the library—last night. With her unruly hair and clinging dressing gown and haunted eyes. He might have thought it a dream, but here was proof. And so she’d also heard him say things he never said to anyone. She’d struck a sympathetic chord, at that late hour, in those shifting shadows, and he’d succumbed. Of course he regretted it now, as one did a reckless indulgence. Miss Saunders would look at him differently today. She’d imagine she understood him, and perhaps pity him. Benjamin gritted his teeth. He dressed quickly and headed out to get some air.

A soft mist drifted over the lawns of Furness Hall and, with it, a hush. He could hear the soft drip of dew from leaf and branch. The damp air brushed his cheek as he walked through the gardens, where daffodils poked from the earth. The sky would clear later, he judged, and the day would be warm. The lure of a good gallop drew him around to the back of the house. Physical exertion always improved his mood.

Benjamin strode into the stables and was about to call for a groom when he heard a high, light voice say, “We’ll go everywhere.” There was no one in sight, but he knew the voice. It was Geoffrey, in conversation with someone. “To the stream,” the boy continued. “And the woods. Tom says there’s a fox den on the other side of the hills.”

Geoffrey was in the loose box with his pony, Benjamin realized. The other new arrival, Molly, looked on from the next stall.

“He wouldn’t take me to see it, because he didn’t havepermission.”

Geoffrey said the final word as if it was a curse.

“We’ll find it. And watch the kits play. I won’t let them hurt you!”

Benjamin smiled at the picture.

“When I’m bigger, we’ll go to the gorge.Ourselves. And stay as long as we want. I’ll show you the caves.”

---