Brinkley nodded.
“Well?” the master roared. “Did they return together, or not?”
“They were most certainly together,” Brinkley said with dignity. “All three ladies returned to the house at a perfectly respectable hour…I believe around midnight.”
“A mistake,” Rafe said, dragging an unsteady hand through his hair. “Must be another Miss A.E. I’ll make them print a retraction. I’ll burn down their offices. I’ll sue them for slander.”
Brinkley didn’t think that those ideas would solve the dilemma before them, but he kept mum. “Your manservant is waiting to run you a bath, Your Grace,” he said soothingly. “Meanwhile, I shall ask Lady Griselda’s maid to deliver the Messenger. I am certain that her ladyship will wish to speak to you about this unfortunate dilemma.”
His Grace had dropped onto the side of the bed and was sitting with his head in his hands. Brinkley beckoned silently to his valet, and gratefully left the room.
Ewan had raised the knocker twice before the door was opened by a distracted-looking butler who took one look at his red hair and pulled open the door. “The Earl of Ardmore,” Ewan told him, but the butler was already ushering him into a sitting room.
“May I bring you something, my lord?” he asked. “Some refreshment, perhaps? A cup of tea? I’m afraid that His Grace has just risen and he won’t be able to greet you for at least a half an hour.”“I don’t wish to see His Grace,” Ewan said, pleasantly enough. “I’ve called to see Miss Essex, and I’d be grateful if you’d let her know that.”
“Oh, but—”
“Miss Essex,” he said firmly. The butler looked even more frazzled, but Ewan was a man used to getting his own way. “Immediately,” he added.
“Miss Essex,” the butler said, “has not yet seen the journal in question, my lord.”
Ewan smiled. “All the better,” he said. “Then may I count on you to summon her to this room without revealing the existence of that benighted article?”
The butler seemed to cock an ear toward the upper regions, but Ewan couldn’t hear anything. “Lady Griselda may have informed the young lady,” he said finally. “I shall ascertain if that is the case. Perhaps Miss Essex will join you, with her chaperone, naturally.”
Ewan caught the butler’s arm. “Without the chaperone.”
The butler’s eyes widened.
“Too late for that,” Ewan said cheerfully, which probably confirmed the man’s worst thoughts about Annabel, but it couldn’t be helped.
The butler gone, Ewan sat down and thought about mundane things like jointures and the sprouting wheat, and (incidentally) how very nice it was to have a special license in his pocket and all this wife-catching business on the way to being sewn up tight.
Annabel walked through the door to the sitting room twenty minutes later, well aware that something had gone terribly wrong. For one thing, Griselda’s fit of hysterics could be heard all over the house. For another, she had heard Rafe bellowing as well. On the rare occasions that Rafe rose before noon, he certainly never raised his voice. Thus, whatever had occurred, it was of sufficient gravity to trump Rafe’s morning headache.
Their adventure of the previous night had surfaced, somehow. Perhaps they were all ruined. Or perhaps only she was ruined, having been found in a hotel room with a semi-clothed Scottish nobleman.
When she had the message that the Earl of Ardmore was below, Annabel was sitting at her dressing table, summoning up the courage to find out that she was no longer a candidate for any decent Englishman to marry.
Ardmore was asking for her. Not for her guardian, but for her.
She’d spent years and years dreaming of getting out of Scotland. Dreaming of leaving all the poverty and the disgrace behind, and coming to London with her beauty and her lush curves and trading them to a man who would keep her in silk forever. A man of ample means who had nothing to do with horses. That was all she ever asked.
It seemed that had been too much.
She felt numb. Surely, she could survive this. Maybe the earl didn’t drown all his money in the stables. After all, he pulled together the money to come to England for a wife. Their father had never been able to give them the season that he talked about.
She opened the door to the sitting room so quietly that the earl didn’t hear her. He was standing on the other side of the room looking at a Constable landscape. He was tall. She knew that, but for some reason it seemed important to note his characteristics. Tall actually wasn’t the first thing that sprang to mind when you saw him: Ardmore was more powerful-looking than tall, with large shoulders and legs that looked like tree trunks. At least he’s getting enough to eat, Annabel thought with no humor. In fact, if things became particularly unfavorable, he could always hire himself out as a day laborer. Even that thought didn’t make her smile.
His hair was a russet color, like autumn leaves just turning brown, and it turned up at his neck. He was wearing black, as he had both times she had seen him. Black had its virtues, she thought drearily. It could be turned, and re-turned, and the seams never showed that they had been re-dyed.
She walked into the room. “Good morning, Lord Ardmore.”
Ewan turned around. For a moment, he thought that the wrong sister had come to meet him, even though they looked nothing alike. Surely it was Imogen whose eyes were so tragically unhappy, who looked as if she were holding herself upright merely so that she didn’t collapse into tears. Annabel was the one whose eyes danced with humor, who had laughed at his proposal of marriage.
“Annabel…” He took her hand. It was ice-cold.
She pulled her hand gently from his and curtsied. Then she folded her hands before her and waited.
And what the hell was she waiting for? Obviously, the butler was wrong and she had read that benighted gossip column. Should he begin with a proposal? She looked so—uninviting. And yet…
“I’m afraid that Mr. Barnet has decamped from the hotel,” he said finally.
She blinked at him.
God, but she was beautiful: all soft, rumpled curls of a gold that had nothing to do with the brassy colors that people often attribute to the metal. This was real gold: soft, sensual, beckoning gold curls, matched with the creamy skin of a Scotswoman. And her eyes…they were beautiful. Almost too lovely to catalogue, as if the good Lord had made that smoky blue just for her and then thrown away the paint box. They tilted a bit at the corners, and her lashes swept her cheeks—
He wrenched his mind away from that nonsense.
“Mr. Barnet, the hotel manager,” he explained.
“What about him?”
“He was the person who provided Bell’s Weekly Messenger with information about the events of last night,” he explained. “He was eavesdropping, and I’m afraid that when he realized that he would lose his position due to Lady Griselda’s wrath, there was no reason for him not to sell the information.”
“The Messenger,” she said dully. “So that was the source.”
He walked over and stood just before her. “We’re going to have to put that nasty rag out of our minds, lass. We’ve a life to start together, and that sort of ugliness has no part in it.”