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‘Hmm, perhaps you’re right,’ she admitted, ‘but now I have the impossible task of finding somewhere for us to stay where you won’t cause chaos before we hardly have our feet over the threshold, my son. You are seven and three-quarters, Toby, but at this rate you won’t live to see eight and I am tired of all these accidents you keep falling into.’
‘The rat wasn’t an accident,’ Toby muttered mutinously.
‘I know,’ she said dourly.
‘And you didn’t want to stay at the Dowager Lady Porter’s London residence either, Mama,’ he pointed out slyly, imitating her grandmother’s stiff and disapproving butler’s hushed reverence for the place.
‘No, but I would rather we had somewhere to go to next before it became impossible to stay another moment, and I would prefer it if my grandmother was still speaking to me as well.’
‘Why? You didn’t like her either and we would never have met Lady Aline if we stayed at stuffy Porter House with Great-Grandmama frowning at us all the time and looking down her nose at you. I’m glad I found the poor rat in a trap and let it go in her horrid drawing room when she had her horrible friends to tea. She did nothing but blame you for everything from the moment we got inside her stuffy old house and I never want to see her again. You can’t live there when I go to school, Mama. You would hate it and so would I.’
Hetta met her son’s bright blue eyes and managed a wobbly smile to reassure him she didn’t hold that particular piece of mischief against him and a sceptical lift of her brows to let him know she could fight her own battles, thank you. Toby was offering her something nobody had since her own mother died: unconditional love and real concern for her feelings. ‘Her visitors will spread the story of your misdeeds and I don’t want the world to think you a monster, love, even if you are one.’
Toby seemed immensely cheered by the notion and Hetta didn’t have the heart to berate him for his sins again. She blinked hard at the unfamiliarity of being protected by her own son. Nobody had truly worried about how she felt about the world since her mother died. Her father made sure she was physically safe, then went on with his own life. And her late husband had been a prime example of April when he’d wooed her, December when they’d wed. She winced at the memory of Bran shouting in his cups that she’d ruined his life. At least she’d still had enough spirit left to argue he’d reneged on every promise he made to love and cherish her for life if she would elope with him. Even now she flinched at how desolate she’d felt when he staggered to his feet and glared down at her, challenging her with his superior height and strength to blame him for using his looks and charm to bend a lonely schoolroom miss to his will, even if he had done exactly that. He didn’t meet her eyes and carry on with the lie, but belched and slammed out of the house with a lewd comment about finding a woman with some go in her instead of a useless little milksop who still cried for her mother. At least she had faced him down. It hurt to know he’d wed her because he thought her father and grandmother would relent and advance his career once their marriage was a fait accompli. She was seventeen to his two and twenty when they’d wed over the anvil.
Her father had never laid a hand on her in anger, but he seemed to think she was too grown up to need him to tell her he loved her, even when he sent her back to England after his wife died. Hetta was sure he had loved her mother in a vague this woman fills the gap in my life so comfortably I must love her sort of fashion, and he probably loved his daughter as well, but he had no idea of how to comfort a grieving child when he was feeling bereft himself. He was so relieved to leave her with his mother and bury himself in work again that he’d ignored all her letters pleading to be allowed to join him on his travels and escape the constant criticism and disapproval of her grandmother and the stiff-necked governess hired especially to teach her to be the perfect English gentlewoman so she could attract a stern English gentleman one day. No wonder she had spent most of her time at Porter House fantasising about being adored by a dashing hero out of a Gothic romance. Lieutenant Champion had looked like the answer to a maiden’s prayer, but appearances were deceptive.
She had been even more lonely in the neat little cottage in Lyme Regis Brandon had bought to store his wife in. Once he realised none of his plans would bear fruit he tried to live almost as freely as if he’d never met and married her. Bran would come home, slake the lust of however many weeks he had spent at sea without a woman on her, then walk away whistling to find the knowing and flirtatious sort of women he preferred to his wife. Never again, she swore to herself as she shook off those uncomfortable memories. Never again would a man woo her, then walk away as if she was nothing. If not for his Admiralty masters’ raised eyebrows Bran would have left her in Lyme that day and never gone back and she would not have Toby. She would not undo a day of her failed romance if it meant losing her son, so she had best forget the past and live for now. The fleeting picture of a man as mighty and passionate as Magnus Haile desperate to share life with her was folly and she consigned that to outer darkness as well.
Now the next tangle of wagons and porters and furious drivers snarled the traffic to a halt again and it seemed even more stifling inside the tired old hackney than ever. At least Toby was chastened enough by his latest misadventure to only fidget and sigh and peer out of the small window to listen to colourful arguments being traded all around them. Hetta dreaded to think what gems were taking root in his busy head, but she would have to trust him to save the worst for his peers at the school she must find him before summer’s end. He knew enough insults in several languages to keep a pack of scrubby boys happy, but at least their wandering life had given him a wider view than he would have got in Lyme or at Porter House with her rigidly formidable grandmother. Her son had a robust sense of his own worth. Now she owed him stability, she decided as she eyed the sweaty chaos outside the window and sighed. She would have to endure this benighted country while her son grew up and there was no point having the blue-devils about it.
Since before he was even born Toby had been her counterweight against the failings and sadness of the past, and hope for the future, but she had to be careful not to smother him. The fact that most schools were closed for the summer let her put the idea of him going to one at least as a weekly boarder to one side, so she could at least get her breath back and give herself more time to look around for a place that wouldn’t stifle his character and try to turn him into the crushed pattern card of a gentleman. Not that it seemed likely, but the attempt to force him into such a mould would end in disaster for him and his mother, so she would need to be very careful about this school and the place she would eventually settle—nearby, but not too near.
The new Earl of Carrowe’s odd behaviour seemed a good way to distract herself from thoughts of her imminent parting from her son, so she let him steal her anxiety about the future, as the ancient vehicle finally trundled on. Shouting at Toby to come down off his less than noble roof had almost shocked her son into the tumble Lord Carrowe had claimed he was trying to prevent. The panic in the dark eyes the Earl shared and yet didn’t quite share with his younger brother Magnus had looked odd as well. Understandable for her to feel her life was hanging in the balance while Toby teetered between safety and a crashing fall, but why had his lordship been so concerned about a boy he didn’t even like? He’d continued to stare at the chimney Toby was clinging to even after he had let go and taken the lesser risk of a jump into the ancient attic below rather than a fall to unkempt grounds far too many feet below. At the time she had been so concerned for her son that his lordship’s odd behaviour had seemed irrelevant, but now she thought about it the more the man had seemed almost as hard-pressed to keep his feelings in check as his younger brother had under very different circumstances at Dover.
Hetta sighed and concluded she was making mountains out of molehills. Toby had been exploring where he wasn’t supposed to, so the Earl could hardly pat him on the head and claim it didn’t matter. Her fault for weakening and agreeing to stay there instead of facing a tramp around London looking for suitable accommodation. She should have recalled Haile was the Earl of Carrowe’s family name and steered clear of the rest of them the moment she heard Magnus’s name at Dover. Still, she recalled all the heart and intelligence under the misery in Magnus Haile’s dark brown eyes as he’d watched his little girl sail away and decided he had hopes, dreams and a passionate nature his elder brother must have sidestepped at birth. She marvelled Lady Drace was so obsessed with the current Earl of Carrowe that she refused to see how much less of a man he was than his younger brother. Perhaps ten years ago the eldest Haile brother had been as dashing and deliciously dangerous as the Honourable Magnus was now, but Hetta couldn’t imagine it. There was coldness in the Earl’s gaze his brother would never share, and if she was lucky enough to have a lover as potent and passionate as Magnus Haile, she hoped she wouldn’t be as big a fool as Lady Drace was by whistling him down the wind.
No, close off that notion right now, Hetta Champion. One failed love affair in a lifetime is enough.
She refused to be second-best ever again and Magnus Haile wouldn’t even notice if she fell at his feet and begged him to take her instead of his precious Lady Drace.
A week after he had to watch Delphi and his daughter sail away Magnus was halfway down a second bottle of cognac and still the memory refused to fade. He’d felt so hollowed out and despairing that day he had been trying to fill the void ever since.
‘Oh, no, what the devil are you doing here?’ he asked when he heard rapid footsteps outside, then looked up and only just managed to silence a groan of protest. Maybe he was asleep and dreaming. He blinked and the apparition still didn’t go away. The boy glared back as though Magnus was somehow at fault. Well, he was drunk and noxious in his mother’s newly decorated dining parlour. He needed a hot bath and someone to shave him, then push him into clean clothes, since he was too cast-away to do it himself. He didn’t think he deserved a hallucination as ill timed as this one, though.
‘Mama! Mama! It’s the man from Dover and he’s got horns,’ the boy’s treble voice yelled and managed to make Magnus jump as if he’d been struck by lightning.
He put up a shaky hand to feel his hair standing up in two peaks where he’d run his fingers through it and smoothed them down as best he could. He still didn’t see why the boy had to trumpet his sorry state to his mother when she was standing right behind him and could see for herself. ‘Oh, the deuce, please get him out of here,’ Magnus begged, putting his hand over his eyes and hoping the boy would disappear if he pretended not to be here hard enough. He thought he’d done quite well not cursing his imagination for dreaming the boy up, but next time he looked the brat from Dover was glaring at him as if he was the interloper here. Even thinking about the day they’d met made Magnus’s stomach give a heavy roll of nausea in protest. He only just managed to force it back and go on glaring at them owlishly.
The sight of him glowering must have made the bespectacled lady hesitate in the doorway, far more daunted by the rough welcome than her appalling offspring. For a moment Magnus felt guilty about making it so plain he didn’t want them here, but she shouldn’t march into strange houses if she wasn’t prepared for a rebuff. Before he could repent his harshness and recall his manners, she raised her chin, braced her shoulders and sailed further into the room as if she had every right to be here as well. He was almost ashamed of himself and could see the effort it cost her to brazen this out, but he was three-parts drunk and looking forward to adding the last quarter as soon as she and her son left, preferably as fast as their feet would carry them.
She was eyeing the chaos Magnus had wrought during his day of drunken misery instead of obliging him, though. A tidal wave of sickness ground again in Magnus’s belly as dread of Delphi and his little girl being unmasked by this woman who knew too much joined all that brandy and very little food, if any, he recalled hazily. This woman knew things he didn’t want anyone knowing and here she was expecting... Exactly what was she expecting of him?
‘We did knock, but nobody came to see who was at the door, so I dare say they thought it was you being loud and ridiculous,’ she explained frostily. She looked tired and pale even to Magnus’s jaundiced gaze and shame got a little stronger under the dread she might have tracked him down somehow and come to extort a price for her promised silence.
‘And why the deuce were you knocking on my mother’s door?’ he barked harshly.
‘Lord Carrowe told us to stay here until I find more suitable lodgings.’
Magnus felt more at sea than ever as he wondered why Gresley had sent this woman, of all the women he could find and send to the Dowager Countess of Carrowe’s Hampstead home, in their mother’s absence. She didn’t look like a member of the muslin company and the boy couldn’t have an ounce of Haile blood in him if she turned out to be another of Gres’s guilty secrets he was shuffling about the country now she was on these shores, in the hope his wife never found out about her.
‘Who the devil are you, then?’
‘Mrs Champion.’
‘And who the deuce is she?’ he said, still uneasy with the notion Gres could have had anything to do with her or her son.
‘Sir Hadrian Porter’s daughter,’ she said flatly, as if that was all he needed to know about her. The name sounded vaguely familiar, but he couldn’t dredge the man out of his memory to go with it. So, who was Sir Hadrian Porter and where was he while his daughter was running wild about the countryside with her brat knocking on doors where she wasn’t wanted?
‘So now I know?’
‘My father was called back to England to track down your father’s murderer,’ she told him wearily, as if she was quite accustomed to being unwelcome among Sir Hadrian’s victims, or should that be his clients? ‘Lord Carrowe sent me here when he decided Carrowe House was unsafe for adventurous boys. We had nowhere else to stay at the drop of a hat,’ she explained reluctantly, and even in this state he thought she was probably skimming over a chapter of disasters.
Another wave of guilt washed over Magnus as he looked round his mother’s dining parlour and wondered if it looked any better than Gresley’s ancestral wreck in town at the moment, thanks to him. Not much of a welcome to be had here nor any comfort. Wouldn’t his mother be ashamed if she could see him? He heard himself groan as if he’d been kicked by his uneasy conscience, then glowered at them for hearing it and seeing him like this. Though, if they thought him objectionable enough they might go away and leave him to find oblivion in a bottle at last. He eyed them with disfavour and wondered if he ought to go on with his potations to underline how little he wanted them here.
‘I beg your pardon for interrupting, Mr Haile,’ Mrs Champion said. ‘But the front door is open and this one was ajar.’ She carried on as if that was a good enough excuse for rushing in here even when his glare argued it wasn’t.
‘Your son would march into hell to argue with the devil uninvited, if you ask me,’ he said harshly. Unfair, but he might as well try to get drunk in a busy London street and he didn’t feel like being fair.
‘You are the devil,’ the boy argued, chin out and a fine glare of his own.
For a moment Magnus almost smiled and might have managed to laugh at himself if those words hadn’t hit home so hard. It was devilish of him to speak to a child like this. He had sworn never to be like his father at a very early age, but he caught the glower and meanness of the man in his own frown and gruff unfairness now and felt his sins grind in his gut all over again. A cold sweat broke out on his forehead and he hated the man he’d become with a bitter passion close to despair. He heard an unearthly noise, more like an animal in pain than a human being, and realised he had made it as the awful fear he was about to disgrace himself washed over him like icy water. Desperate to prevent the final disgrace of having them see him spew, he lurched to his feet and shot past them at a speed he didn’t know he had in him. A brief image of the woman and her boy staring as he fumbled blindly past them haunted him as he ran for the back of the house, blessing the fact the door was open as he dashed past the kitchen. Lingering cooking smells didn’t help, but he was vaguely aware of Cook and Peg, the middle-aged maid who stayed with his family through thick and thin, staring after him open-mouthed, but they at least must have been expecting it after the amount of time he’d spent in the darkened dining room trying to drown his sorrows. At last he was outside and in the kitchen garden, gulping in clean air, and dared to hope he had managed to overcome his ills.
Wrong, an evil little voice in the back of his mind chortled triumphantly. Heat and icy chills washed over him in waves and he managed to stumble as far as the stable midden before casting up his accounts as the smell hastened wave after wave of wretched sickness, so he doubled over in self-inflicted misery and gave in. No effort of will could halt the cramping nausea now and he hardly had time to moan his woes into thin air between bouts as brandy scorched out of him a lot faster than he had put it in.
Magnus had no idea how much time passed before he finally dared hope he was done. A wonder if there was anything left in his belly to retch on now and he dearly wanted to believe it was empty. The cold of his own sweat on his skin belied the glorious summer day all around him and he had a horrible suspicion he might be about to faint. The threat beat in his ears as the world seemed to come and go with an angry buzz every time he moved his head, so it would be foolish to straighten up just yet.
Not that, he silently pleaded with the gloating voice of his conscience. Don’t let me be found lying on a muck heap by a nosy boy.
Determined to save a small scrap of dignity from the wreck of fashionable and almost Honourable Magnus Haile, he straightened up slowly and carefully and waited for the world to stop spinning.
‘Come on, Mr Magnus. Let’s get you under the pump.’ He heard Jem’s resigned voice behind him and he realised Peg or Cook must have run to fetch the lad so he could deal with Magnus while they welcomed their unexpected visitors.
‘I am a damned fool, Jem,’ he managed to mutter as he lurched towards the pump in the far corner of the yard and felt better as the smell of manure faded a little.
‘There’s a lot of it about,’ Jem said wisely, and Magnus felt like a child with a patient and resigned adult telling him boys will be boys.
Then even thinking was impossible as ice-cold water rushed over his still-reeling head and shoulders and soaked him to the skin. Feeling as miserable as sin, he made himself stay under the relentless flow while Jem pumped and he shivered. At last he called a halt and shook like a great, misguided and miserable dog. Standing still for a long moment, he signalled Jem to pump again and made himself gulp icy handfuls of water to test his still-complaining belly. Shaking water from his sodden hair, he dared stand back and strip off his soaking shirt.
‘Finished?’ Jem asked.
‘Aye.’
‘Best have this, then,’ Jem said and first presented him with a towel, then exchanged it for a pristine shirt Magnus pulled over his head, at the same time wishing he’d never even heard of brandy as the thunder of it rang in his temples. Why had he thought getting drunk would solve anything?
‘Cook said you was to drink this,’ Jem said glumly and passed over a concoction that smelt of peppermint and something a lot less tempting, so Magnus gulped it down as fast as he could and grimaced as the taste clashed with everything else he’d put into his belly lately.
‘I will do now, go and help Peg,’ Magnus managed to say gruffly, and Jem took one last look at him, then nodded as if he agreed the worst was over, before leaving him.
Magnus felt his stomach give one of those ominous rolls as it objected to whatever the drink was before it settled and felt surprisingly better. At least he had the taste of peppermint in his mouth now instead of the sour aftermath of his sins. He stood still for long moments like a chastened dog bathed after a really good roll in something awful. After a while he dared hope he might be himself again in a week or two and the sturdy wall at the end of the kitchen garden looked just the right height to support a failed gentleman in a fragile state of health. Somehow, he made his way there without toppling over, but he could not face going back inside to apologise to the woman from Dover and her unruly boy quite yet.
It would make sense to build this wall higher and block out the wind, he reasoned to distract himself from the thunder of his own pulse in his ears at the thought of her and all he had to be sorry about this time. Peaches and grapes and apricots could shelter under its sunny warmth and fruit almost as happily as they would in their Mediterranean home, but why would anyone wall out such a view even for those natural riches? And where did grapes and apricots and peaches come from originally if not those warm and sunny lands?
Magnus leaned on solid stones under a benign July sun and gazed across wide acres of blessed space as the Heath spread out before him. Out there was real life—the glory of nature he ought to have clung to as his world fell apart, instead of trying to lose himself in a brandy bottle. He listened to the quiet buzz of bees happily occupied among the bean flowers and mused on the origin of garden plants in an attempt to forget his troubles. His shirt was still clinging to him like a lover and his head was thumping as if Thor’s hammer was busy inside it, but the world was wondrous again and he needed to remember how small a part of it he was.
Soft footsteps sounded from behind him and he heard the rustle of feminine skirts. His brief moment of peace was over. ‘Can’t I be spared even one indignity?’ he pleaded with nobody in particular under his breath. He knew she heard when she met his aching eyes with a hint of hurt behind the eyeglasses he suddenly suspected were there to keep him and the rest of the world at a distance. Regret nagged at him as he caught sight of her flinching and a feral nag of attraction to this sharp, yet somehow vulnerable, female dug into his conscience like a hot whip. He groaned in audible protest that she took the wrong way from the look of that poker back and her best antidote’s glare. She should know what a contradiction all the pretend hardness was against the soft fullness of her mouth and a figure not even the most determined attack of dowdiness he had ever come across could quite disguise. A true rake would be so intrigued by the contrast between the faulty disguise and a warm, desirable woman underneath it and try all the tricks in his armoury to seduce her. Luckily he was an uneasy seducer and in no state to undo any sane female with his mythical charms right now.
Chapter Four (#uc7aa7933-3b6a-5347-a715-6d4c29ac0686)
‘I am sorry to disturb you, Mr Haile, but your manservant said you were feeling a little better and I wanted to talk to you before we go,’ Hetta said with more sympathy than he deserved after calling Toby a little devil and greeting her with such revulsion she almost turned tail and ran, until weariness and common sense took over and reminded her what a challenge it would be to find somewhere else to go this late in the day.
But then he’d stared at Toby with what looked suspiciously like a sheen of tears in his bloodshot dark eyes before dashing outside to be disgracefully ill, as if her son was a painful reminder his own child was gone. Her heart went out to him even as she fought an impulse to run after the hired carriage she could hear trundling down the drive and forget she had set eyes on him again. She noted the sunlight played on his wild, wet black curls as they dried in complete disarray, but highlighted his starkly handsome features more acutely than ever as he squinted against the light with a flinch that gave his headache away. Even after seeing how drunk he was when she got here she still had to fight a ridiculous flutter of enthusiasm for the dratted man. He could have walked straight out of one of Lord Byron’s epics and he wasn’t to know she had peeped through the window on the half-landing and glimpsed him bare-chested and rather magnificent as he reeled back from his dousing under the pump. Bran had been five years older than her, but he’d lacked the sleekly muscled power of this mature man even when he died. And Magnus Haile managed to look deliciously masculine even when shivering like a drowned rat in the July sun. With sunlight merciless on his ashen face now and those darkly shadowed eyes showing how little he had slept since she saw him at Dover, a dangerous sort of pity softened her heart. Despite his dissolute ways and low opinion of her and Toby, he was clearly a deeply lonely and bereft man and at least he had a heart to be broken by a lover’s desertion. Her late husband would have shrugged and found the next willing female if she had left him. Heart or no, Magnus Haile had no feelings for her, though, so she ordered herself not to be more of a fool than she could help and waited for him to argue.
‘Why?’ he obliged, producing one of his best frowns especially for her.
‘My son and I need a safe place to lay our heads for the night. The jarvey has demanded his fee and driven back to town. I could not persuade him to take us to the nearest respectable inn. He said his horse wanted its stable and he did as well, so I need your advice on where I can find a respectable and clean place to stay for the night. Oh, and I also wanted to remind you I never gossip.’
‘Everyone gossips in the right circumstances, Mrs Campion.’
‘Champion,’ she told him impatiently. Getting her surname wrong wasn’t an insult even if it felt like one. ‘And I don’t.’
‘What did you say you are doing here, Mrs Champion?’ he demanded sharply as a man could when he was suffering so many self-inflicted ailments.
She should wait until he was completely sober, but she really must find lodgings for the night and, once she had, they need not meet again. Even now she would leave him to his misery and his favourite glower, but he was ghost pale under the tan even she knew a dandy would condemn as bucolic. Maybe the rumours she claimed not to listen to were right about the Honourable Magnus Haile after all, then. Perhaps he had been trying to turn over a new leaf since his father was murdered and wanted to live a more useful life. She reviewed Mr Haile’s solitary drinking spree and decided, no, he was quite happy with the old one.
‘My father came to England to find your father’s murderer,’ she told him.
‘You said that before as well,’ he said impatiently.
‘Drunken gentlemen rarely recall what was said five minutes ago,’ she said and cursed her own stupidity for trying to reason with him. ‘I suppose you are so used to being one you have developed an obliging memory.’
‘If you say so, but if your father is Fat George’s Bloodhound he will need an exceptionally hard head to keep up with his master,’ he said with the suggestion of a sneer in his voice. She could imagine him backing it up with a quizzing glass in his heyday as a dandy. ‘Like his royal patron Sir Hadrian Porter doesn’t seem to take much interest in his immediate family, does he? Even I know he doesn’t spend more time in his home country than he can help, yet he is supposed to catch the killer who has confounded our efforts and half of Bow Street as well? Forgive me if I doubt it, ma’am.’
‘Papa has solved all the mysteries His Majesty’s Government set him so far, I will have you know. He does important work, so why should he worry about things I am capable of sorting out myself? We go on very well together, Mr Haile, and, if I were you, I would be glad he is here to unmask your father’s murderer and he always refuses to listen to rumours. Because of my father your family has a chance of finding true justice instead of some cobbled-together tale made up to satisfy his masters.’
‘I hated my father, so no wonder the gossips whisper I must have killed him, despite my valet’s evidence I was even more drunk that night than I managed to be today.’
‘Your mother and sisters have my sympathy, then. Two drunks in the family must have been almost too much to endure,’ Hetta said bluntly, but he had insulted her and her family first, so why not?
‘I am not a habitual drunkard and I would never hurt them if I was,’ he protested, and deep down she felt guilty for implying it.
She knew he would never use his strength to coerce or dominate a woman. If ever a man was tempted to do so he must have been when Lady Drace walked away with his child. Now, instead of one of Lord Byron’s devil heroes, he looked like a weary knight who had defended too many lost causes for the good of his soul. Fanciful nonsense, she told herself, and it came of being in the wrong place at the wrong time to witness his darkest moments, but what on earth was she going to do with herself and Toby now? The idea of trying to find a hired coach to heaven knew where at short notice nearly overwhelmed even her sturdy determination never to allow a man to order her life again.
‘Why are you here instead of in Worthing?’ she asked impulsively, because it was easier to think about him than worry about where to spend the night.
‘Guess,’ he said wearily. ‘This summer by the sea is supposed to be a much-needed tonic for them and it won’t be if they spend it worrying about me.’
‘Honestly, men,’ she said disgustedly. ‘Do you really believe your mother and sisters won’t worry if they can’t actually see you drunk and miserable? If you truly believe we women live on fluffy clouds of ignorance about what men get up to behind our backs, I am sorry for you. I took you for less of a fool than most of your sex, Mr Haile, but apparently I was wrong.’
‘Obviously, and why would you give me so much credit when my idiocy was writ large the day we met, Mrs Champion?’ he barked as if he meant to drive her away and never mind if she had to sleep under a hedge tonight.
‘Your sister Lady Aline has such a high opinion of you I must have fallen into the error of thinking she knew you better, despite all evidence to the contrary. She seems such a rational being and really should know better.’
‘No doubt she will see through me in time, but what I can’t understand is why my elder brother sent you here and your father let him. Your husband must be deranged to let you and his son visit England in his father-in-law’s so-called care.’
‘My husband is dead,’ she said, indignant he thought she ought to have one to take charge of her when Bran was as irresponsible as a cuckoo whenever he was far away from his command and the sea.
‘I am sorry for your loss,’ he said so soberly she almost believed him.
‘As I am for yours,’ she replied, and if he chose to think she meant the death of his father he was welcome.
‘I don’t deserve pity,’ he said harshly.
‘Yet your dilemma was made by two people,’ she said with a brutal frankness she refused to regret even when he glared at her, then shook his head as if silently admitting she might be right.
‘Most of them are,’ he said with a half-weary, half-wolfish smile that made her heart skitter, then race on in panic. No, she refused to be a fool for a handsome face ever again. She had been one for Bran for a heady, brief time, and now this man was baiting her she almost wanted to flirt back. Luckily, he waved a hand as if he was being more unworthy than usual in using such tactics to deflect her. ‘I cannot deem my child a mistake, then shrug and carry on with life untroubled, Mrs Champion, even if her mother wants me to,’ he added bleakly.
Her heartbeat sped up again as she put herself in Lady Drace’s elegant shoes for a moment and decided she would say yes to almost anything if he asked her to in the right way. ‘Why would you?’ she managed to argue even so.
‘You heard Lady Drace, Mrs Champion. I have been dismissed from their lives and I hope you and Champion did a better job of being parents, for all your sakes.’
‘He died before Toby was born,’ she said, frowning at the prickly memory of how little Bran wanted the baby in her belly during his last shore leave.
‘That explains a lot,’ Magnus Haile said as if it might well.
‘And do you always use rudeness to deflect personal questions, Mr Haile?’
‘Only when frigid politeness fails me, Mrs Champion. None of which explains why my elder brother sent you here when our mother is from home and the place half-finished,’ he persisted.
He waved an impatient hand at the lovely little Queen Anne manor house behind them. It was obviously still undergoing improvement from piles of sand and gravel and a dusting of sawdust, and Hetta wondered if he had sent the builders and carpenters away for the day, so he could get drunk in peace. The strength and elegance of his long-fingered hand caught her feral imagination and painted her a picture of him sensually rendering parts of her helpless with longing and melted to the core. She was so shocked she glared at him to make up for the shameful image and thought she saw a reluctant echo of her own fascination in his dark brown eyes for a moment before they were sternly guarded again.
This will not do, barked her inner puritan, so she grasped at the reason she was here to divert them both.
‘Lord Carrowe caught Toby climbing the roof at Carrowe House, despite all the nailed-up doors and windows and his dire warnings not to go anywhere near the worst parts of the poor old place. His lordship suggested I get Toby out of London before he killed himself in such a deathtrap and it was kind of him to suggest we came here for a few days, given Toby’s mischief. I would have had to stop him bothering the builders here, I suppose, but we cannot stay now, so at least that’s one less thing to worry about—and that reminds me. I must find somewhere to stay tonight before the inns are full, so I shall bid you good day, Mr Haile.’
‘Wait, there’s no need to quit the place. I am in the way of the builders and upholsterers anyway and of my mother’s cook and housekeeper, who insisted on staying to be sure the builders do not make a mess. My mother hired servants for the summer season because she wanted those two to enjoy an easy summer after years of devoted and often unpaid work, so looking after me is hardly a rest.’
‘They don’t seem unduly worried, rather the opposite, in fact.’
‘Peg was our nursemaid and playmate when I was young and we still had a few servants willing to stay in such a decaying old wreck as long as my mother managed to scrape together their wages. By the time my youngest sisters came along, Peg and Cook and a very ancient butler were the only staff left. Peg is more a member of the family than a housekeeper and Cook is too happy with her new kitchen to complain about anything much.’ He smiled and looked as if his memory had taken him back to more innocent days, before he recalled Hetta was a stranger in his home and snapped back to the present. ‘This business with the old Earl must have made my elder brother think harder about his responsibilities if he got you out of the old dust heap before your son did himself permanent damage,’ he said as if it almost explained her presence. ‘And I ought to leave this place, not you. There are plenty of low dives where I can stay and you cannot.’
‘No, finding a new place to stay is hardly a great hardship and we will soon be back on the Continent and back to a proper summer, so it hardly matters where we stay for now.’
‘Is this an improper one, then?’ he asked with a ghost of rakish innuendo in his naturally husky, fascinatingly deep voice.
The sound of him reciting a laundry list would make goosebumps rise on her over-sensitised skin, so his almost-suggestion they misbehave together made her shiver with something very far from cold. ‘No, just a British one,’ she said flatly.
‘Aye, the rain must have found all the holes in the roof and made Carrowe House even more uncomfortable than usual,’ he said as if he had already repented his lighter mood.
