“Aye.” His voice was low. “A woud.”
“Then I beg your pardon for the disappointment.” She must not allow her words to tremble as her insides did. She would not betray her foolishness. She was Lady Katherine Savege, coolheaded spinster and ruiner of titled men. She could not be moved, although quite obviously that was a wheen o blethers. “Now, my lord, your task here is finished and you may go away.”
His hand slipped from her face and he backed off and Kitty found herself draped against a doorframe, loose-jointed and breathless, like a woman aching to be kissed.
He swung the door open. Emily stood in the aperture.
“I have come to borrow that tract on eastern trade, Kitty. Ned told me about the mouse. Have you found it?” She looked between them at the wolfhounds.
Kitty untangled her tongue with some difficulty. “Lord Blackwood’s dog discovered a hole in the floor, which shall be mended shortly.” She smoothed her palms over her skirt. “Thank you for your assistance, my lord.”
“Maleddy.” He nodded and moved into the corridor toward the stair. The two great beasts lumbered after.
“Kitty?” Emily looked after the earl. “What were you and Lord Blackwood doing in here with the door nearly closed?”
“Nothing at all.” And yet not one iota of her pounding blood and quivering insides believed that.
Leam scrubbed a palm over his face, considering the snow and the great good it might do him poured into his breeches. Her skin was soft as silk, her eyes lustrous, her generous mouth a pure fantasy. A man need only catch a glimpse of her pink tongue to imagine a great deal he oughtn’t to be imagining about a woman of her caliber. Imagining what her tongue could do to him and precisely where.
He hefted the shovel, an unhandy tool intended for manure, but it must do.
The moment he had touched her skin, and her eyes shaded with longing, he realized his mistake again. Je reconnus Vénus et ses feux redoutables . He recognized Venus and her dangerous fire. Very well indeed.
He had gone to her chamber to touch her. For no other reason than that.
She was not afraid of mice. Not afraid of mice. Not afraid of anything, Lady Katherine Savege.
Very little, she had said.
Then fear the madman who must ply the shovel through thigh-high snow to drive the sensation of a woman’s skin from his hands.
On the other side of the stable Hermes let out a yowl, echoed by the donkey inside. The snow fell lightly now and Bella’s shadowy shape came into view around the corner of the building. Haunches bunched, head high, she barked.
Setting the shovel aside, Leam moved toward her. The drifts grabbed at his legs but he trudged the distance swiftly. He needed activity and Bella never alerted him lightly. She waited for him, then flanked him around the corner of the building. Her pup, already larger by a stone, leaped about a depression in the snow.
Leam slipped the knife from his sleeve.
The trough was roughly the size of a man’s prone body, half-filled and covered by several inches of new snow, with foot holes moving from it and a hoofmarks as well. He cast a glance at the scrubby trees flanking the Tern, sparse, gray with white sleeves, shifting forlornly in the wind. Nowhere to hide in there, but the tracks were lost in any case.
He slid the knife back into place. Bella nudged his arm. In thanks he ran his hand around her ears, but she bumped her long muzzle against his chin.
“What is it?”
She pawed at the edge of the depression. Leam pushed the snow aside, his breath frosting in damp clouds. Buried beneath was a brown clump of fabric. He shook it out. A man’s muffler made of fine cashmere.
Cashmere did not come cheap. If this was the man who pursued Leam he was not, it seemed, a hired sniper, unless he was exceptionally good at his trade and demanded much for his services. But the fellow had had plenty of opportunities to attack, if not in London, then on the road from Bristol and even this morning.
Beneath the muffler, tucked in the snow, were a handful of coins and a broken chain of thick gold links. The man had dropped them, apparently when he’d fallen, perhaps off his horse, or perhaps simply due to the driving wind and blinding snow. But he hadn’t come to the inn only a few yards away.
He plucked the objects out of the packed ice and pocketed them, then straightened and pushed through the snow to the stable door. Inside all was crisply cool and scented of straw and horse. Hermes went straight to the Welshman lying on his back across a bench, a bottle propped in one hand.
Passing the somnolent carriage horses and squat ass, Leam moved toward his horse’s stall.
“Knitting the ravelled sleeve of care?”
“I’ve no care. However, I do have whiskey.” Yale’s voice was heavy. “Care for a drop?”
“I am being followed.”
Yale squeezed his eyes shut and pinched the bridge of his nose. “How do you know it isn’t I who is followed?”
“If one of your enemies determined to murder you, he would not be hesitating.” Leam dropped the muffler beside the bottle.
“S’truth.” Yale struggled to sit, setting the whiskey on the bench and taking up the garment. “But murder? Perhaps he is merely seeking information, like we were wont to do.” He lifted a black brow over a preternaturally clear eye. “Or p’raps it’s Lady Justice, chased us all the way from Dover Street to ferret out our purpose.”
“In a Shropshire snowstorm?”
“In a Bengalese monsoon?” He dropped the muffler. “That fellow we sought in Calcutta tracked you all the way through the jungle, if you recall.”
Leam shook his head, moving to his horse’s stall. “I’ve no idea why this one hasn’t come closer.
He’s within spitting distance yet he balks.”
Yale leaned back against the cold stable wall and swung the bottle once more to his lips. “Much as the lovely Lady Katherine?”
Leam would not oblige him with a reply. But it was a damned nuisance sometimes that the lad had the instincts of a real spy. Always watching.
“He is closer than I like given the circumstances.”
“P’raps you ought to simply wait for him behind a wall and shoot him when he appears. Works like a charm, you know.”
The big roan bumped its head into Leam’s chest. He ran his hand along its smooth face.
“Is that how it happened, Wyn? When you shot that girl?” Leam didn’t know the whole story of it; Yale had never shared it. But he knew well enough that his friend had not always drunk the way he did now. It had started after one assignment went terribly wrong.
The Welshman pushed up from the bench and hefted a saddle into his arms. On steady legs he moved to his horse’s stall. But this time Leam could see the drink in his eyes and the set of his mouth.
The soberer the lad grew, the more he laughed. For years they had gotten along famously together: Mr.
Wyn Yale, the drunk, and Lord Uilleam Blackwood, the man with a hole where his heart should be.
Yale unfixed the latch on a stall door and heaved the saddle and blanket to his black’s back. It was an elegant creature, beauty and strength in its Thoroughbred lines.
“Going for a ride, Wyn?” Leam spoke mildly. “It is unwise in this weather, of course.”
“When you call me by my Christian name, Leam, you intend to lecture me. I will save you the trouble. Ta-ta.” He tightened his mount’s girth and reached for the bridle.
“I could knock you down. You would sleep this one off.”
“You couldn’t, old man.”
“I haven’t bothered to in years, it is true. But I am tempted now.”
Yale slid the bit into the black’s mouth and dropped the reins over its neck. He drew the horse from the stall, its hooves clomping across straw-strewn wood.