And I should stop being so inquisitive. He will tell me when he is ready, she chided herself as she reached the small landing area outside her door and let herself into the room, making Faith, who was laying out her nightgown, jump.
‘I’m sorry, Faith. Just unlace me and then you be off to your bed. I am sorry you have had such a frightening day of it.’
Faith sniffed. ‘I’ll give that Thomas frightening if I get my hands on him. And don’t you worry, my lady, Mr Hunt will make all right, just you wait and see.’ She helped Guin out of her gown and into her nightgown and turned back the bed. ‘Shall I brush your hair, my lady? That’s very soothing.’
‘I’ll do it myself, you get to bed now, Faith, thank you.’
Guin settled at her dressing table, pulled out the pins and shook her hair loose. It settled around her shoulders, whispering over the silk. Jared’s hair had felt like raw wild silk when she had freed it. Freed was the word, like loosing a caged animal. The brush snagged on a small tangle and she let its weight carry her arm through the motions of brushing, calmingly repetitive.
Hair-brushing gave one time to think. Think about Augustus. She reached out her free hand and picked up the miniature that always lay on her dressing table. Dear man. Kind man. She laid it down, traced a fingertip over the strong features. He was dead now because of an act of gallantry, an act of generosity to an unknown young woman. We will avenge you, she promised, blinking away tears.
Think about Jared instead. There was that faint hint of Yorkshire in his voice, but he had admitted he had grown up somewhere near here and boys would run wild with their friends, whatever their parents might have to say about it. Leaving that aside, his accent was educated, refined, without a suspicion of the self-improved about it. Listening to him in that ballroom the night before Augustus had died, there had been nothing to distinguish him from the men around him.
Then there was that pride, verging on arrogance – although he has much to be arrogant about, she thought. He had left home at the age of seventeen because of a slight on his honour and was not prepared to let it lie now. This was not a yeoman’s son, a country gentleman’s son. This was an aristocrat who’d had pride and honour and self-assurance bred into him, fed him with mother’s milk, beaten into him by the unforgiving expectations that aristocratic fathers heaped on their sons.
But he had not been the eldest son, the heir, the privileged one. When that situation had arisen and his father had to chose which son to believe his choice had been, inevitably, his heir. Who was now dead.
She had stopped brushing some time ago, she realised. Who is he? What has Jared just become? Downstairs was the Peerage, dusty on the shelf. He did not want her to know, did not want anyone to know. Would it be a betrayal to look?
Probably he would look at it that way, Guin decided. But she felt a deep revulsion for secrets that could do so much damage. She wanted to help and so she needed to know who might be Jared’s enemies. Was she justifying her own curiosity? Yes, she admitted, putting down the brush on the dressing table and belting the sash of her robe more securely. Yes, but she was going to do it anyway. He was angry enough over the way their feelings for each other were interfering with what he saw as his role as her protector, she may as well be hanged for a sheep as a lamb.
Her bare feet brushed silently through the silky pile of the Chinese rug and the staircase door swung open onto darkness on well-oiled hinges as a figure in white rose from the ground directly in front of her. Guin swung instinctively with her chamber stick, the hot wax spattering her hand before she made contact with solid flesh.
‘What the blazes are you doing?’ Jared demanded.
‘What am I doing? What are you doing outside my door?’ She put the chamberstick with its guttering candle down on the floor and sucked her wrist where the hot wax had burned.
‘Guarding it. The lock on the main door into the corridor is good but Thomas knows this house. If he gets in he could well come this way to do you harm.’
Guin looked down at the cramped landing space, the scuffed dust. ‘You were sleeping across my threshold out here?’
‘Attempting not to sleep.’ Did she catch just the faintest glimmer of amusement in his voice? ‘Where were you going?’
Guin was not certain how it had happened, but she was in Jared’s arms and his question was a breath on her lips. ‘I was restless.’
‘The idea is that you lock yourself in your tower, my lady Guinevere, and your knight fights the battle for you.’
‘This is not the Middle Ages, you are not the mysterious knight Lancelot disguised behind your visor and I want to take a broadsword to the enemy myself.’ It was difficult to speak assertively about broadswords when a man was kissing his way along the line of your jaw, nibbling your ear. ‘Jared – are you listening to me? Do you know what I want?’
‘Yes, I am, yes, I know.’ His voice was muffled in the angle of her neck and shoulder, then he looked up. ‘You want a broadsword and you want me to take you to bed.’ He was laughing at her, his eyes sparking amber fire in the candlelight, his hands sliding over her body with dangerous ease, those beautiful, mobile lips curving into a smile.
‘Not necessarily in that order,’ Guin murmured as he walked her backwards towards the bed. When her knees hit the edge she sat down and watched as he went to lock the stair door, wedged a chair under the handle then did the same to the main door. He laid his rapier on the bedside table and then turned to look at her.
Somewhere he had shed his coat, waistcoat and neckcloth and his feet were bare. Why, when she had seen him naked, the bare feet, the vee of skin at his throat should affect her so powerfully, she could not say, but heat flooded her. ‘Not the most romantic of preparations for lovemaking,’ Guin said, more to try and stop herself dissolving into a puddle of lust than anything.
‘This time I am going to take every precaution. You want romance too?’ Yes, he was laughing at her. Or perhaps it was with her – there was no edge, no malice in his amusement.
‘It would be nice,’ Guin said demurely.
‘What is this?’ Jared bent to pick up a scrap of red leather that lay by the side of her dressing table. ‘Book binding. Someone has been in here.’
‘No. No, that must have been on my skirts. I was looking at something in the study before I came up to bed.’
The red leather turned again between his fingers to reveal gold tooling.
‘The Landed Gentry. You know how battered the binding is on that old copy,’ she said.
‘Why were you going downstairs, Guinevere?’ This time there was no sensual amusement behind the words.