The Bluestocking and the Rake (Hearts in Hiding 2)

So no, he wouldn’t consent to Lord Griffith searching his room for some miscreant runaway, which is what his lordship implied. A maidservant who’d stolen his silver? That’s what he gathered by his incoherent description, and Miles wasn’t going to budge.

Not until, after watching his lordship’s color rise as he began to froth around the mouth, he had no choice in the matter.

“Lord Griffith, I protest!” Miles said, turning to follow his host who had barged past him and was now looking under the bed; a most undignified position for a tall, uncoordinated man.

“Where’s she hiding!” his lordship panted as he rose with difficulty to his feet and began tossing the bedcoverings to the floor before he stopped suddenly, and stared at the urn sitting on the table beside the bed.

“What is that doing here?” he demanded. His eyes narrowed with suspicion as he stalked over and picked up the vase, his mouth working silently as if he were intoning something.

There was something strange in his look; something between suspicion and madness, Miles thought, as he asked, “Did you put that here or did she ask you to?”

Miles stared. What the hell was Lord Griffith talking about? Nevertheless, a faint sense of foreboding chilled him as he watched Lord Griffith, seemingly on a surge of inspiration, plunge his hand into the bottom of the urn and with a cry of victory, pulled out a piece of clay.

“It was her! The minx came back for it! Lord, but I should have known. I should have searched every last damn inch of this house. Instead, I assumed she’d taken it with her or dropped it before she got here. But she failed in the end. All that plotting and planning over the last year and she failed to get what she was after!”

Turning, catching sight of Miles’s confusion, Lord Griffith dropped the arm he’d been swinging about in his abandoned joy and raised an eyebrow. “You really don’t know what I’m talking about, do you, Lord Ruthcot? That woman in your bed.” Miles had the distinct impression his words were laced with scorn intended for Miles rather than Jemima for His Lordship let out a harsh laugh and added, “You truly don’t know who she was?”

He was not about to say Jemima was the woman he loved. The woman he would protect whatever it cost him. Not only were his suspicions regarding Jemima now highly aroused, he wondered where on earth she’d disappeared to? Lord Griffith had checked under the bed. That left only the cupboard and now Griffith was angling himself in that direction.

“Was she your lover?” Griffith’s nostrils flared. “No, I think not.” He paused as he returned from a perusal of the escritoire, and a slow grin spread over his face. “Or, rather…tonight was the first time you’ve had her. She’s not the kind to throw herself into a man’s bed unless it was to save her life. I should have thought of that.”

“Get out of my room, my Lord.” Miles was finding it hard to breathe. A great rushing sound in his head was deadening his senses while the last kernel of cognisance, it seemed, tried to establish a reality he could live with.

Griffith laughed again. “If you thought she came here to be with you, your plumped up pride is going to suffer a beating when I find her and get her to confess. She wasn’t here for you, Lord Ruthcot—”

For some reason, Miles had a premonition that unless he knocked his lordship out cold, the consequences would be very dire for Jemima. Of course, the consequences wouldn’t be good for him either, but he could always use the excuse of trespass and invasion of privacy.

And so he drew back his strong right arm and aimed a short, sharp, and satisfyingly effective uppercut to his lordship’s jaw.

It was at this moment that John, his newly acquired valet, put his head in to see if there was anything his lordship required. Miles had not expected the man to transfer his loyalty from his morally upright brother to Richard’s tearaway sibling so was dismayed to be caught in a situation which suggested Miles had not mended his errant youthful ways. He looked from the prone form of Lord Griffith at his feet to the enquiring expression of his valet who seemed less perturbed than might have been expected as he said, “I thought you were abed, m’lord, but then I heard a commotion. What’s happened?”

“To be honest, I don’t quite know.” Miles contemplated the cold, square-jawed – or rather, slack-jawed--character lying at his feet. “Here, help me get him onto the bed, will you?” Lord Griffith’s taunts were still ringing in his ears. What on earth was the man insinuating? Why else would Jemima have come to his room if it wasn’t to be with Miles?

Obediently John bent down to pick up Lord Griffith’s torso, and in moving aside his arms, checked himself as he raised what appeared to be the piece of clay that Lord Griffith had brandished earlier.

“What are you doing?” Miles asked, irritated, when he saw his valet had ignored his directive and had moved away to hold the object to the light of the candle.

“Where did this come from?” John asked, ignoring both Miles and the prone man on the floor as he waved the worthless fragment in the air.

“Lord, I don’t know!” Miles lowered Lord Griffith’s ankles. “I don’t even know what it is. Lord Griffith burst in here looking for…some poor woman and then seemed more concerned with that old urn—”

His senses were skittering all over the place. Jemima’s intoxicating scent with was him still. Just the thought of her brought back the feel of her soft, creamy skin beneath his hands. She’d gazed up at him as if she’d truly felt something in her heart and his had answered in a way that was far more intense and visceral than he’d been expecting; for he’d already acknowledged how much he wanted her.

Yet Lord Griffith suggested Jemima was fleeing from him. And that he’d had something she’d wanted. Such an insinuation suggested she was as culpable as a thief stealing the family silver. Well, as soon as the coast was clear and Jemima could step out into safety, she could answer all these questions for herself.

John’s agitated voice cut into his musings. “He was pursuing a woman, you say? Dear Lord, was he pursuing Miss Percy? Is she here?”

John stared about the dim room as if he might surprise Jemima cowering in the corner.

“Miss Mordaunt was the woman’s name,” he corrected John, distracted. “She was fleeing…another man.” He didn’t want to compromise his beloved which was why he’d not invited her to step out of the cupboard. For that was the only place she could be right now.

“I thought you said Lord Griffith was pursuing this…Miss Mordaunt of whom you speak?” He raked Miles with a pair of disapproving eyes. “And what was she doing here at this time o’ night, m’lord, if she weren’t running for her life? Which is sounds, very much, as if she were.”

Miles was about to castigate his servant for his impertinence but John was talking again, his tone more urgent, “With all due respect, was this…Miss Mordaunt…a golden-haired beauty who was here to claim a clay tablet? Is that why she had the vase? Is that why Lord Griffith was pursuing her?”

Miles had assumed Lord Griffith had been sent to find Jemima on Deveril’s orders. Yet, Griffith’s words floated back to him more clearly now. He’d been pursuing Jemima, personally. Hadn’t he?

He glanced at the cupboard, wondering if Jemima would on her own initiative reveal herself. She did not, so he said slowly, trying to piece the story together himself, “Miss Mordaunt asked me to take down the vase for her, it’s true. I thought nothing of it as she’s fond of antiquities and I thought she merely wanted to look more closely at it.”