Authors: Charis Michaels
Trevor stared, trying to mince through confusion so deep, his ears had begun to ring.
“This little door,” she explained slowly, soothingly, “leads from
your house
,” she patted the plaster beside the door, “through a small, tunneled-out passageway to
my
new house. See? It goes back and forth, between the two homes. Of course the buildings share this wall, as most row houses do.”
He ran a hand through his hair, scrambling to keep up.
“The passage connects to a room in
my new house
. It’s an odd, unexplained sort of fluke in the masonry,” she continued. “Well, not a fluke, really, as someone, at some point, must have planned for it, and tunneled it out, and installed doors on both sides. But it’s hardly typical and largely unnecessary; however, in the case of my renovations—”
“Stop.” Trevor closed his eyes and pinched the bridge of his nose. “If you please,
do stop
. Miss . . . ?” He squinted at her. “What did you say you’re called?”
“Piety Grey.”
“
Please, stop, Miss Grey
. I grasp that there is a passage. This I can plainly see. However, the bit that bears repeating, if you please, was your mention of an ‘agreement.’ Or, ‘contract,’ was it?”
She opened her mouth to answer him and then closed it, eyeing him critically. He stared back, raising an eyebrow.
“The
agreement
,” she began pointedly, “stipulated in our—yours and mine—
paid, binding contract
.” She eyed him. “It grants me the right to temporarily board in your home while carpenters make crucial repairs next door.”
Oh, God.
Trevor said nothing—there was too much, perhaps, in that moment to say—and she finished, “I have paid you a fee to reside here in your house during the months you take up residence in your country estate.”
“A
paid
contract?” Trevor repeated hoarsely.
“But this was the most crucial piece, my lord. I cannot believe you have no memory of the fifty pounds I paid to let this house.”
Trevor gasped. “Fifty pounds? Surely you’re joking.”
“Surely
you’re
joking,” she laughed, but it was a strained, nervous sort of laugh, frantic and panicked. She began to pace.
“This . . . this was all finalized,” she said, “signed and sealed and notarized.” She gestured to the right and left. “My lawyers in New York, your solicitors here in London.” She stopped and turned to face him. “You cannot mean that you have no memory of it? The money? The payment’s been issued and gone for months. Even before I sailed from New York. I know we have only corresponded via solicitors until now.” Miss Grey pressed on. “But surely you cannot say that you don’t recall
any
of this. I have a document signed by your own hand . . . ”
“Not by
my hand
.”
“But you agreed.”
“I agreed to nothing,” he said. “Even if it made sense, which it does not, I would never agree to lease out my home to a—” He ran his hand through his hair again. “To anyone. But especially not to—” He ended abruptly, overwhelmed suddenly by the urge to do as he had done in Greece and simply give the order,
Get out.
He walked to the small door instead and slammed it shut.
“Sorry,” he said, reaching for calm. “Let me begin again.” He looked at her. “Are you married, Miss Grey? Are we saying,
Miss
Grey, or
Mrs.
Grey?”
“It’s
Miss
.” She raised her chin.
“Of course,” he said. “Very well. What of your father, where is he?”
She blinked. After a long moment, she said, “My father is deceased.”
“Your guardian, then? Who looks after your affairs?”
“I, alone, have moved to London and purchased the house, sir. I am in control of my own affairs.”
Rather than grapple with that statement, Trevor found words for what he should have said from the very start. “
Miss
Grey,” he began, grabbing the back of his neck, “I am the new owner of this house. I have only just inherited it, the title, all of it. The previous earl, my uncle, has died. Some six weeks ago. Any arrangement you made would have been with him.”
Miss Piety Grey gasped. “Died? I’m so sorry for your loss, my lord.”
“Don’t be. Be sorry that you made a deal with a dead man.”
Another gasp. “I beg your pardon, I have a docume—”
“Look,” he interrupted, “I’m selling the house. As soon as possible. I’m not sure of the sum it will fetch, but, assuming my solicitor confirms the legality of your arrangement with the late earl, perhaps I can repay your family some part of it.”
“If I wanted to reverse the settlement,” she said, “which I do not, the money would go to me, not my family.”
“That makes no sense, but very well,” he said. “The repayment would go to you, but this house will be put up for sale next week. In the meantime,
I
live here. You cannot, you shall not, reside inside it. Legal, binding documents or no. It’s entirely out of the question.”
Miss Grey narrowed her eyes. “I see. Of course, I could not predict your uncle’s untimely death, but I do wonder why you were not informed of our arrangement when you inherited? The paperwork to finalize the settlement was, at least on my end, oppressive. Did your uncle leave you no will, no ledgers? Did he not speak of it?”
“We were not familiar,” Trevor said. “I am still sifting through his, er, ledgers. My first priority was to take stock and sell everything of value.”
Miss Piety Grey crossed her arms over her chest. “Sixty?” she said.
“I beg your pardon?”
“I am offering you ten pounds more. To honor the agreement I made with your uncle.”
“You’re mad,” he said. “Even if I could move out so that you could move in, which I have no intention of doing, you could enjoy an extended stay at one of London’s finest hotels for that sum. Why not book a proper suite of rooms in St. James and wait out the repairs?”
“No,” she said quickly—too quickly.
He studied her. “Why in God’s name not?”
She drew breath to answer but then looked away. She was revising, taking care with what she said. Everything else had come out in a veritable gush, but now, she edited. It was, perhaps, her most revealing tell. Revealing what, he couldn’t say, but he knew when someone was withholding. Or lying.
“If you please, Miss Grey?”
She glanced up and offered a grim smile. “A hotel would never do,” she said quietly, almost shakily. “My circumstances require that I set up house immediately. I must move in,” she said, ticking off the list of “musts” on her fingers, “hire a staff, buy furnishings, establish myself in the neighborhood.”
When she looked at him again, she was emphatic. “I cannot appear transient,” she said. “I am
not
transient.”
Before he could respond, Joseph trooped into the room. The boy glanced quickly at Trevor but stared at the young woman. “They’re empty,” the boy said, his voice cracking. “The other rooms.”
“Yes, Joe. She is alone,” Trevor said, turning to look out the window. “And, you’ll be relieved to learn she is neither ghost nor forgotten maid. She is . . . ” He looked at her.
“Piety Grey,” she provided again, reviving her smile.
“This is my serving boy, Joseph.”
She nodded and turned her smile on defenseless, impressionable Joe. “But you must meet my maid,” she said, darting to the passage.
“Tiny!” She shouted the word through the doorway. “Do come and meet our new neighbors!”
No, we must not meet your maid,
Trevor thought, even as the sound of frustrated effort rustled from the other side of the tiny half door.
From the mouth of the passage crawled a petite, middle-aged woman with brown skin. She was dressed in the plain uniform of a servant, except for the bright-orange turban securing her hair. Her expression registered somewhere between diligent retainer and perturbed relation. Before she spoke, she looked at Trevor squarely in the eye.
“Missy Pie,” she said, “all the house trunks are inside. They finished ten minutes ago and then invited themselves in, right through the front door. Wandering around like company. Swarmed the ground floor, looking for Lord-knows-what. If you don’t get them outside, they’ll break something or steal it. They’re thick as ants on your jewelry trunk right now.”
“Yes, of course,” said Piety Grey, looping her arm around Tiny’s and patting the top of her hand.
“Lord Falcondale,” she said, “this is my companion and maid, Tiny Baker. As you can see, I was not exaggerating about her harmlessness.”
To the maid, she said, “Tiny, the earl next door has died, and this is his nephew. The situation, I’m afraid, is not as we expected.”
The woman narrowed her eyes at the earl, studying him shrewdly, looking back and forth between him and her charge.
Miss Grey went on, “If you’ll excuse us, my lord, we hired hostlers in South Hampton, and they have agreed to help us with the unpacking. I’m afraid they are more accustomed to horses than people.”
She nodded to her maid and released her, and the woman ducked through the passage.
Piety went on, “Of course, we have yet to unload our personal trunks because we planned to reside here.” She looked around. “I traveled from New York with very few fixtures, but it appears what I brought might be useful here. Have you no furniture?”
“The house is empty by design,” he told her impatiently. “The furniture has been sold—and hopefully the house will soon follow. It is empty except the bare necessities for the boy and me.”
“Very well.” She scanned the room like someone of a mind to provision. He cleared his throat and stepped in front of her view.
Miss Grey snapped her gaze to his face and went on, “My English solicitor has been notified of my arrival, but I do not expect to meet him for a day or so. No one could venture a guess as to precisely how many weeks it would take us to reach London from New York.” She paused, rubbing two fingers back and forth over her brow. “In the meantime, please think over my offer of an additional ten pounds. I’d like to discuss it more.”
Before his next denial, she added, “In future, of course, I will apply to your front door. Please do forgive my intrusion here. You have been most kind.”
“Right.” Trevor mumbled the word even while he thought,
No, no, no, and no.
Before he could say the words out loud, she smiled again, gave a small wave, and ducked into the passage to trundle through.
P
iety Grey waited a full hour before she approached the earl with a revised offer.
It was, for Piety, an exercise in extreme restraint.
It was also time well spent. She dashed off letters to her solicitors, to the staffing agency that would supply maids and footmen and grooms, and to the builder she would hire to restore the house. All the while she allowed her brain to reorder the impression of the man next door, who would, it seemed, crush her dream.
No, she thought, not crush it. The man who would
blockade
her dream. It took considerable effort to suppress the surge of queasy anxiety that flooded her belly at the thought of falling weeks behind schedule, and she reverted to her original impression. He was a crusher of dreams.
Of course he was absolutely nothing like her lawyers in New York had led her to expect. He wasn’t old, for one, not even a little. Not old, not infirm, and most annoyingly, not absent.
He was strong enough to pounce on her and restrain her. If he wished, he could pick her up and carry her around, which certainly he did not wish. He wished to be rid of her; he made that perfectly clear. Rarely, in fact, had she met a man so steadfastly disinterested to the point of rudeness, and again, how lucky. Preoccupied men didn’t have time to make assumptions, correct or otherwise, about her unique circumstances, and better still, they didn’t have time to “improve” said circumstances by insinuating themselves into her affairs.
So what if he seemed a little unyielding? Piety could manage men who wanted nothing to do with her. It was men who wanted too much who became a problem.
And
management
is exactly what he would require. Luckily, she had planned for this. Well, if not exactly for this, she had forced herself to anticipate any manner of setbacks or false starts. She would discover some solution and make him see rather than accept defeat. God forbid, she turn back now.
It was in the spirit of this—
not
turning back—that she and Tiny clipped down her steps after one, long hour; strode to his front door; and knocked. Stridently.
“Hello again!” Her beaming smile greeted him when he opened the door.
The earl blinked. It was clear that he had not yet become accustomed to the sight of her.
“I was not sure if you lived alone,” she said tentatively, craning around him, “or if we would have the pleasure of meeting the countess?”
He narrowed his eyes. “There is no countess,” he said, stepping onto the stoop and slamming the door behind him. “Which is to say . . . ”
And so it began. Piety watched him descend. Deny and descend.
She retreated to the first landing, giving him plenty of room. She smiled, she nodded, she forced herself to listen. He made valid points, strong points. He was sarcastic and ironic and wry.
“So let me be very clear,” he said, taking a step down to the landing, “in no way”—he stepped down again—“am I amenable to”—another step—“the so-called agreement that you had with my uncle, the previous earl.”
Clearly, he tried to crowd her, to intimidate.
I’m a man. I’m tall, solid, broad-shouldered.
The aggressive display was unnecessary; she knew this much from being tackled by him. Now, he loomed. While the tackle had demonstrated his strength and agility, the looming invited her scrutiny of the little things.
His tan, for example. He as far too tan for a gentleman. His face and neck were as brown as the sailors on the ship that had conveyed her to England.
And his hair. It was thick and brown with hints of auburn. Lighter on top from the sun. Too short to be stylish, but long enough to curl. Long enough to flop.