There was a vague resemblance from one portrait to another. Even the mad fifth earl looked perfectly sane, although he’d apparently thought he was the reincarnation of Nero and only wore togas. He died childless. Mad Thomas’s brother, Rupert, was the family’s black sheep. Two of his children had gone missing, and records showed he was suspected of killing them, though their bodies had never been found. His wife had gone insane, and Rupert had hanged himself. Jago wasn’t sure what happened first. Rupert’s younger brother, Tobias, inherited Sharwood, and ironically, had that not happened, Jago wouldn’t be where he was today.
Finally he reached the portrait of his grandfather, who he’d never known, and the last portrait, which was of his father. They could have been brothers. Same tight-lipped mouth, Roman nose, and piercing eyes. Actually, not physically like him at all.
* * * *
Ellie worked with both hands, pinching the stems of the strawberries between her thumbnails and index fingers, keeping the fruit cradled in her palm. She twisted and broke the stems and popped the strawberries in the basket. She’d moved onto autopilot, working as fast as she could.
“Ellie?”
She jerked upright and saw Jago staring at her, Henry and Diane standing behind. Jago blinked and rubbed his eyes.
Shit. I was doing that too fast
. She plastered a smile on her face and walked over to push a huge strawberry into his mouth.
“Good grief, I didn’t expect all that to go in,” she said with a laugh. “I thought you’d bite it in half.”
Jago chewed, swallowed, and glared.
Uh-oh, what did I do?
“How many more baskets do we need?” Diane asked.
“Three.” Ellie bent back to the plant she’d been working on.
Jago worked a couple of rows away, and Ellie felt certain he was annoyed with her.
“Henry, it’s not one for the basket, one for your mouth.” Diane tsked.
“You weren’t supposed to see that.” He laughed.
Ellie’s stomach churned with anxiety. What was wrong with Jago?
“Who else have you worked for?” Jago suddenly asked.
“I don’t discuss my clients.”
“Can’t you give me a hint? What sort of businesses?”
“Fine arts. Jewelry.” She’d given Bernie advice plenty of times.
“What’s your company called again?”
“A Breath of Fresh Air.”
“How many employees?”
What was with all the questions? “Just me.”
“Good grief, Jago. Leave the poor girl alone,” Henry said.
“The three of you smile for the camera,” Diane said.
Ellie winced when she looked at her full basket. She hoped Diane had only taken a picture and not a video.
What was wrong with Jago? Was he feeling guilty about last night? She’d wanted it to happen. Did he feel she’d tricked him into something? Maybe he didn’t want her anymore. A fist squeezed her heart.
They walked back to the farm building, and the owner scratched his head. “I have no idea how you managed to pick so many so fast. Need a job?”
Ellie forced herself to smile.
“I’ve weighed the rest. Let me just weigh these.” The guy took the extra baskets. “That’s fifty-five kilograms at three pounds forty a kilo. A hundred and eighty-seven pounds and fifty pence. With your discount, a hundred and fifty pounds.”
Ellie gulped and handed over her credit card. Money she didn’t have, but she could reclaim it from the receipts tomorrow. If there were any strawberries left, she’d buy sugar with more money she didn’t have and make jam and sell it.
“I’ve put all your containers on a cart,” the owner said. “You can wheel them to your vehicle.”
“Oh my God.” Diane gasped when she saw the mountain of strawberries.
“Bloody hell,” said Henry.
Jago said nothing.
JAGO STARED IN disbelief at the cart. There had to be over twenty large baskets. How the hell had Ellie managed to fill all those? If he wasn’t standing looking at them, he’d say it was impossible. He had a lot of questions but wanted to wait until he and Ellie were on their own.
Annoyingly, Diane maneuvered herself into the back, where he’d intended to sit with Ellie, so once they’d loaded the fruit, he slipped into the front next to Henry. How long had Ellie been at the farm? No more than two hours. Fifty-five kilograms in two hours—that was about two minutes for every kilogram. It was impossible.
Henry pulled up outside the hall. They unloaded the strawberries and carried them to the old scullery. Once Henry and Diane had left, Jago turned to Ellie. She grabbed his hand, looked into his eyes, and…
What was I going to say?
“What’s wrong?” she whispered.
Something
was
wrong, but he was damned if he could remember what.
Oh yeah, that’s it
. “What were you doing in the baron’s hall this morning?”
Her eyes widened. “How did you know I’d been in there?”
“I saw you from the squint, the little window in the solar. You were on your knees in the middle of the floor.”
“I thought I saw a coin trapped between the stones, but it was a bit of wire.”
“How did you get in there?”
Ellie shrugged. “Just opened the door and walked in.”
“I keep it locked.”
“It was open.” She squeezed his hand. “Sorry. You were busy. I was curious. I should have waited for you to show me. It’s fantastic. People would pay a lot of money to have a wedding in there. No wonder your brother wants to use it. It’s so romantic. And those tables? Have they been in since it was built? Because they’d never fit through the door.”
Is she trying to distract me?
“I was told they were built in situ.”
“Do you want me to give you some ideas on decorating it for your brother’s wedding?”
“Okay.”
He tugged her down the hallway, and as he pulled out his keys, Ellie opened the door.
“Shit,” he gasped.
“I told you it was open.”
As far as he knew, only he and Henry had keys. Had Henry shown Diane and forgotten to lock it?
Ellie leaned back on the wall below the minstrels’ gallery. “How many people are invited?”
“Sixty.”
“You’ll need two long tables at either end. The one on the dais will be for the important people. I think you’d only seat forty at what’s already in here. But any table would do. When they’re covered with clothes, no one will know what they’re like underneath.”
Jago wrapped his hand around hers and tugged her toward the place where he’d seen her standing. “What can I do to make this a faerie wedding?”
“Lots of twinkling lights, maybe potted trees covered in lights, plants, ivy, draped filmy fab…ric.”
His imagination, or was she dragging her feet?
“You could put…pretend diamonds on the table…lots of…flowers…”
“What’s wrong?”
“Nothing.”
He looked down. They were standing over the old fireplace. In the days before chimneys, there were just holes in the roof to let the smoke escape. Something glinted, and he crouched to look. As Ellie had said, a bit of copper wire was caught in the gap between the stones. As he rose to his feet, Ellie collapsed.
Chapter Thirteen
Ellie blinked up at the ceiling soaring sixty feet above her head. Jago was talking on his mobile and pacing.
“Hey,” she said and he spun round.
“Hang on, Henry. She’s awake. I’ll call you back.” He dropped next to her and stroked her hair. “Are you okay?”
“I’m fine.” Ellie tried to hide her eyes. She suspected they looked wrong. She’d used too much energy. She wasn’t surprised she’d collapsed.
“You’re not fine. You’ve been unconscious for more than fifteen minutes. I debated calling an ambulance, except you just looked as though you were asleep. You didn’t bang your head, because I caught you. But I couldn’t figure out what was wrong, and I’m a bloody doctor. Christ, you scared me.” He hugged her, and Ellie clung to him.
“Sorry. I have these blackouts sometimes,” she lied. “I’m not allowed to drive, operate heavy machinery, or walk around with a pencil in my mouth. The doctor said it was nothing to worry about.”
“It fucking well is something to worry about. Did you feel sick or light-headed? I fetched a glass of water. You’re probably dehydrated.” He jumped up to grab it from the table, and she drank it all.
“Sorry,” she whispered.
Jago sat beside her and rubbed his thumb on her arm. “Did the doctor say it was vasovagal syncope?”
Huh?
“I don’t remember.”
“When did you see him or her?”
“A year ago.”
Like never.
Ellie hated lying, but she could hardly tell him the truth that she was never ill. She’d been forced to engineer this visit to the baron’s hall because it had belatedly occurred to her that after telling him she’d found it open, she couldn’t let him find it locked. Then she’d had to manufacture the wire, and that sapped the last of her energy. She’d definitely overdone it with the strawberries. Hence the blackout, though there was always the possibility that the Kewen or whatever lurked under the floor was sending her a message.
Find me.
“You’ve done too much today. Out in the sun picking all those strawberries. I don’t know how you managed to gather so many.”
Seemed her ability to make someone forget didn’t necessarily last. Had Henry recalled what she’d said in the tea shop? This was a reminder of why she rarely used her magic. She wasn’t very good at it.
“I’m ambidextrous.” Ellie slid her hand under his T-shirt onto his belly, and his skin fluttered. Jago groaned. She slid her other hand under too. “See. I have talented hands.”
“Stop trying to distract me.”
“Is it working?”
“Yes.” He rolled onto his back and pulled her on top of him. “I feel like I’ve been caught up in a whirlwind. Positive things are happening with the house, the garden’s going to make money, Denzel will get the wedding he wants for Liz, and I have a very beautiful, sexy, stunning, clever… I’ve forgotten what I was going to say.”
Ellie laughed.
He frowned. “Your eyes look…wrong…pale.”
Oh fuck
. Ellie cupped his cheeks.
Forget my eyes.
Jago pulled her down and kissed her on the nose. She spread her legs wide to straddle his waist and rubbed her belly against his rock-hard erection. Another greedy kiss shot a jolt of lust all the way to her toes.
“I want to move and I can’t,” Jago said with a groan. “The door isn’t locked, anyone could come in, the floor is hard, and there’s a comfortable bed not far away, but none of that is as important as keeping you right where you are.”
He slid his fingers inside her shorts and onto her butt. Ellie groaned and writhed harder against him. Sunlight suddenly poured through the window, spotlighting them in the middle of the room.
Oh shit. The middle of the room
. But she wasn’t tingling or anxious, more like overwhelmingly excited. Ellie tugged her T-shirt over her head, and Jago reached for the fastening of her bra. He tossed it aside and pulled her higher to bring her breast down over his mouth. Ellie whimpered as he teased her nipples, moving his mouth from one to the other, licking and nibbling. He supported her with one hand while the fingers of his other worked on the fastening of her shorts.
All she could think about was having him inside her, filling her. Need clawed at her brain and at her heart. She stood to peel down her shorts and panties, and kicked off her sandals.
Jago sucked in a breath. “Beautiful, sexy, stunning, clever girlfriend with…weird eyes.”
Ellie saw the hint of uncertainty on his face, heard the hesitation in his voice, and it choked her. “Contacts,” she managed to blurt.
He pushed himself up to stand in front of her, reached behind his neck, and pulled his shirt over his head. While she stared at his broad-shouldered body, he toed off his shoes, pulled down his zipper, and stripped off his pants and boxers. Tall, lean, and tanned, his cock rising straight out of a bed of dark curls, he was so perfect that merely looking at him sent tingles careening through her veins. For a moment, she couldn’t breathe at all.
“Not going to faint again?” he asked.
“No, but I could come just from looking at you.”
He smiled. “Flattering as that is, I’d feel cheated if I didn’t get to touch.”
He knelt in front of her, wrapped his fingers around her ankles, then slid them up her calves and around the backs of her knees, and on to trace figure eights on her thighs. Shivers of breath-stealing excitement echoed every touch. When Jago pressed his face against her belly, she threaded her fingers in his floppy hair and stroked the edges of his ears with her thumbs.
A low moan burst from her when he rubbed his stubbled chin down her belly. He let his nose rest in her navel while he slid his hands inside her thighs and used his index fingers to spread the lips of her sex. No one had ever touched Ellie like this with her standing in front of them. He caressed her folds with his tongue, sucked at her wetness, and she could only breathe in staccato bursts.
She trembled as his tongue slid slowly back and forth, licking up her cream. On each pass, he pressed deeper until his tongue was inside her and mimicking the action of a cock.
“Leave me some hair,” he gasped, and Ellie loosened her hold, horrified to see black strands lodged in her fingers.
“Oh God, sorry,” she whispered.
“You’re worth it.” His eyes lit as a lovely grin spread over his face.
When he focused on the nub of her clit and fluttered his tongue over it, she cried out, hovering on the verge of coming. Looking down, watching him do this brought another gush of moisture, and she felt herself running faster along the track, the finish line gaining definition. Jago’s hands settled on her butt as he ate at her, and Ellie sprinted the rest of the way, the race won, jolts of pleasure speeding through her like fiery comets. Her muscles locked and then released in a biting frenzy that she wanted to never stop.
Only it did.
That was sooo good.
He pulled her down so she lay on top of him, face-to-face, her cream glistening on his lips, and he trailed his tongue over her mouth.
“Taste yourself. You’re delicious,” he whispered.