The Cheer in Charming an Earl (The Naughty Girls) (7 page)

Her crestfallen expression was a powerful reaction for a young woman whom he’d just met that afternoon. But he wouldn’t press her now, especially when he didn’t understand why he felt so disappointed to have disillusioned her.

“P-p-p-rost-it—?”
She squeezed her eyes closed. “Are they really
p-prost-ti-tutes
?”

He said nothing at first. Then he shrugged helplessly. “They are.”

“Ohhhh,”
she moaned. “I am
ten
times a fool.”

He couldn’t bear to see her blame herself. Not when it was his fault for deceiving her into believing his sordid guests were respectable. He gripped her arms just above the elbows and pulled her toward him. “No,
I’m
sorry. I thought they could behave themselves for one blasted night.” He looked over his shoulder and scowled at his friends as he cradled her in his arms.

Under his cheek, her hair tickled his skin. She wasn’t touching him back, but he felt like less of a bounder while holding her. But after allowing him to comfort her for several lovely seconds, she pushed against his chest. Paper wrapping tore at the corner of the box pressed between them as she struggled out of his arms. “Let me go. I have nothing to say to you.”

Reluctantly, he released her. It probably wasn’t doing her virginal outrage any good to be crushed against a man who’d just admitted to being a libertine. “We’ll have it out in the morning,” he promised, feeling the need to make everything right for her. How did her teardrops manage to wound him like little knife-pricks in the chest?

He held his arm out for her. She didn’t nod and she didn’t reply to his promise, but she did allow him to see her back to her room. He spent the remainder of the evening attempting to remember what, precisely, had been said, so he could mend things after breakfast.

Yet after a long, sleepless night, he learned there was to be no morning for them. Miss Conley, her trunk, her driver, and her horses had disappeared overnight. As though they’d never existed. Grantham rubbed at his eyes, but the little bedchamber she’d occupied remained empty. “Where do you think she went off to?” he asked de Winter.

As usual, de Winter stood at his side. Because it was morning, he sipped hot coffee rather than brandy. “Not farther than we can find her. They’re bound to leave tracks in the snow, and in this weather, I doubt anyone else will be about to ruin them. But why would you want to go after her?”

He’d had all night to answer that, yet still he didn’t know. He did have one notion, however, one he wanted to test on de Winter. “I think I broke her heart.”

“That’s ludicrous. She was a flighty thing, but far above the impressionable age when a girl sets her cap at a man she’s just laid eyes on. Far more likely, she was distraught to learn your twenty thousand quid came attached to a coven of lightskirts and dissolutes.”

Grantham went over and touched his fingers to a soft dent in the pillow. It might have been where her head had rested, or it might be time to retick the filling. “Still, I can’t shake the sentiment. What if she and I were meant to be?”

“Like some sort of perverse Christmas miracle? Chelford, are you sure she’s the one who hit her head?”

Grantham didn’t laugh. Miss Conley
had
felt like an extraordinary gift. Her presence had brightened a holiday that had gone dark since his sister’s death. “I’m taking a search party out. Even if I’m not destined to be leg-shackled to a slip of a girl who practically bleeds artlessness, I won’t have her life on my conscience. The snow has stopped but the roads are still icy.” That, at least, explained how she’d managed her trunk. They were probably dragging it behind her horses like a sleigh.

An hour later, he and de Winter rode out accompanied by three footmen and Mr. Tewseybury. It was no surprise the other men had declined to go chasing after a woman who’d left their lives as suddenly as she’d entered them. He expected nothing less from his wastrel friends, at any rate.

As the search party rounded the rear of his house toward the road, Grantham got his first good look at the destruction wrought on his poor kitchens. Chelford was the usual sort of family seat one found in Yorkshire; what had started as a small crofter’s hut had been extended and rebuilt over the years in the direction of rolling hills. But the kitchens abutted the old road, and it wasn’t difficult to imagine how Miss Conley’s carriage had managed to cut a path directly into the back of his house.

An oiled canvas tarp swathed the corner of two stone walls. The makeshift cover had frozen solid overnight. Even with half of the devastation shielded by it, the damage was unmistakably appalling. “Looks like we’re fortunate the house didn’t burn down,” de Winter mused. “Had she come an hour later, the piglet might have been spitted and the hearth roaring at full-blaze.”

Fire.
Grantham’s blood went to ice. He stopped guiding his horse as his numbed mind sent him into a daze.
Fire.

It wasn’t the fire that had killed his sister. It was the smoke.

He shook himself. Shook his head hard, as if the awful memory could be displaced by anything he could physically do. Stupid, puerile hope. Nothing could help. Nothing could change the past. His sister was gone and there was nothing to be done for it; over the last five years he’d learned the impossibility of wishing otherwise.

It seemed de Winter was waiting for him to speak. “It wasn’t our time,” Grantham said of the notion that they had all escaped being roasted alive on Christmas Eve. The empty words barely squeezed through the tightness in his throat. There was nothing about the thought of burning that didn’t singe him to his soul.

De Winter shrugged. “I should have kept the thought to myself.”

It was Grantham’s turn to shrug. “One can’t hide forever.”

De Winter inhaled deeply. The breath whooshed out of him. “And yet I try.”

Grantham nudged his horse forward to pull in front of de Winter’s. He knew the other man had demons of his own, emotions he perhaps wanted to share now that Grantham’s had been laid bare. But Grantham hated to be reminded of that day. It was one thing to lose one’s parents. Certainly, he grieved for his father. And every so unexpectedly, the reminder that his mother was gone struck him so hard it knocked the wind out of him. But his baby sister, only fifteen years old, should never have been taken from this earth.

If only he’d reached her before she’d succumbed.

It seemed Miss Conley’s trail went on for miles. No one had been able to say what time she’d left, but he deduced it must have been directly upon leaving the dining room. Else, he would have come across her resting the horses. Even with the snow coming down in gusts, the beasts would need to be rubbed down. Perhaps more so because of it. Their sweat would otherwise begin to freeze.

When the trail took a sudden turn along a path marked by the rut of carriage wheels and a handmade sign, Grantham sat up straighter. Wasn’t this—?

“Mrs. Rebmann’s house?” de Winter shielded his eyes from the glare bouncing off the bright slush. “I’d recognize that upside down shoe if it hung from Lucifer’s gate.”

“Agreed.” Grantham nudged his horse’s flanks with his heels and trotted ahead. He’d heard whispers the famous actress lived in the area, now that she’d left the stage. “Perhaps Miss Conley needed to rest.”

De Winter drew abreast on his own mount. “What if her aunt
is
Millie Rebmann? You did say she was making her way to tend an ailing relative.”

Grantham slowed his horse as they came to a picket fence with its gate firmly latched closed. He hadn’t expected to track Miss Conley all the way to her destination. Now he wasn’t quite sure what to do. Whether her aunt was Mrs. Rebmann or not, if he presented himself at the door and asked after the young woman who’d just been brought in, a woman who had fled what must have been a terrifying circumstance to drive her into the dead of night on a winter’s eve, he’d destroy any chance of leaving her reputation intact. If he planned to do that, well, then, he might as well ask her to marry him while he was at it.

Perhaps he ought to do that anyway.

He held out an arm to slow de Winter and shushed the others with his hand. He drew his horse around so that he faced the search party. “I can’t think of a way to approach Miss Pearson that doesn’t end with my being shackled to her immediately. With my luck, I’ll be held accountable even if I
don’t
chase her inside. We’ve seen that she’s safe. We’ll ride back and, once my house is cleared of leeches,” he looked at de Winter and Tewsey by turn, “I’ll invite Mrs. Rebmann to take tea.”

“So you’ll go about this the proper way, rather than the half-cocked way?” Mr. Tewseybury asked. “That’s a much better start to a marriage than public ruination.”

“I’m not
courting
her,” Grantham denied, even though he did seem to be making a plan to do just that. “Have it your way, then. But if I do find myself on the way to the altar, none of you will be invited to the wedding.”

De Winter’s head snapped up. Grantham rolled his eyes. “Of course
you’re
invited. Someone must keep a close watch on my bride.”

The earl’s lips curled in a sardonic smile. “At the rate you’re collapsing into hysterics, Chelford, I predict
you’ll
be the one with cold feet.”

“Amusing as always. Let’s be off, then. I won’t have her thinking I’m sniffing at her skirts, when I’m not sure I’ll come up to scratch.” As he kicked his heels and spurred his horse back toward the main road, he chanced one last glance over his shoulder.

A single curtain fell back into place.

ELINOR HAD expected Aunt Millie to bear a bit of resemblance to her mother: tall for a woman, with a nose that featured prominently on her face and a trim waist that defied her age. She hadn’t expected Aunt Millie to be the spitting image of Mama, right down to her wide-spaced blue eyes and unfashionable orange hair.

“Y-you’re twins?” Elinor stammered, partly because her teeth were chattering and partly due to the surprise of learning her mother had kept an enormous secret all these years. Her mother had a
twin
sister. Elinor was so stunned, she couldn’t seem to move her feet.

“Come inside, darling,” Aunt Millie bid her, “and take that wet coat off. Come, come.” With one hand she closed the door behind Elinor. With the other, she waved for a slack-jawed serving woman to leap into action. “I’m certain my niece has an excellent reason for her extraordinary arrival,” Aunt Millie assured the maid, hustling Elinor into the foyer. “Bring tea, very hot. Oh, and send Charlie out to see to her man and the horses.”

“Thank you,” Elinor said numbly as she shrugged out of her coat and delivered it to her aunt’s outstretched hand. Tea sounded divine.

Aunt Millie tossed the sodden fleece across the back of a chair, then ushered Elinor into a nearby parlor. “Sit,” she commanded, pushing Elinor onto a couch. “I’ll have the fire made up as soon as the tea is brought in. Why on earth are you here now? It’s Christmas
morning
.”

So it was. Elinor had almost forgotten that, in her hurry to be away from that dissipated man and his equally, if not more, dissipated friends. “I thought you were dying?” she tried by way of feeble explanation.

Aunt Millie sat beside her. She pulled Elinor’s frigid hands into her warm ones and began rubbing the life back into Elinor’s fingers. “We all are, darling. Death is but the last act. For everyone.”

Elinor had never heard anything so profound. She studied her handsome aunt with no small amount of wonder, until she realized that bit of philosophy didn’t answer her question at all. “But you
are
dying. We’ve been worried about you.” Even as she said the words aloud, she became aware that her energetic aunt didn’t seem to be ailing in the least.

“Ohhhh,”
Elinor breathed. Not again! How silly could she be? Aunt Mildred wasn’t
dying
.

Her ears rang.
“I think you must be wonderfully naïve.”
She squeezed her eyes tight. Goodness, but Grantham’s verbal pat on the head seemed all the more true when she was faced with the fact that she’d accepted yet another blatant fabrication without question. And she’d set out on this journey believing herself the clever one!

Aunt Millie’s gaze fell to Elinor’s hands. As if she’d just remembered what she was doing, she returned to rubbing Elinor’s fingers, this time with extra vigor. “She let you worry? How very
like
her. When she might have explained it all.”

Elinor gripped her aunt’s hands to keep them from rubbing her skin clean off. “She? You mean Mama? Truly, I haven’t the patience for more games. Have out with it or I’ll leave.” She surprised herself with her conviction.

Aunt Millie, on the other hand, didn’t seem to notice Elinor’s sudden assertiveness. Her wide blue eyes, framed by just a touch of crow’s feet, seemed to stare into the past. “Madge never did approve of me. I thought all these years you children were just waiting to come of age so you could visit me, but now I see she truly didn’t want anyone to know.”