His mouth quirked—not quite a smile, but close enough to unnerve her. “I have a feeling, Miss Ashcombe, that we are both destined for disapointment.”
He swung back into the saddle, the great horse shifting beneath him with a restless huff. “Good day.”
And then he was gone, thundering down the path and vanishing into the trees as swiftly as he had appeared, leaving only the churned earth and the faint, lingering trace of sandalwood and leather behind him.
Eliza exhaled sharply, her irritation evident in that harsh sigh. But it wasn’t irritation that had her heart racing and the blood rushing in her veins. It was something far more dangerous and potentially destuctive.
One thing was certain—Ravenwood Hall was no longer a vacant, slumbering mausoleum. And when the house was occupied by anyone with Hawthorne blood, trouble would always follow.
Chapter
Two
Gabriel Hawthorne had not intended to spend his morning in a state of mild agitation, yet here he was — pacing the length of his study with the sort of restless energy that used to come over him before a battle. It was absurd. Entirely disproportionate to the situation. And yet, for reasons he preferred not to examine too closely, he could not seem to let it go.
“Send word to Harker,” he said curtly as a footman passed in the corridor. “I will see him here at once.”
The servant bowed and hurried off. Gabriel moved to the hearth, then to the window, then back again, unable to settle. It was not rage that gripped him — he was not so temperamental as that — but a simmering frustration, the kind that came from being blindsided. And hehadbeen blindsided. An early morning ride, something he’d taken to quite often since his arrival in Dunrake-on-Swale, eased his restlessness from suddenly having far too much time for leisure. But it had not resulted in relaxation and ease at all that morning. Rather it had come with shocking revelations and an uncomfortable awareness of how long he’d been without feminine companionship. Now, in the brief span of an early autumn morning, he had discoveredthat there were two women living on his estate — on his land — without his knowledge. And not merely tenants, but women bound there by some ancient agreement of which he had been wholly unaware. And one of those woman was entirely too young and too pretty for him to ignore it.
It was intolerable. Not because they were a threat, nor even because of the legal nuisance of it all. It was intolerable because itoughtnot to matter and yet, for reasons he could not quite articulate, it did.
More to the point,shedid.
Gabriel exhaled sharply and sank into the nearest chair, scrubbing a hand over his face as if that could erase the memory of the morning’s encounter. Miss Eliza Ashcombe. He’d heard whispers of villagers about his mystical neighbors.Neighbors. Not tenants!
Still,she had been nothing like what those hushed and scandalized whispers might have suggested. There had been no cackling, no dark mutterings over cauldrons, no signs of sorcery. Only a young woman with calm eyes, hair of an indiscernible shade that might have been brunette, auburn, blonde or anything in between. She’d also been in possession of a steady voice, one that had realized she was utterly unafraid of him and entirely unimpressed by his title.
And — damnably — quite pretty. Far prettier than he had any business noticing.
If she had been old or dull or insignificant, he might have dismissed the matter entirely. But she had not been. And their meeting — volatile and unexpected as it was — had left him unsettled in a way he had not been for years. He liked his life smooth. Predictable. Ordered. Dull, even. If not precisely happy, then at leastmanageable. But nothing about his life had been manageable of late.
He had been a younger son of a younger son of a younger son, content with the regimented certainty of military life. There had been no expectations, no great responsibilities waiting to claim him. Until, one by one, the heirs ahead of him had fallen — age, infirmity, misfortune, all conspiring to place him in a situation he had never imagine. Heir. A titled and landed member of the peerage, he was now the Earl of Blackburn, master of an estate he barely knew, saddled with decisions he did not feel equipped to make, and apparently — he added darkly — host to resident witches.
The knock at the door came as a welcome interruption.
“Enter,” he called.
Harker, his steward, stepped inside with his usual unhurried gait, though the flicker of wariness in the man’s eyes betrayed that he had already heard of Gabriel’s mood.
“You wished to see me, my lord?”
“I did.” Gabriel remained seated, his tone clipped but not cold. “Perhaps you can explain why I was forced to learn from a stranger in the woods this morning that two women are living on my estate under some sort of perpetual agreement.”
Harker blinked. “Ah. Miss Ashcombe and her grandmother.”
“Yes,Miss Ashcombe and her grandmother,” Gabriel echoed, his brows knitting. “The ones who apparently occupy a cottage on my land and have done so for generations. A rather pertinent detail, wouldn’t you agree?”
The steward shifted uneasily. “It is… common knowledge, my lord. They’ve been there longer than I’ve been in service, and as they keep to themselves, I confess it did not occur to me to mention them.”
“It did not occur to you,” Gabriel repeated quietly, the words laced with a patience that was thinner than he would like to admit. “And yet here I am, appearing the fool before a womanwho seemed far better informed of my holdings than I am myself.”
Harker coughed lightly into his hand. “There is, as you said, an agreement — quite an old one. The cottage was granted to the Ashcombe family by your ancestor, the third earl. They are to have use of it, and access to the surrounding land, in perpetuity. I can have the original documents retrieved from the archives.”
“Do so,” Gabriel said. “And once I have reviewed them, I wish to know precisely how binding they are. Whether this so-calledperpetuityleaves me with any recourse at all.”
The steward’s brow furrowed. “My lord… you mean to turn them out?”
Gabriel looked past him, through the tall windows to the tree line in the distance — where mist curled between the trunks and somewhere beyond, Miss Eliza Ashcombe walked among the forests’ herbs and trees, her footsteps a whisper amongst them.
