Mayhap he would have to get thoroughly drunk before he visited Charlotte next.
Or find a replacement.
One with hair as black as his heart.
“I do not want to be troubled, Wentworth,” he snapped, shaking himself from his reveries. “Send her on her way and see to it that a bottle of Sauternes is delivered to the library, won’t you?”
“Of course, my lord.” Wentworth bowed. “I would be more than happy to do so.”
“Oh, and Wentworth?” he added belatedly. “Mayhap some towels as well. I am a bit…wet.”
Without awaiting a response, Shelbourne trudged down the rest of the hall to the library, leaving a veritable river in his wake. Once within the familiar, shelf-lined walls, he discarded his sodden coat, tugged at his necktie, and flicked open the buttons of his waistcoat. His pocket watch would live to see another day.
A consultation of it revealed he was either more inebriated than he had supposed, or he was sorely in need of spectacles.
“Fuck,” he swore, and tossed the elegant gold timepiece to the floor atop a pile of drenched fabric.
He paced the library while he waited for his bottle, his soaked shoes making interminable squishing sounds as he hastened toward the door. Where the devil was Wentworth with his wine?
He was almost to the threshold when the clack of approaching footfalls in the hall alerted him to the presence of someone else. Someone who was decidedly not Wentworth. Someone who was wearing a lady’s heeled boots, and who walked with purpose.
“Madam! I beg of you, please stop or we shall have no recourse but to bodily remove you from his lordship’s home.”
The breathless, frustrated male voice calling after the owner of the boots was undeniably his butler’s.
“I will not go without speaking to Lord Shelbourne first,” countered a feminine voice he knew too well.
Except, there was something about it that sounded…different. A change in the accent. It was less clipped and precise, more drawled and drawn out. But there was no mistaking it otherwise. He had never heard another quite like it, throaty and yet innocent, husky and melodious.
Once upon a time, he’d experienced the singular pleasure of hearing that voice moan his name. But that had been when he had been deep inside her, when he had thought it an undisputed fact they would be married.
Rage soared through him. He stormed toward the library door with purposeful strides, reaching the threshold just as she came barreling into him. They collided, the impact sending him staggering backward.
Into a bloody table, as it happened.
One moment, he was on his feet, and the next, he was on his back, staring up at the intricate plasterwork on the ceiling. Only, he could not truly see the delineations. The ceiling was deuced blurry.
His arse and his head were sore.
So, too, his pride.
The combination of which was only made worse when the loveliest face he had ever beheld hovered over him.Good God, his first sight of her in two years, and she was sideways, presiding over him like some sort of avenging deity.
She was no deity, however.
If anything, Lady Julianna Somerset was a witch.
“Shelbourne,” she said, as if his very name produced a bad taste in her mouth.
And mayhap it did, because Christ knew hers did in his.
“My lady,” he gritted, clenching his jaw.
“Madam, come this way, if you please,” said Wentworth then, reaching for Lady Julianna, his face a mask of concern. “Your lordship, are you injured?”
Was he injured?
Ha!
