“Good heavens!” said McClellan, shooting up from her chair. “Cordelia’s brother will be arriving shortly with her aunt and cousins! You must all hurry and dress for our gala pre-wedding supper.”
CHAPTER 2
“What a lovely evening.” Charlotte entered the study chamber off the main room of the library and settled into one of the leather armchairs by the hearth. It was late, and while the others had all retired to their quarters in the guest wing of the manor house, Wrexford had chosen to stay up a little longer in order to continue sorting through some crates of books that had recently arrived from one of his minor estates in the north.
“Cordelia seemed pleased with the evening’s festivities,” said the earl absently. He turned the page of the book he was perusing without looking up.
“Relieved is perhaps a better word,” replied Charlotte. “Apparently her aunt can be prickly, but with both her parents gone, she wished very much to have her mother’s sister attend the wedding.”
He closed the book and picked up another from the worktable at which he was sitting. “Families are complicated.”
An understatement if ever there was one.Charlotte reflected for a moment on her own tumultuous relationship with her parents. The terrible rift in her family had been repaired now that her kindhearted brother was thepater familias. But Wrexford was still struggling with recent revelations about his younger brother’s death in the Peninsular War, which had forced him to question certain assumptions about his own relationship with his father.
The books her husband was perusing had come from the late earl’s personal library, as he had chosen to live at the small family estate in the north rather than Wrexford Manor after his two sons had left home to pursue their own lives.
“Anything interesting?” she asked lightly.
Wrexford hesitated, his gaze on the printed page. “I hadn’t realized that my father read poetry—much less made annotations in the margins about his reactions to the sentiments.”
“Wrex—” she began, only to be distracted by theclick-clickof canine claws on the oak flooring.
Harper appeared a moment later in the doorway. Nose to the ground, the big hound ignored both her and the earl as he crossed the room and paused in front of the French doors leading out to the back terrace.
“If you need to piddle, you could have woken the Weasels,” said Wrexford, as he rose to undo the latch.
“He did wake us,” announced Raven as he and his brother padded in from the main room. “But not for a call of nature. He seems . . . unsettled.”
“Perhaps he ate too much this evening,” drawled Wrexford, “and his stomach is feeling bilious—”
A sudden growl cut him off.
“I don’t think it’s his stomach,” said Hawk. “Oiy, Harper! What’s wrong?”
In answer, the hound pricked up his ears. Another growl. Hackles rising, Harper turned abruptly and left the room.
Charlotte followed the others as they hurried to catch up with the hound. Wrexford, she saw, had grabbed Harper by the collar to keep him from bolting into the corridor that led from the back of the manor house to the guest wing.
“Hold your water, laddie. Let’s not wake the entire house,” murmured the earl, ruffling a calming caress to the hound’s shaggy head. After a look up and down the unlit passageway, where there wasn’t a flutter of movement among the slumbering shadows, he shrugged. “I daresay he’s not yet reacquainted with all the creaks and noises of the manor.”
A rumble rose in Harper’s throat.
Hawk crouched down beside him. “Shall I fetch you a nice, meaty bone from the kitchen to gnaw—”
“Sshhh!” Raven edged halfway out the doorway and cocked an ear. “What was that?”
Charlotte had heard it, too. A faint scuffing sound coming from the first-floor landing of the West Wing staircase. Repressing a smile, she touched Wrexford’s arm. “It’s likely Kit paying a visit to Cordelia’s room,” she whispered. “Let us not embarrass—”
But in the same instant a shrill shout—it was Cordelia—shattered that surmise.
“Intruder! There’s an intruder in the house!”
Wrexford reacted in a flash. “Stay in the library and shut the door!”
Charlotte nearly tripped as he thrust the agitated hound at her and pushed the boys back through the doorway.
“Anddon’tlet the Weasels and Harper follow me,” he added.
She nodded and managed to retreat just enough for him to slam the door shut.
