“Why,” he said, once the doors were closed, “is everyone outside in this weather?”
“Refreshing, isn’t it?” Rhys shouted, as though he’d gone deaf from the gales of wind. “Oh! A towel!”
Malcolm made a disgusted noise as Rhys whipped Hattie’s discarded towel from the ground and began to dry himself. “I’ll just go get myself a new one,” he said. “Baron.”
“Lennox,” said Elias, nodding as the other man passed him.
“You never call me ‘Caradoc,’” Rhys observed, rubbing the towel over his hair. “Am I more of a first-name chap?”
Elias turned to give him an exhausted look, which made the other man giggle.
“Yes, I suppose I am,” Rhys Caradoc decided.
“I was wondering, actually,” Elias said, watching with a morbid sort of fascination as Rhys made a show of drying himself, “why Willa trained you to be an illusionist and not… Well, everyone else got a vocation.”
“I do all right,” said Rhys, wiggling his dark eyebrows with a chuckle. “She wanted me to be a surgeon, in fact. Something with precision. I just refused to cooperate with anything respectable.”
“Ah,” Elias said, nodding. “That makes sense.”
“It does, doesn’t it?” Rhys agreed, dropping the now-soaked towel back onto the tile floor with a plop and sauntering past him into the house. “Well, see you at dinner!”
He sighed, resuming his restorative wall lean as Peach emerged tentatively from her shadow and began to root at the towel, flopping over onto the thing as though it were warm and cozy and not cold and wet.
Elias wondered if she liked Rhys’s scent. Or perhaps Hattie’s.
“Oh, that scalawag,” a maid exclaimed, marching into the foyer to retrieve the towel and hesitating when she saw the pig. “Oh. Pardon, my lord.”
“No, it’s all right,” he said. “I’ll move her.”
“I’d box that Welsh lad’s ears if he weren’t so pretty,” she said to the pig as Elias lifted her from the middle, her little cloven legs dangling as the maid whipped the towel off the floor. “Lucky for you, piglet, you’re a pretty one too.”
“You are,” he agreed quietly to Peach, after the maid had gone.
He watched the door for a moment, wondering if anyone else was going to blow in from the outdoors.
Perhaps Willa herself, in fact.
And when no one did, he nodded, sighed, and took his pig back to his bedroom.
Chapter Eighteen
Harriet French awokeon the eve of her wedding day in a raw panic.
Panic, as it happened, tasted like burnt toast and roasted tomato, smashed together in a rotten paste against her tongue. It was a nasty thing to awaken to, flooding her nose and mouth as she tore from sleep with an anguished gasp of anxiety.
Something, though she was not entirely certainwhatat first, was very wrong.
Images floated in her mind from the remnants of her nightmare, of wedding bells and the church aisle. What was it? What had she done that had disturbed her sleep so?
“The rings!” she croaked, flinging herself out of bed headfirst, hands to the rug and crawling out of her blankets like a demented acrobat. “I’ve forgotten to get the rings!”
It was, Hattie knew, an understatement.
She’d never even ordered the damned rings. Rings she had been planning ever since that afternoon in Elias’s bedchamber, when he’d shown her the one Willa had left him. She had wanted engraved rings with something nicer thanmea culpato exchange after the wedding, a symbol that this was not going to be a marriage of fault and regret.
And she’d forgotten them! Entirely!
She could see them in her mind’s eye. She had envisioned them so clearly and in detail that she had thought they werebloody real! There they were, glinting just beyond the seal of her eyelids on an imaginary velvet cushion, nestled together in a perfect figure eight, glinting like liquid moonlight against the dark-blue fabric.
