He stood at the water basin, swishing soap from a razor as he raised his gaze and locked with Mary’s in the glass. She stood behind him, her hands on her ample hips, her lips pursed in a straight line. Water dripped from his wet hair onto his bare shoulders. He wore a clean pair of leather breeches but little else and those he had dragged on after Rose left his chambers.
Ruark had gone to Hawick last week for many reasons, one being to assess Stonehaven’s accounting books. Ruark needed to know his father’s business transactions these past years. If therewasa connection between his father’s death and Hereford, it would be found in the accounting books, many of which were missing from Stonehaven, but which he had hoped his father’s solicitor had copies. Most importantly, banking transactions were always duplicated. If he could find proof, anything to connect Hereford to his father’s death, there may be another way to end this standoff with Hereford.
“Where is he?”
“I took the liberty of informing him you take yourbreakfast in the dining room at eight and that he may await your presence there.”
Ruark finished wiping the soap off his face. “Thank you, Mary. I will be down directly.”
Mary remained in the doorway. Ruark finally turned, waiting for her to speak her mind. “I know the lass is no’ the first woman to be used as a means to an end ... and she be the warden’s daughter—”
“Do I need this dressing-down, Mary?”
Recognizing that the tenor of the reprimand coincided with his mood warned her that even for her there were limitations to his patience. “Lady Roselyn has refused to see the modiste,” Mary said before taking her leave. “I was just to see her and told her I have arranged one to visit tomorrow. After much searchin’, I learned of a modiste living in Hawick and made provisions to bring her here. I would use that French highbrow Lady Roxburghe brings over from Paris three times a year. But I did no’ think we have—”
“Why did Lady Roselyn decline the offer for a modiste?”
“She informed me that she was convent raised and would no’ face her father being anything more than who she was, her father be damned. She asked me to thank you for your consideration, the gist of her comment bein’ along the same sentiment. She does not need your charity.”
Christ.
Ruark intended to see that when it was time to face her father, she would do so asexactlywho she is: the daughter of an earl, not some impoverished supplicant beneath that man’s regard.
Fifteen minutes later, he was trooping down the hall, adjusting the lace on his wrist. He dismissed Jason to attend to his breakfast as he passed the lad, then he wasstanding before her door. He reached for the knob, paused, then he decided to knock rather than barge inside. For a moment, considering this, he braced his palms on the door frame.
The door opened. Her eyes widened, and it was as if he’d stepped into bright morning sunlight. “My lord.”
He had been wholly unprepared for her effect on him, only because she had not left his thoughts, and he already considered his mind and senses finely attuned to her. He was wrong. She stood in a bright patch of the sunlight filtering through the high window from her bathing chambers. Her plaited copper hair crowned her head in a wreath of red-gold glory. She had changed her clothes and now wore homespun, but the simplicity of the dress merely refined the complexity of the tall woman beneath. The common accented the uncommon.
After what they had already shared between them, Ruark was surprised anything could make Rose blush, but she did as she found his eyes on her, and suddenly he was remembering the journey they had shared in the glade. There wasn’t a part of her he had not touched. A part of her that he did not want to touch again.
“Sunlight becomes you,” he said.
“I was just thinking about you,” she said not unkindly, reaching around to drag up something behind the door. “This is for you, my lord.”
She gave him a knapsack made from a patchwork of wool and muslin. Curious at the clinking and odd weight of the thing he peered inside to find it filled with silverware, napkin rings, and a chalice as she informed him, “I have no more need of such as I have every intention of going to my father when ’tis time.”
“Is that right?”
“I have not made the decision lightly. But you wereright when you told me that night at the river that there was nowhere I could go that my father would not find me. So I have decided to make this simple for all of us.”
“If there is another way?”
“After what you have told me, I know there is not.”
Her words banished the softness that had momentarily incapacitated him. Though he grudgingly admired her courage, he did not intend to hand her over to Hereford.
“I do not need your protection, my lord.”
The steel in her words told him she did notwanthis protection. His first instinct was to parry her steel with his own. But he did not. He had forgotten his purpose for coming to her room but as Mary rounded the corner, he had not forgotten his solicitor was awaiting him.
“Our chaperone has arrived,” he said, then leaned a hand against the doorway until his face was near hers. “You wish to meet your father on your terms? Give Mary one of your dresses to take to the modiste for measurements. Let her make you something ... simple.”
“Simple?”
Hell, he probably knew more about lady’s garments than Rose did. “Something provincial. Silk. Velvet. Emerald in color,” he said.The color of her eyes. He would have added,with all the proper undergarments and accoutrements, but he would choose to leave those details to Mary’s discretion. “You wearsimplevery well,” Ruark said. “You want to meet your father as you are? Never go into the wolf’s den looking like a sheep, my love.”
“Even with your infusion of gold, you still do not have enough to pay the ransom, my lord.”
