The pale face on the bed screwed up as if thinking hurt. “But how?” This time the word sounded more insistent. The rheumy blue eyes demanded honesty.
“Someone cut the planks. The weight of the trap broke them.” Rob watched the old man’s lids drop and thought he went back to sleep.
Moments later, he spoke again without opening his eyes. “I’m glad you’re here, Robbie.”
Rob swallowed hard. “Me too, Da.” He gave his father’s hand a squeeze, but the old man seemed to have fallen asleep. He held on, overwhelmed.
The candle gutted out a moment later. “I love you, Da.” Rob choked out the words, still holding the old man’s hand. A gentle squeeze was the only response.
*
In the silenceof the night, he pulled out Rockford’s message. He glanced at the man on the bed and began composing his reply in his mind. He couldn’t leave Ashmead until he ensured the safety of his family and the stability of Willowbrook. He would find out who did this to his father, and they would pay. And then he would go.
Another thought crowded in, one that had never quite left him, an image that hovered on the edges of his mind even before the kiss that didn’t happen, of Lucy beside him when he returned to his world.Foolish thought, that. Lucy belongs to Ashmead. I’ll secure a place for her, since Clarion won’t. I’ll do it before I leave.
Chapter Twenty-Four
“Aren’t you goingto see to the field work?” Agnes grumbled. The horizon had brightened, and soon the sun would be up. Lucy’s habit to join the tenants at dawn, assign tasks, and see that they began, had fallen by the wayside of late, more mornings than not.
Lucy sat at the kitchen table sipping coffee. “Thatcher can manage it.”
“That he can. He always could.” Agnes’s sharp tongue cut across the room, and she swiveled, hands on hips, to glare at Lucy. “He’ll be down when he’s ready. It isn’t like you to moon around.”
Hot coffee sloshed onto Lucy’s bodice. She surged to her feet and grabbed a bit of toweling from the sink to mop frantically at the stain. “I am not mooning!”
“Is there a problem here?”
Lucy thanked the saints she had put the remains of her coffee down. Rob’s deep voice startled her and rumbled right through her. He leaned one elbow on the door frame without a coat, in a shirt wrinkled from sleep in a chair all night. The dark stubble across his unshaven cheeks and rumpled hair didn’t help. Her foolish heart found him even more attractive than it had the night before, and that sensation, God, forgive her, had been powerful enough for a lifetime.
“A small mishap,” she choked out.
“You seem to have had a spill.” His intense scrutiny of her person—and the site of the brown stain—did nothing to calm her. Rob blinked and stood upright as if suddenly realizing how improper his gaze had been.
“Mrs. Spears, my sister has gone in to sit with her father. Could you please bring her up a tray?”
“I was preparing to do just that.” Agnes hesitated, however, glancing between Lucy and the baronet.
“Come now, Mrs. Spears, I can hardly ravish her in the time it would take you to carry up a tray.”
Agnes stiffened her back with a huff, poured a cup of coffee, and placed a sweet roll next to it on the table for him. He sat with a murmured “Thank you.” The older woman loaded a tray and left before Lucy, still standing by the sink, managed to control her scrambled thoughts.
“Herfather?” she blurted out when they were alone, an emphasis on “her” carrying a weight of meaning.What had he said at the assembly? Robert Benson isn’t my father. And yet he sat up all night…She hadn’t mistaken the anguish in his eyes.
He raised one brow over his coffee. “It’s too early in the morning to probe the sinews of my soul, Miss Whitaker.”
She briefly considered running to her room. The stains on her gown made a handy excuse, but she thought herself made of sterner stuff. She sat down across from him, picked up the remains of her coffee, and snatched a roll from his plate. “You said we needed to talk.” Her heart, foolish organ, pounded.
Rob—she tried and failed to think of him as Sir Robert—drank his coffee. His solemn expression did not appear to be that of a man who planned to make a declaration to a lady.Of course, he doesn’t, you ninny.
“I’ve been considering your conditions, Miss Whitaker.”
“Conditions?” The squeak in her voice appalled her.
“The conditions you laid out before you would vacate Willowbrook.”
Vacate Willowbrook. She shuddered under the force of it, but he didn’t take notice. He spoke steadily while consuming both coffee and a prodigious pile of sweet buns. “The funds you put aside as a steward’s salary are fair enough. If anything, they appear modest. My brother, Eli, will arrange to have those funds put under your control if at all possible. Do you have a guardian?”
She stared for a moment before shaking her head. “David, that is, the earl manages a small bequest from my mother for me, but guardian? No.”
