Page 32 of So Wild A Heart

“My lord…my lord…” The soft repeated words finally brought Devin awake.

He opened one eye and looked up to see his butler looming over him, wringing his hands and frowning. Devin growled something unintelligible and sat up.

He realized two things simultaneously as he did so: one was that he was incredibly stiff, particularly his neck; and the other was that his head was pounding furiously. The reason for the latter, he knew without even having to think. His head felt as it always did when he had consumed an excessively large amount of alcohol the night before—swollen and tender and as if a thousand tiny elves were going at it with hammers from the inside.

It took a moment to realize the reason for his unusual stiffness. He was seated at his desk in his study, not lying in bed, and he had fallen asleep on the desk, his head cradled on one arm, with the result that his neck felt permanently crooked, and his hand and arm were numb and useless.

He blinked against the light and groaned, trying to remember what he had been doing in his study and why he had fallen asleep there.

“My lord,” his butler began again, but Devin raised an admonitory hand.

“No.”

The butler stopped, shifting nervously from one foot to another, looking at his employer, then at the door, then back at Devin.

“Give me a minute to make sure I’m alive,” Devin went on. “I think I may be in one of the circles of purgatory.”

“I beg your pardon?” The butler added confusion to his expression of anxiety. He was not the man who had buttled for Devin for years, that good chap having been offered better pay elsewhere. This man had worked in the Earl’s household for only two months, and he had found it both undemanding and unsettling. He still had not decided whether the easygoing manner of his employer was worth the strange hours he kept and the less than genteel folks who came and went there.

“Never mind. I need a glass of water. No, wait, coffee. Perhaps both.”

“Yes, my lord. But first, there is the matter—”

Devin let out a groan. His memory was coming back to him by degrees. He recalled the opera the night before and leaving Leona in a huff, then going to Richard’s house. They had played cards, finished off the bottle of port and opened another before he had finally left. It had been very early in the morning, he remembered, as he made his unsteady way home, for the sky had definitely shown signs of lightening in the east. A man of sense, he knew, would have gone straight to bed at that point, but he had not. He had been carrying their second bottle of port, which still contained some liquid, and he had taken the bottle into his study and continued to drink.

He had also, he regretted to remember, decided to try out his drawing skills. Richard’s words had somehow implanted in him an urge to draw, to see if he was still capable of rendering a human face on paper. It had been an utterly useless thing to do, of course, but then, he frequently embarked on utterly useless courses of action when he was in the grip of drink. So he had dug out paper and pencil and had wasted an hour or two trying to draw faces—well, one face in particular. He had been unable to get Miss Upshaw’s countenance out of his mind, and he had tried to exorcise it by recreating it. He had been singularly unsuccessful, a fact which was attested to by the number of balled-up sheets of paper in the waste bin and scattered around it. However hard he had tried, he had not been able to capture the exact look of penetrating intelligence and inner amusement that marked Miranda’s face.

Somewhere along the line, obviously, he had fallen asleep. He leaned back against his chair now and fixed his butler with a deadly gaze. “I said coffee. Forget everything else.”

“But it is the lady, sir—I don’t know what to do.”

“The lady?” Devin sank his fragile head onto his hands. “What lady?”

“The lady outside, my lord. She insists on seeing you, and she seems most determined. I told her you were unavailable, but she refused to believe me, sir. I—I didn’t know what to do.”

“Send the baggage packing.”

“I would have, sir, but she—well, I recognized the unmistakable lines of Madame Ferrier in her dress and pelisse, sir, and her speech, her manner, well—” He lowered his voice, almost as if he were revealing a secret. “She appears to be a lady.”

“You’re daft.”

“No, he’s not,” said a clear voice from the doorway.

Both Devin and the butler whipped around to look at the doorway, a movement that caused Devin’s stomach to lurch dangerously.

“Miss Upshaw!” the butler exclaimed, obviously shocked.

Devin groaned and let his head sink into his hands. “I should have known.”

“I am sorry,” Miranda said, addressing the butler rather than Devin. “But I was getting rather bored cooling my heels out in the entry, and frankly, I was afraid that you might not have the nerve to awaken Lord Ravenscar. I thought you might need my help.”

“Good God,” Devin groaned, “am I to be plagued by you everywhere, even in my own house?”

“Rough night, eh?” Miranda said, not without sympathy, coming farther into the room. She turned to the butler. “He needs coffee, I imagine, Mr…. what is your name?”

“Simmons, Miss. Just Simmons.”

“All right, Simmons. Bring a pot of coffee as quickly as you can, and I think it would benefit the man greatly if you would also make a glass of my remedy. It works like a charm. Mr. Hoskins, Papa’s trade representative in the Northwest Territory, used to swear by it. Poor man, he was given to drink, and whenever we arrived there, we were as likely as not to find him sunk in a hangover. It was the loneliness and snow, you know—drove him to drink. I always made him a glass of remedy, and it made him better in minutes. First you take a raw egg, then you add a pinch of crushed black pepper, a—”