James Pembroke was even more beautiful in repose. The warm fire’s glow highlighted the sharpedge of his jaw, the lush curves of his lips. His dark hair was a tumble of ebony waves, with a few strands hanging over his brow and one errant curl stroking his cheek.
Even in sleep, he exuded a magnetism that drew her closer. She itched to put her hands on him because that’s what they seemed to do every time they were near each other.
For a moment she almost forgot a half dozen staff members watched from the doorway. A rogue impulse made her reach out to touch his arm. She needed the reassurance that he was real, not just some mirage she’d willed into being because she’d so wished she might see this man again.
And then it struck her, realization slamming home with a nauseating truth that made her pulse race and her stomach churn.
This man who’d touched her, helped her, made her smile, he wasn’t justJames Pembroke. He was a man who meant to take ownership of her aunt’s beloved manor house while she was away and could do nothing to contest his claim.
Just as she started to turn and step quietly toward the door, he roused, and Lucy, heaven help her, looked back at him eagerly. In sleep, she missed those eyes of his, and that seductive smile.
And there it was. Just a hint of a smile, bending the corners of his lips. “Am I dreaming?”
Then realization seemed to strike him too. He shot up from the settee and got to his feet, then drew closer. Without a moment of hesitation, hereached for her, laying a hand, heavy and warm, on her arm.
“Are you all right? How did you find me? Is it Nichols?” The questions tumbled out, one on top of the other.
His voice emerged husky and deep, and Lucy wished she could sit and speak with him as they had on the train.
“This lady is our mistress’s niece. I’ll ask you to remove your hands from her,my lord.” McKay was a big man and couldn’t manage to say anything without bluster.
James’s expression went from worried to angry to a shock that made his blue eyes widen in the span of a second.
“Lady Cassandra’s niece,” he said slowly, as if arranging the pieces in his mind. “She’s the aunt you were coming to visit?” He held her gaze, ignoring McKay and the fact that Mrs. Fox had stepped into the room.
He did release his hold on her arm, and Lucy inwardly chastised herself for noticing that most of all.
And then anger came. Anger at her own wistfulness and the ease with which she’d been dazzled by his masculine magnetism and too-familiar manner when she knew next to nothing about him. Anger thatheof all men had to be the one who’d come to take her aunt’s home.
“If only you’d shared anything of your true intentions for this trip on the train,LordRossbury, wecould have had this discussion there.” How might things have proceeded differently if she’d known he was a nobleman journeying to Scotland to overturn her aunt’s life?
James drew back as if she’d struck him.
She was being too emotional. Flustered. Everything Mrs. Winterbottom advised against.
Lucy closed her eyes and tried counting to ten, but halfway there he spoke her name.
“Lady Lucy” emerged as a soft, gentle plea.
She sensed that he wanted to explain as much as she wanted to ask him a dozen questions. But time was what she needed. Time to speak to her aunt. And to sort out her feelings about the most appealing gentleman she’d ever laid eyes on, a man who she barely knew and yet whose scent made her mouth water.
“Can we see to a room for Lord Rossbury?” Clearly, the man’s long legs and broad shoulders couldn’t be contained by her aunt’s settee.
“Lucy.” In the repetition, there was a thread of need in his voice that made her long to turn back and give him anything he asked. In some respects, she did owe him a debt of gratitude, if nothing else.
But explaining that to the staff here and now was too much. She didn’t turn back to him and kept her gaze focused on the housekeeper.
“I’ll need a room too,” she told Mrs. Fox and then glanced over her shoulder. “We can discuss everything in the morning, Lord Rossbury. I suspect you’re as exhausted as I am.”
Lucy left him standing in his rumpled clothes with gorgeously disheveled hair and a massive dog at his feet that had to belong to Aunt Cassandra and yet remained at his side like his loyal pet.
All Lucy knew for certain was that she wasn’t going to let this man, no matter how charming and handsome he might be, cast her aunt out of her home.
There had to be a solution, and she had to find it.
But as Lucy followed Mrs. Fox upstairs to a guest room, her mind wasn’t churning about ways to resolve the problem of James’s inheritance and her aunt’s potential eviction as it should have been. His little lopsided smile filled her thoughts, the way his lips had tipped immediately when he’d woken and blinked up to find her next to him. He’d been as pleased to see her again as she was to see him.
Good grief, how had one man on a train turned her head so completely? Mrs. Winterbottom would be appalled.
