His jaw tightened. “It was the Scourge.” The edge of his hand brushed the delphiniums, and a few tiny blue flowers fluttered to the ground. “Go back inside, Lady Ruby. Keep your friends away from the village. As you can see, it’s not safe to be out.”
“But we—”
She broke off abruptly. His palm had come to rest, warm and heavy, on her waist, and the sensation shocked her out of speech. Her lips parted as she met his gaze.
“Quit skulking about the house,” he said. He used the tie of her dressing gown to turn her around, back toward the kitchen door. “Especially at night.”
She looked at him over her shoulder. “But our parcels—”
“I’ll hunt down your missing items.” His voice was low, and he looked her in the eye as he spoke—so earnest she could almost believe him. “I promise.”
Chapter 9
It seemed possible that his crew had grown too good at smuggling.
Honestly, they’d only been at it for a handful of months. They did not have the excuse of a lifetime of piracy to explain their actions. Archer would have supposed that—upon finding several boxes of anonymous luxury items on their doorstep—Lamentation and Gerry would have at leastasked.
But no. They’d leapt into action and secured the goods in a variety of obscure and ludicrous hiding places all over the house, most of which they couldn’t entirely recall when interrogated. Only when Archer had confronted them after his encounter with Lady Ruby had they admitted that they’d thought the parcels were Archer’s and thus needed to be promptly concealed.
Bloody Christ. It had taken him six days to track down all the items, which was approximately ten times as long as it had taken for Lamentation and Gerry to hide them in the first place.
To be fair—to himself—he’d not had an easy time of it. Every time he’d turned around, Lady Ruby seemed to be peering around a corner, or popping into whichever room he was in, or inventing an errand that involved nosing into every nook and cranny.
She was clever. Canny. She was the only person in the world who had ever seemed to see right through him, a fact that made him increasingly uneasy.
Hadit been one of her ladies outside the window that night?
She had said it wasn’t, and, somehow, he believed her. He recalled her blunt honesty from Gravesmuir’s party. Even when it had not served her, she’d spoken the truth.
He shifted the last bulky, waxed-paper-wrapped parcel beneath his arm and headed downstairs.
If it had not been one of the ladies-in-waiting slinking furtively past the window, who could it have been?
There had been something—some anonymous figure—out there in the dark. He was certain of it. One minute he’d been attempting to hide a crate full of illicit Spanish oranges, and the next he’d been pressed full-length against Lady Ruby, trying desperately to shield her against what he’d believed beyond all shadow of a doubt to be an armed intruder.
He could’ve sworn that was what he’d seen. The flash of moonlight off steel—he knew that cold metallic gleam by heart.
But when he’d peeled himself away from her—all soft, ruffled temptation—he had found nothing at all. No trace of an intruder; no sign of danger. If there had been a stranger outside the house, the fellow had vanished into the cliffs.
Could it have been one of Gill Oliphant’s men? Some rival smuggler, looking for contraband?
The Scourge, his brain helpfully suggested, a notion he quashed.
There was no Scourge, for God’s sake. Lamentation had made it up.
When he arrived in the kitchen, he discovered most of the house’s occupants arrayed around the wooden table. Tamsin appeared to have maneuvered Lamentation and Gerry into a game of cards, which she was winning handily. Ruby and Alice were seated together, their heads bent over a tray of sugared currants.
The food deprivation scheme had met its demise days ago. Wall was a pitifully soft touch—when he’d discovered how much the ladies-in-waiting had liked his macaroni, he’d folded immediately.
Archer set the parcel down and cleared his throat.
Ruby looked up.
Allof them looked up, probably, but Archer couldn’t say for certain.
God above, he was an atrocious fool. His eyes had gone straight for her face, and his mind had wheeled instantly back to that tense dawn: sea wind, and her unnamable scent, and his sudden, mad arousal as he’d shielded her against the wall. Each dip and curve of her body was engraved upon his mind—was right there before him every night when he closed his eyes.
A pair of black puppies tumbled drunkenly toward him, and he had to pretend to be very interested in picking them up and setting them on their feet. He cleared his throat again and handed one of the puppies to Lady Alice. “I believe this is yours.”
