Except as he drifted off, exactly as it had every single night for the last dreadful week, his addled and overwhelmed brain decided to wander down a path it had no right wandering when his whole world was a lie that could implode at any moment.
Toward a vexatious dark-haired vixen who never minced her words or pulled her punches. To the woman who had been the constant pithy, prickly bane of his life all the time he had known her. The woman who could expose his lies to the world in a heartbeat if she uncovered them, but also the woman whose reassuring hand and presence had stopped him falling into the abyss when the worst had happened.
The woman his wary, frightened, lonely heart missed more than waking Giles was prepared to acknowledge. The woman who was now, reassuringly, only eighteen hours away.
Chapter Eight
“Can you move your legs, Jeremiah! They are taking up far too much space and crushing my skirts.”
Jeremiah glared at Olivia over the top of his newspaper and gestured to his knees, which were drawn up about as far as he could in the confined space. “And where would you have me move them to, woman?”
“To your half of the carriage, Mr. Peabody, if you please, as is fair and reasonable.” They had been bickering continually since they left the inn at Ludlow several hours ago, and after three and a half relentless days of travel, it was grating on Diana’s last nerve.
“Fair! Reasonable! How, pray tell,Mrs.Peabody, is it reasonable for a woman of barely five feet to command additional inches of empty space because she doesn’t want her stupid dress creased when a man of over six feet is scrunched up and restricted opposite her getting everything creased in the process? My joints are so damn stiff, I’ll have to be lifted out of this goddamn carriage if we ever get to our destination!”
“There is no need to resort to coarse language, Jeremiah. Havesome consideration for the girls’ tender ears and stop being so selfish.”
Before Diana’s temper exploded, it was the usually diplomatic Vee who groaned aloud first. “Please stop! And if you cannot stop, kindly stop the carriage so I can get out as I’d rather walk the last few miles than listen to any more nonsense from the pair of you!” She wagged a finger, her pretty face stern behind her spectacles. “You have both been intolerable all morning and that isn’t fair on those of us crammed in here with you.”
While the outburst impressed Diana, who had always thought the youngest Merriwell needed to grow a backbone, it stunned Olivia. Before she could counter with some outrage, her sister surprised them all again. “It was you who insisted the four of us share a carriage for the entire journey, Olivia; therefore, you of all people should make the best of it.”
“Amen to that!”
Jeremiah’s quip earned him a glare from Vee until, like his wife, he looked chagrined. There were a few seconds of blissful but tense silence until Olivia broke it.
“I don’t know about you, Jeremiah, but I feel like a naughty child who has just been admonished by a stern schoolteacher.”
“Well, it is funny you should say that,” said Vee, grinning as if that were a compliment and the atmosphere wasn’t as brittle as glass, “because the Reverend Smythe from the orphanage has asked me if I would consider taking over some of the lessons once we get back. He says I have a way with the children and am especially good at teaching them their letters.” She had been volunteering at the small but progressive Covent Garden Asylum for Orphans since it opened to great philanthropic fanfare in the spring.
“Oh, that is wonderful, dear! I can see you as a teacher.” Unlike Diana’s, Olivia’s bad mood could always evaporate in an instant. “But why did you not tell us before? When we could have all done with some good news as a distraction.”
“To be honest, with poor Giles’s loss and the funeral, it completely slipped my mind.” Vee’s sunny smile also evaporated. “I do so hope he is all right. He seemed to have taken his father’s death badly—and by that, I mean much worse than I would have expected. He looked… so lost and overwhelmed when I last saw him.”
Lost and terrified, more like, but Diana didn’t say that.
“I should imagine the shock of taking on the dukedom has a lot to do with that.” Jeremiah’s ill temper of moments ago had also disappeared. “And be in no doubt, it’s a lot to take on. You only have to consider the work Hugh puts into his estate to realize Giles has a mountain to climb, as his is apparently triple the size. Actually…” He frowned and snapped open his pocket watch. “As we’ve made good time, we’re probably driving through it now. He’s inherited over seventy-five thousand acres.”
Diana gazed out of her window at the soaring hills all around them, stretching as far as the eye could see. Even on this gray day it was stunning. Narrow roads and rivers ran in the valley between them. Quaint villages, tiny hamlets, farmers’ fields, and dense woodland peppered the vast expanse of green. For a girl who hadn’t left the cramped confines of London until very recently, and only had the gently rolling land of Hugh’s estate in Hampshire to compare it to, Shropshire seemed wild, untamed, noble, and majestic all at once, and quite unlike any scenery she had ever experienced before. Winters would be hard here, she realized; bitter and isolated.The summers a glorious display of all the beauty nature had to offer. The pace and challenges of life so different from what she knew and understood, it was like another world. A world that a forger’s daughter from Clerkenwell would have no concept of.
To think the erudite, flippant lover of leisure and quintessential bachelor-about-town Giles owned all this? Came from all this? It beggared belief.
Their carriage wound its way upward around a hill, meandered down the other side, and as it did she saw a pretty manor house from another era nestled on the side of the next hill along. Whitewashed walls with age-blackened Tudor beams crisscrossing them warred with a dense blanket of ivy that covered one corner. Despite the lack of sunshine, the diamond lead-light windows twinkled in their frames while a profusion of dainty but ornate twisted chimney pots sprouted from the slate-tiled roof, puffing welcoming smoke into the dull midmorning sky.
She sensed he was there before the driver announced their destination and experienced a sudden rush of relief and excitement, which she decided to put down to the end of the long journey rather than the thought of being reunited with him. Like the rest of the family, she had worried incessantly about him all week, as any sort-of-friend-who-only-tolerated-the-other would after his recent bereavement. Yet bizarrely, she had also missed him.
So much so that a worrying ache beneath her rib cage had bothered her for the duration. She refused to link it to the odd moment she had experienced during their last meeting, when she had wanted to hug him close and tell him everything would be all right. That had merely been her sympathy and compassion coming to the fore, a basic human response to a sad situation andnothing more. A friendly gesture because they were friends—of sorts. Giles viewed the world through the same cynical, jaded lens as she did, adored the ridiculous, was fluent in sarcasm, and didn’t take himself too seriously. Appreciating that did not make her blind to all his flaws, and those flaws were manifold. Certainly, enough that she was as immune to his effusive charm, sinful good looks, and broad shoulders as she was to all men. Noticing those things, appreciating the aesthetics of them, and having your head turned by them were two very different things.
Twoverydifferent things.
And it was also perfectly normal tofeelcertain things for the opposite sex from time to time in an overtly physical way even though she wasn’t predisposed to that sort of nonsense. Such reactions were natural in all the creatures of the earth after all, and being aware of those unconscious, lustful impulses was a long way from acting on them. Diana had always been curious and inquisitive, and now Minerva had found a man whose touch she obviously enjoyed, it was entirely normal to wonder, hypothetically, if one might have a similar effect on her. Not that she had any plans to turn that hypothesis into a reality, and even if she did, it wouldn’t be with Giles. Dukes and forger’s daughters were a laughable combination. Ridiculous, in fact. Why on earth would she want to kiss him when he vexed her so? But of their own accord, her lips tingled at the idea…
“What are you smiling so wistfully at?” Vee’s question startled her. The fact that she was indeed smiling wistfully about a man startled her more.
“The scenery—of course.” The “of course” an unnecessary clarification that earned her a disbelieving look from her sister andOlivia, which she ignored as the carriage turned abruptly into a driveway. “Who knew the delights of Shropshire were so charming?”
“And speaking of charming delights of Shropshire…” Jeremiah nudged her and winked as he pointed out the window. Like an idiot, she looked and blushed like a beetroot. Because to make her misery complete, Giles was bounding down the steps to greet them.
As Jeremiah assisted his wife, Giles came to her side of the carriage and opened the door with a mile-wide grin. “You’re early!” He seemed delighted by that. “I did not think I would see you till this evening.”
