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The duke’s head snapped up. His expression changed instantly from one of scrutiny to alarm. He bolted forward.
“What are you—oof.” Evaine yelped as he tackled her to the ground and rolled. A shadow crossed their tangled bodies. She flinched into him. The duke’s masculine scent wrapped around her.
The clock toppled with a crash of breaking glass and straining wood, landing inches from their prone bodies.
Evaine pressed her forehead into his shoulder. She found herself cradled within his arms, with Gareth’s legs tangled in her skirts. Squashed between them was his stuffed bunny.
Chapter 17
Gareth
One minute, Gareth was staring at a ledger page that had been torn from a book and hidden inside a drawer in his father’s precious Napoleonic desk. The next, he saw the clock tipping toward Evaine.
He dove across the room and hit the floor with a grunt as the clock came crashing down. Glass shattered. Wood splintered.
All that mattered was the woman in his arms.
His shoulder ached where they’d gone down hard. He’d tried to roll to the side, which dulled the force of the fall with only partial success.
With his nose pressed against the crown of her head, the scent of her hair teased him. Fresh and springlike. Soft against his cheek. Instantly, his body responded, but Evaine was already struggling to free herself from his embrace.
He let her go.
Slowly, she rolled onto her hip and sat up, clutching Herman the stuffed bunny to her bosom.
“How…did…that happen?” she said slowly, gaping at the broken clock.
Gareth didn’t want to say it out loud. Thinking it was enough to make him feel like a madman. He couldn’t tell her that the reason he hadn’t wanted her to come into this room was that if any portion of this house was haunted, it would be here, where his father had terrorized his family and his ward, for years.
Already, he missed Evaine’s solid warmth. Miss Ballard was quickly becoming the one thing tethering him to reality.
“The house has settled over the years,” he muttered, pushing himself upright. “I suppose the clock was unbalanced. Didn’t take much for it to tip over.”
He deserved the look of disdain she shot him. A likely story. Yet acknowledging the truth, that his father’s malevolent spirit was trying to keep him from tearing Wolfhaven apart, felt unspeakable.
She said she didn’t believe in ghosts. She certainly wouldn’t believe him. He would only end up in an asylum like the one his mother had been unjustly confined to for almost two decades before he succeeded in freeing her.
“What did you find in the desk?” Evaine asked.
“What desk?” he said rather stupidly. She got up with a grunt of annoyance and went over to it, searching for the ledger page he had been looking at moments before. The implication of that neatly recorded list he’d found stored in the main drawer chilled his blood.
His father had stolen Marina’s inheritance. All of it. But what had the miserly old bastard spent it on?
“This desk,” she answered as if speaking to an intellectual inferior. “The one Napoleon used. Remember? We were just talking about its potential value at auction when the clock fell over.”
“On you.” Perhaps it was not incontrovertible proof, but Gareth interpreted the falling clock as a sign that he had put Evaine in danger by allowing her to stay here.
“I was standing very close to it when it fell.”
“Did you see anything?” A shadow, a movement…
“Only you examining a piece of paper that no longer appears to be in this drawer.” She tucked Herman under one arm and frowned at him. Gareth shrugged. He didn’t know where the paper had gone.
Evaine bent to search beneath the desk. Her drab woolen skirt pulled tight around her hips. He cast his gaze at the ceiling. Don’t look. Somehow that was even worse. All he could think about was her bottom.
“Here it is.” Evaine straightened, putting him out of his misery. “It fell when you rushed to save me from being crushed.” She batted her eyes at him. “My hero.”
“I know what it’s like to have a heavy grandfather clock fall on you.” He gestured to his ruined face. Her brows pinched together.
