The Scarred Earl (2 page)

So that was fairness out of the way and it was hard to maintain impartiality about him when the Earl constantly irritated her without any effort at all. My Lord Calvercombe would certainly be declared a deliciously brooding romantic hero by the flightier elements of the
ton
, if only they set eyes on him more often. Such breathless young ladies would be taken faint with delicious
frissons
of panic and desire on beholding his flawed male beauty, but it would take more than a few battle scars and a cynical smile to make the wretched man
her
beau ideal.

Yet she had to admit there was more to him than a wry smile and an intriguingly marred and still very handsome face. He had an ancient title, a suitably mysterious past, a vigorous masculine body that looked fit and hard with sleek muscle and that air of cool command. He somehow defied his own kind to see only the fine scarring over one side
of his face and the one damaged, deep blue eye he wouldn’t cover to make the world feel better when it looked at Alex Forthin.

She was a fair woman, Persephone told herself, as she wondered why he always made her itch to be an unfair and petty one instead. The man would make a model hero—or villain—for one of the Gothic novels her contemporaries loved to lose themselves in with shivering delight. He would be revolted by the idea of fictional vices or virtues inflicted on him when he had plenty of his own, so just as well she wasn’t a susceptible young girl. Persephone almost smiled at the idea, but stopped herself in the nick of time, horrified he might think she was casting lures in his direction when nothing was further from her mind.

Little wonder she was suffering imaginary horrors today with spectres like him drifting about her head, she decided, with a quick frown, and avoided his sharp blue gaze with as much dignity as she could manage. She flitted to the other side of the terrace and did her duty by the cream of local society and half the nobility of the land still milling about Jack’s immaculately tended lawns. As most of them were curious about the reclusive
Earl of Calvercombe, there seemed to be no getting away from him today even with as much distance as possible between them.

It said much for Lord Calvercombe’s love of solitude that he’d escaped the combined attention of gentry and nobility as long as he had. She was surprised he’d risked encountering so many of them today to stand as Jack’s groomsman and tried to tell herself it was unfair to blame him for standing in the place where her elder brother Richard should be. If Rich hadn’t sauntered out of their lives three years ago, without a single word to reassure them he was still alive from that day to this, Jack would have accepted nobody else but the cousin who had been close as a brother to him. They had raked and larked about Oxford and London until both of them grew bored, after which Rich went off on his adventures and Jack had had to learn the burdens and privileges of being a great landlord and aristocrat, and bear them with style.

Persephone might admire the reclusive Earl for doing his duty by an old friend when her brother failed to turn up and do so, but that didn’t mean she was attracted to the wretched man, or even had to like
him. Luckily she had more sense than to want a lone wolf focusing his formidable attention on her and shot him an exasperated glare to prove it. How unfortunate that he was looking her way and raised a quizzical eyebrow, as if there was no point blaming him for her wayward thoughts. Turning her back on the annoying creature to prove he meant nothing, she went back to charming Jack’s guests.

Their conversation might have revolved round Richard Seaborne’s odd disappearance, if the occasion hadn’t been Jack’s wedding and she hadn’t been Rich’s sister. Few guests dared ask where he could have got off to, but the question was in many eyes—from sharply curious to genuinely sympathetic. Despite his absence, Lady Henry Seaborne had organised this joyful celebration so flawlessly that everyone who came to be charmed by the happy couple seemed content and even Grandmama had enjoyed herself in her own peculiar fashion.

Persephone’s eyes threatened to tear up if she gave herself time to think how deeply her beloved father would have enjoyed it all. When Jack’s father broke his neck shortly after his Duchess died in childbed with her
stillborn daughter, her own parents had moved to Ashburton New Place to help sixteen-year-old Jack grieve, and then enjoy his minority with as few cares as possible resting on his young shoulders.

To her shame, Persephone recalled being acutely jealous and sulking about the changes in her own life and the new burdens on her father and mother as Jack’s guardians. She wondered if her brother Richard had felt the change even more acutely, at fifteen years of age, to her eight. No, she refused to think any more about the significant gaps in their ranks while there was so much still to be done, so she wove through the crowd as if she hadn’t a care in the world and smiled and laughed until her face ached.

At last the company began to disperse to rest before dinner, or return home if they lived nearby, and Persephone was able to escape. Once she was out of sight of the house and terrace she gave a heartfelt sigh of relief and sped towards her favourite sanctuary. She was delighted for Jack and his new Duchess and exasperated with herself for feeling acutely uneasy on such a joyful day, but that didn’t stop worry nagging at her like a sore tooth.

Even on this brilliantly sunny late-summer day there was the whisper of autumn in the air and she could almost scent something dangerous trying to blow in on the dusty south-west breeze along with it. She shivered despite the heat of a sunny August afternoon and felt everything was changing around her. Instinct was warning her again that an undefined evil was nipping at the safe world the Seabornes built here and it would damage them ruthlessly to achieve its purpose.

At least she managed to wave Jack and his new Duchess off with only a laughing injunction not to enjoy their tour of the English Lakes so much they forgot to come home before Christmas. Despite his eagerness to get his bride to himself at long last, Jack would never have gone if he thought aught was amiss here, so Persephone met his gaze with unclouded serenity and ordered him to go before Jessica left without him. Anyway, there was nothing tangible to worry him with, no convenient enemy to focus her unease upon.

Better if there had been, she concluded, as a tall figure blocked the entrance to her sanctuary. She needed a distraction from Jack’s groomsman, she thought, as she
watched Lord Calvercombe pause, eye her with mocking irony, and come on. Anyone would think he had the right to plague her with unwanted advice and the sceptical looks he kept especially for her. She wondered why the lone wolf Earl of Calvercombe couldn’t leave
her
to enjoy some solitude for once.

Apparently oblivious, he sauntered towards her as if he owned Ashburton as well as an astonishing variety of old-fashioned houses inherited from his ancestors. Persephone wouldn’t put it past him to exaggerate their ramshackle state to scare off visitors or eager young ladies intent on becoming his Countess. But he had come out of seclusion to support Jack, which shot down her belief that he was the most selfish man she’d ever come across.

She hoped he would leave her to it, but he loped fluidly towards her as if he had no idea he wasn’t as welcome as the flowers in spring. He was the second most irritating man she knew, after her brother Richard, she decided crossly. And hadn’t it been stupid of her to hope Rich would hear of Jack’s wedding to Jessica Pendle and find a way to attend it? Somehow her brother would be here today, her imagination had assured her
earnestly before it all began, but Jack and Jessica had been blissfully wed in Ashburton Church earlier today and no heavily disguised stranger had crept in while everyone else was distracted, only to watch furtively and leave before any noted he was there but her.

Chapter Two

D
rat, hadn’t she promised herself she wouldn’t think about her stubborn, wild and absent brother any more today? Persephone made herself breathe deeply and balled her hands into fists as she tried to blot out that widest of gaps in the Seaborne ranks on Jack’s wedding day. Idiot, she chastised herself, as she felt it more acutely as soon as it was forbidden and glared at the nearest available distraction—Alexander Forthin, Lord Calvercombe—to give her thoughts a new turn. Just her luck, Persephone concluded with disgust when the wretch returned her hostile glare with raised eyebrows and a cool stare, as if she was being fractious and difficult and unwelcoming, which of course she was.

It seemed to her he could see as well with his damaged eye as he did with the one still as clear and piercing as a watchful predator’s. His injured eye was clouded by that streak of opacity, almost as fine as the faint lines scarring that side of his face, but however much, or little, he saw with it, insolence and hauteur glared out of that blue orb as notably as from the other. Of course the man would never explain what he saw and didn’t see, but he certainly hadn’t got those injuries in battle. Chance didn’t inflict such fine cuts day after day on a man too strong to cave and say what he’d been tortured to tell, she decided, with sneaking admiration for the dogged courage it must have cost him to hold out against the wicked torture his face revealed.

‘Well, Miss Seaborne?’ he asked at last, as if she must know what he meant by his satirical question and the hint of a cynical smile on his lips by sheer instinct.

‘How could I be otherwise on such a happy day, your lordship?’

‘Quite easily, I imagine. You will have to concede precedence to Jack’s wife from now on and your mother tells me she is intent on returning to your old home as soon as
they get back from their bride trip. However comfortable it is, Seaborne House can hardly rival the freedom and luxury you must have enjoyed here as Jack’s cousin and honorary sister.’

With any other man she might take his statement as a mild expression of sympathy, but this was the rude and insufferable Lord Calvercombe, so there was no point hankering after such consideration from him.

‘I dare say I’ll amuse myself perfectly well, despite the drawbacks,’ she said coolly, determined not to tell him what she thought of his barbed comments and superior smile and give him even more of an advantage. ‘You must remember I am still the eldest daughter of the house, which gives me endless chances to preen on being granddaughter, niece and cousin to various Dukes of Dettingham.’

‘Which will help salve your sad drop in consequence, I suppose,’ he said as if consoling a sixty-year-old spinster.

Persephone remembered why she found this man so annoying—he even outdid Jack, Rich and her second brother Marcus all rolled into one irritating being—and she itched to take him down a peg or ten.

‘You really have no idea how much,’ she drawled as if she really was a bored society beauty. ‘In a few weeks the Little Season will be on us and I can blithely skip off to town and leave others to open up a house that’s been unlived in, if not unloved, these ten years and more while I selfishly enjoy the social whirl as I deserve to.’

‘Being too frivolous to worry yourself over hiring suitable staff, supervising any redecoration and reupholstering found necessary, and any general interfering that will entail? Please don’t mistake me for a flat, Miss Seaborne. You will jump at such a golden opportunity to impose your iron will on your world, social whirl or no.’

‘Not as high as I might at the chance of reordering yours,’ she snapped, and if he had any illusion she meant for the better, he was more naive than he looked.

‘I have no desire to find the mouldering splendours of my ancient state rooms in the dungeons or on the nearest handy midden, so you’ll certainly never be asked to spruce up any of my houses.’

‘Why on earth would I want to?’ she asked with as much disgust as she could fit into so few words.

‘You tell me, my dear,’ he replied, and suddenly he was too close for comfort and even more impossible to ignore.

‘I suppose I
might
want to murder you in your bed.’

‘I sleep so lightly not even a sleek little hunting cat like you could slip into my bedroom without my knowing. You would be in far more danger than I if you ever tried it, Miss Seaborne, and it wouldn’t be murder I had on my mind.’

All she had intended was to make him see she disliked him, but he’d turned her words on her. She shivered with apprehension and something more disturbing as his softly muttered threat seemed to fill the air between them with false promise.

‘If I were such a discerning animal, I doubt I would look to you for comfort by night, or any other time of day, Lord Calvercombe. Cats of any sort are too wise and independent to need aught from such as you,’ she managed to say, as if the idea of purring under his stroking hand didn’t send a dart of something hot and uncomfortable shivering through her, as if her body had plans for Alex Forthin the rest of her didn’t want to know about.

He smiled blandly at her defensive words and she cursed the man for seeing too much, whatever he could physically see or not see. More civilised men would realise she wanted to be alone when they found her in this quiet garden. A true gentleman would turn and leave at first sight of her staring at the statue of her namesake at the heart of a garden intended to glorify spring and its goddess. As the garden was long past its best and waiting for next spring’s abundance to be astonishingly lovely again, why would he come in here if he didn’t want to speak to her? Yet now he was here, he infuriated her with his aloofness and looked as if he preferred her room to her company.

‘I wouldn’t believe anything you heard about me until you know me better than you do now, Miss Seaborne,’ he warned silkily.

‘Why on earth would I gather gossip about you?’

‘I can think of one very earthy reason,’ he said softly and suddenly there was a different danger in the air from the one that had frightened her earlier.

‘Then think again. I wouldn’t tangle with a bitter and disillusioned man like you if you
came gilded and anointed by the gods,’ she told him militantly.