Worth Lord of Reckoning (25 page)

“Listen, Lannie.” Worth risked taking his sister’s hand, because Jacaranda’s small touches seemed to soothe the girl. “Hess and I haven’t even begun to discuss your circumstances. I’ve just met you, and Avery and I are entitled to some time with you before he spirits you away. Then too, you’ll need a come out, and last I heard, the Queen wasn’t making any progresses to the north, or the Regent either.”

“Are you saying I can stay here? With you?”

“No, I am not.” He spoke quite firmly, because females taking notions could completely ignore all reality to the contrary. “I’m saying if you have to go, it won’t be just yet, and it won’t be forever.”

“Do you know how long winter is in the north, brother?” She snatched her hand away with an air of adolescent long-suffering, but all Worth heard was her use of the word “brother.” She had two brothers, both well situated to provide for her, and only a few weeks after meeting Worth, Yolanda was choosing him over Hess.

The south over the north, too, but that was a detail.

Then he saw Jacaranda regarding him, solemnly, and knew he was at one of those points of decision that came upon a man without any warning, and forever changed the course of his situation on earth.

Worth was a brother, but what kind of brother, and to whom?

“Come.” He possessed himself once more of his sister’s hand. “Give Hess a chance, and when the time comes, I’ll argue strenuously for letting you stay here with us at Trysting. I’m not your guardian, so I make no guarantees, but I’ve been known to be persuasive when I’m motivated.”

He gave Jacaranda a look over his shoulder. She was smiling, and Yolanda was looking less mulish and martyred, so perhaps mediating between his siblings would bear all manner of desirable fruit.

The introduction went fairly well, with Yolanda offering her older brother a silent curtsy and Hess’s mouth all but coming unhinged.

“Good God, you’re beautiful,” he said, walking a circle around her. “Not merely pretty, but beautiful.”

“I do believe he’s serious,” Worth observed.

“I am utterly in earnest,” Hess said. “Nobody at Grampion will recognize you as the hoyden who left us a few short years ago.”

“Assuming Yolanda graces Grampion again,” Worth replied. “We can discuss that some other day, when no picnic awaits us in the back gardens, yes?”

“A picnic!” Avery crowed. Then she was off in half-French, adoring picnics, and to fly the kites, and eat lots of cakes and take off the shoes and make the feets wet.

“Come, Avery.” Yolanda led her niece from the room. “We must make sure the blankets are in the best spot. Footmen can’t know such things.”

“Of course not. Nor the uncles, but we are here to help them.”

Worth took his brother by the elbow. “Come along, your lordship. We’re to be shown the best spot, which no doubt lies in full view of an ant heap.”

“Yolanda will not give in, will she?”

“Regarding?”

“I neglected her, and she’s wroth over that, and the last place she wants to rusticate is at Grampion with me, even though sparing her such a fate is precisely why I so-called neglected her.”

“Hess, she’s female and young and has some reason to be put out with you. Two years she went without glimpsing you, and you’re the head of her family. Did you miss her?”

“Of course I missed her.” His mouth snapped shut, and he strode along beside Worth for half the length of a long corridor. “I wrote.”

“She wrote back, I’m guessing, horrid little notes about embroidery and spotty boys?”

“She wrote about the animals she’d met, Worth. The house cats and cart ponies. As if she wouldn’t allow me the satisfaction of hoping she might make new friends or see new sights. She punished me with those notes, and she was only fourteen years old.”

“We use any weapons at hand when we’re young and powerless,” Worth said, hustling down the corridor, lest he take his meal in proximity to an ant heap. “You can apologize for what you believe you did wrong, and then it’s up to her whether she meets you halfway or stays on her high horse. You don’t have to take her north.”

“I don’t?” Hess stopped as if to admire the view out an oriel window that looked over the rose gardens. “What does that mean? She’s too young to marry, Worth, I don’t care what the old people say about it.”

“The young people are usually the ones kicking over the traces to get married, but consider that Avery is only a year into living with her English uncle, and she seems quite taken with Yolanda. Then too, Yolanda will be back south in a year or two to make her come out. Why not leave her here with me and Avery?”

“As to Avery…”

Beyond the window, Yolanda and Avery were pointing at some shade beneath a towering oak while a pair of footmen moved blankets and hampers.

Worth knew what was coming, and perhaps it was best they have it out now, before too many fences had been mended. “As to Avery?”

“As head of the family, I’ve looked into the legal provisions for assuming guardianship of an orphaned child of a near relation,” Hess began, gaze out the window.

Worth kept a hand on his brother’s arm, until Hess was at least looking at where Worth touched him.

“You’ve been here only a few hours. I’m Avery’s legal guardian, have been since before she arrived, and you needn’t trouble yourself. Looking after the child helps me atone for Moira’s death, if you must know, so don’t feel you have to step in.”

“Atone? For her death? What rot are you spouting, Worth?”

“I gave her money to go to Paris and join our maternal cousins, I gave her funds to seek instruction, I gave her the sense she had backing in case Papa cut her off. But for my short-sighted indulgence of her dreams, she’d be alive and raising her own children with a perfectly jolly English husband.”

He hadn’t planned on that confession, but really, who else could he make it to?

Hess looked him up and down, frowning a truly ferocious frown. He looked not like their father in that moment, but like their paternal grandfather when thunderously displeased.

“Don’t be an idiot, Worth. I gave her money, too, and so, too, did Grandmamma. Moira wanted to go to Paris more than anything. Had we denied her, she might have been miserable instead of happy for the last years of her life. Think on that when you tire of beating yourself with the club of guilt.”

“You gave her—?”

“Grandmamma did, too, and some jewels.” Hess’s gaze swung right back to the window. “Now let’s rescue our luncheon from that ant heap.”

Worth let him stride off, confident the ant heap would be vanquished. He was unable to do more than stare out the same window and watch as the other members of his family assembled for their meal.

Even Hess
, notably cautious with his coin, had abetted Moira’s dreams.

Jacaranda appeared at his side, a comforting presence he’d sorely missed while dealing with his brother.

“Get out there, Worth. They won’t wait for you, and you won’t get even a single chicken leg between now and tea.”

Nor did he want a chicken leg.

He slipped an arm around her waist and whispered, “Come join us.” He needed her near, now more than usually, given what his brother had told him.

She moved away to crack open the window and allow an eddy of rose-scented air into the corridor.

“This is your first meal as a family. You should
be
a family, not a family plus a housekeeper. Don’t worry about Yolanda.”

“The girl is plotting to overthrow the government as she knows it,” Worth countered. “If I were Hess, I wouldn’t turn my back on her.”

“The worst that can happen is she has to go north at Michaelmas. She’ll put up with one more winter at Grampion knowing you’ll make her welcome next year, and once she’s eighteen, Hess will have no reason to keep her up north. The better crop of bachelors always lurks near Town, and your brother can let her come south feeling like he’s done his duty.”

Hess gestured to a patch of grass in the sun, and Yolanda folded her arms. The blankets remained spread in the shade.

“Duty is Hess’s middle name, and if you watch him, you’ll realize he isn’t arrogant so much as shy. He and Lannie have more in common than they think.”

“She liked that, that you gave her a nickname, but Worth, you are the shy one now. Go have a meal with your family.”

Worth
. He was becoming Worth to her.

Out on the shady blankets, Hess pulled off his boots, Avery chattered away in at least two languages, while Yolanda arranged her skirts just so.

“You’ll be fine.” Jacaranda looked around, then went up on her toes and kissed his cheek. “You can tell me all about your ordeal later.”

“Do you promise? My ordeal is likely to be harrowing in the extreme. Arachnids are quite the menace.”

“Cook made chocolate crème cakes to ameliorate your suffering, but Hess won’t leave you any sweets if you continue to hide here. Bide here, I mean.”

“Nattering little besom.” He kissed her cheek and headed down the steps, fortified by those few hints of understanding from her. It shouldn’t be so. He was a grown man, wealthy, thriving in all the ways that counted, and he wasn’t even really her lover. Barely her friend, in fact.

But it was so.

* * *

“Confound it, woman, budge over.”

Jacaranda tugged the covers more tightly around herself. “Go away.”

“I will do no such thing.” Worth’s weight dipped the mattress. “What in blazes are you doing with a brick in your sheets at the height of summer? You’ll take a brick to your bosom but not my handsome self?”

“What time is it?”

He bounced and tugged and wiggled his long frame around until the last vestiges of sleep fled Jacaranda’s mind.

“Past midnight,” Worth said, sounding infernally comfy. “Hess was of a mind to get back his own over the cards. I am traumatized and exhausted by my day, also relieved of two pounds six.”

“Why not seek your own bed, and then we’ll both get some rest?”

Her brick, wrapped in several layers of flannel, made a solid
thunk
when Worth set it on the floor.

“You said I could tell you all about lunch,” he reminded her. “When, pray, might I do that, when you dodged the evening meal with some taradiddle about a tray in your room? You evade me at every turn, so I’ve tracked you to your lair.”

He lined his chest up along her back, and his arm came around her waist.

“Worth, begone. I mean it.”

“You’re denying me my audience?” His lips held a little audience along the top of her shoulder, and his hand gently pushed the strap of her nightgown aside. Under the cozy warmth of the covers, Jacaranda felt a shiver, a
thrill
along the path his fingers traced.

She was a good ten years too old to admit to thrills of any kind.

“Now is not the time,” she tried again, but her voice lacked conviction, and his bodily warmth offered luscious comfort.

“Now is the only time. Yolanda addressed not one sentence to Hess directly at the noon meal, which made for a lovely verbal game of battledore, I can tell you. Hess’s French is in good repair, but I fear his Italian is in worse shape than my own. My dear, you must relax.”

“How can I relax when my bed has been invaded by the realm’s largest magpie?”

“I’m visiting, not invading. You let bricks visit you and probably house cats.”

His tone was playfully chiding, but beneath the banter lurked a question, too. If she insisted, he’d go, and he’d likely not come back until she invited him—if she invited him.

“Do I gather the brick was in the way of a hot water bottle?” he asked. “You toasted it up and brought it here to soothe a female ache?”

“You are too big for me to physically remove from this bed, but are you also too rude to comprehend the indelicacy of the topic you raise?”

He shifted to crouch over her beneath the covers, confirming Jacaranda’s suspicion—her hope?—that he was naked. “I guessed correctly. The female complaint makes you cranky and out of sorts. I suspected this was the case.”

Under him, Jacaranda rolled to her back, glad they had only moonlight to illuminate this exchange.

“I have a
headache
, one that makes my eyes hurt and my neck sore. Now that you know I’m indisposed, will you take yourself off?”

“Settle your feathers, dear heart.” He kissed her forehead, an odd gesture that eased aches in various parts of Jacaranda’s body and heart. “I haven’t come to importune you, not that I won’t at some point. See here.” He found one of her hands and brought it to his—his member. “Hardly a prurient thought in my body, at the moment. I truly did want to talk.”

He wasn’t exactly flaccid, but he wasn’t rampant, either.

“What did you want to talk about?” Jacaranda removed her hand two instants after she realized he’d removed his.

Worth hung over her, so she had to smooth back his hair with her fingers lest it obscure his eyes.

“I couldn’t sleep,” he said, climbing off of her and rolling to his back. He grabbed her hand again and kissed her knuckles. “Having Hess underfoot is disquieting.”

“Family is always a challenge, which is part of the reason I’ve resisted orders from my siblings to return home until recently. In what way is his lordship disquieting?”