But now, he couldn’t stop thinking of her as a woman—scrutinizing each of her features—including those copper-bright eyes and the rosy pout that he hadn’t noticed before. The meddlesome, nosy little Lady Ravenna had grown up to be a beauty, one whom gentlemanly suitors in London drawing rooms would have been fawning over.
Speaking of, why wasn’t she married? Was she married? He was only two years older than she was, so she should be three-and-twenty or thereabouts. Long past marrying age.
“Why are you here?” he asked, enunciating each word.
“My grand tour?” she replied. “A pleasure trip?”
He couldn’t help noticing that the huskiness in her voice stayed that way. Put together with the fact that she was female, the raspy just-waking-up-after-hours-and-hours-of-sex sound of it shaping the word pleasure arrowed straight to his groin. Scowling at the reaction, he moved behind his desk. “Women don’t do grand tours.”
“Hence my ingenious disguise,” she said. “At least until today.”
“You would have been found out eventually. Be glad it was by me and not someone else.” He cringed to think that he’d nearly sent her to a public jail. “So I take it Embry doesn’t know you’re here then.”
Courtland wasn’t close with the duke though they were close in age. The sons of the Duke of Embry had all gone to Eton when he’d been fighting for his life at Harrow. Even in Antigua, however, he’d learned about the tragic fire that had made the youngest Huntley duke, and then the news had come four years ago about the duke’s shocking nuptials with an Anglo-Indian princess. Good for them, he remembered thinking.
If only the marchioness and his own brother had been that accepting, the path his life had taken might have been vastly different, though the final destination had turned out to be inevitable. While his grandfather had written steadily over the years, always knowing exactly where he was—first in Spain, and then Antigua—they hadn’t cared.
Courtland had received all of the letters, but had refused to read them. He’d instructed Rawley to dispose of them. If he was being summoned to Ashvale Park, he didn’t want to know. He had no intention of going back to England.
Without Courtland’s presence, his ambitious stepbrother would no doubt have led a charge to prove he was the Duke of Ashvale’s true heir. Courtland wondered idly if his stepmother had tried to have him declared dead through the courts. He wondered what his grandfather might have had to say about that.
Scowling as fresh feelings of bitterness rose, Courtland stalked forward to refill Ravenna’s glass and then his, lifting a brow and waiting for her answer. Her brother would never have condoned this, that much he knew.
“Stop dithering around and answer me—what does Embry believe?”
“He thinks I’m in Scotland with Clara.”
“Clara?”
“A recently married dear friend. She wed a Scottish earl.”
Courtland frowned. “How is Embry not worried?”
“I wrote several letters in advance, which she will mail out at monthly intervals, and swore Clara to secrecy as long as I was in good health.” She lifted her glass and sipped. “Which as you can see I am. No need to trouble my brother.”
“And this Clara considers you a friend?” He didn’t hide his sardonic tone.
Her eyes narrowed on him. “The best kind.”
“Forgive me if I’ve been out of London society too long, but friends don’t force friends to lie on their behalf. Much less lie to a respected and rather formidable peer of the realm.”
Ravenna tossed her head. “What Embry doesn’t know won’t hurt him, and besides, he’s just had a new baby and deserves every joy. If he knew where I was, he’d be frantic with worry instead of focusing on his own happiness.”
“For good reason, you daft girl!”
“Because I’m female?” she shot back. “Why should men have all the adventure and women be forced to sit at home tending the hearth? We are not possessions or brainless biddable toys designed for male consumption.”
He almost choked on his drink at the images her provocative words produced, but the hostility beneath was clear. “Because it’s not safe or smart for a woman to be traveling on her own.”
“I know how to use a pistol, Cordy,” she said. “I was a better shot than you, remember? Or perhaps you choose not to remember how many times I bested you just to preserve your insufferably delicate male pride.”
He didn’t remember her being this…caustic. Silent laughter rippled through him. Who was he fooling? She’d always been a hothead.
“We were children then,” he said. “And my name is Courtland, not Cordy.”
“Apparently, it’s Ashvale now,” she reminded him.
Yes, it was, apparently. He was going to have to deal with that complication as soon as possible, too. “How did you get here anyway?”
“I took one of Embry’s clippers.” She lifted an ungloved hand to sift through the pressed strands of her shorn mane. “Hacked off my hair and disguised myself as a boatswain. Learned a lot over the last few years from my brother and his old quartermaster so it was easy. Kept my head down, did the work, and no one was the wiser.”
Courtland balked in horror—she’d spent close to five weeks on a ship full of male sailors? His hands fisted at his sides at her rashness. “Why not an ocean liner?”
“Too easily tracked. I didn’t need luxury, I needed to disappear.”
“Why?”
Her lip curled. “None of your deuced business.”
“If you were mine, I’d definitely put you over my knee.” Courtland regretted the words as soon as he said them. The thought of her lying across his lap, her pert bottom bared to his gaze, was not something he wanted to envision, not while she already had him on edge. She busied herself with her gloves, but he could see color flare into her pale cheeks.
“Good thing I’m not then.”
Not yet. Courtland had no idea where that thought came from, nor did he want to know. He had no time for a smart-mouthed, self-centered heiress who knew no better than to traipse willy-nilly around the world with no regard for her own welfare. When he thought of the misfortunes that could have befallen her, his anger surged again. “You got lucky, you know. How could you have been so foolish? Things could have been so much worse.”
“But they weren’t.”
He was going to throttle her. “They could have been.”
“Let’s agree to disagree. Are you going to send word to Embry?”