“I’m sure you were very terrifying, sir,” she obligingly rushed to soothe his ego, which helped not at all. “But I’ll admit I’m rather too elated to be scared.”
“Elated?” He couldn’t believe what he was hearing. Was the woman mad?
She nodded, her lips breaking into a broad smile, her slim shoulder lifting in an attractive and apologetic shrug. “I’ve always believed in ghosts, and I’ve never been lucky enough to meet one. I have so many questions. I could cheerfully murder myself for leaving my notebook back at the carriage.” She said this as a muttered afterthought before looking up at him with a winsome smile. “Do you mind, awfully, turning around so I can dress?”
“I don’t see the point,” he challenged, crossing his arms over his chest and lifting a suggestive brow. “You act as though I haven’t been here the entire time…watching you.”
“How dare you?” she gasped in outrage, her notice flying to the bathtub as if it’d just dawned on her that he could have been present without her knowledge. Her color heightened as a comely blush crept up her chest and neck from below the towel.
He was coming to hate that bloody towel.
John bristled, but only because guilt pricked at him. “I dare because I’m dead and have been imprisoned in this godforsaken structure since before your grandparents were born, no doubt. What have I to do but observe the goings-on here? Most people are none the wiser.”
Her eyes widened as she, no doubt, imagined what he’d borne witness to in so long a time. “That isn’t excuse for your ghastly behavior! You are—were—a Lieutenant Colonel?” She raked her eyes over his form, a few more colors of his crimson regimentals lit by the fire at her back. “This is conduct unbecoming an officer, I say.”
“Take it up with my superiors, then,” he snorted, leaning in her direction with eyes narrowed until he willed himself to disappear.
“Wait!” Her panicked quicksilver gaze scanned the emptiness, hopping right over him. “Come back,” she pleaded. “I’m sorry. I won’t scold you. I promise. I was just—”
He reappeared paces closer to her, standing on her side of the basin now.
She made a little squeak as he did, hopping back as close to the fire as she could get.
An inconvenient conscience needled him again. He was behaving badly, but a century of isolation tended to strip a man of his manners. “Tell me. Would you have behaved differently were our places reversed? Would you have looked away? Maintained my modesty, my privacy?”
Her gaze traveled down the length of him, and a very masculine sense of victory burned through his veins when he spied the glimmer of appreciation as it dashed across her features. An acute awareness of their proximity. Of his proportions in contrast to hers.
She was a woman.
He was a man.
They were alone in a room together with very little clothing between them.
And if he were naked, the warmth in her gaze told him she would drink in the sight of his body.
Just as he had.
“I cannot say what I would do in your case,” she admitted, her voice lower, huskier. “But if you asked nicely, I would turn around.”
He could refuse. What would she do then? But even as the thought flickered through him, so did another indisputable fact. One hundred and fifty years later, he was still a nobleman, one tasked to uphold honor.
And she was a lady deserving of his respect and deference.
Goddammit.
He bloody turned around.
The rustles of her unseen actions intrigued and tempted him, but he clenched his fists and forced himself to stay right where he was.
“I’m Miss Vanessa Latimer.”
He heard the towel hit the ground and this time was able to bite into his fist. Death, it seemed, did not diminish desire.
“Johnathan de Lohr,” he finally gritted out. “Earl of Worchester and Hereford.”
“I don’t think so,” she laughed over the sound of her belt buckling.
“Do you presume to tell me I don’t know my own name?” he asked crossly.
“Not at all, but I’ve been introduced to Johnathan de Lohr, Earl of Worchester at the Countess of Bainbridge’s ball a few years past, and have it on good authority that he’s very much alive. Also, the de Lohrs lost the Hereford title sometime in the eighteenth century.”
He frowned, bloody irked by the entire business. “And how would you know that?”
Her rueful sound vibrated through the dimness. “My mother always wanted me to marry a peer, so I’ve studied Burke’s more than the Bible, the encyclopedia, and most literature combined. More’s the pity. I find it tedious in the extreme.”
Hope leapt into his chest. News of his kinsmen never traveled to this place, and he always wondered about the fate of his family. “Tell me about him? About the Earl.”
“Well…” She drew the word out as if it helped her retrieve a memory. “He’s attractive but not in that charming, handsome way of most gentlemen. More like brutally well-built. Tall and wide, golden haired like a lion. His hand was warm and strong when we were introduced. And his eyes…his eyes were…” She drifted off, though the little sounds of friction and fabric told him she still dressed herself.
“Blue?” he prompted after the silence had become untenable. De Lohr eyes were almost invariably blue.
“Yes. But I was going to say empty.”
“Empty?” he echoed.
She made a melancholy little sound. “He stared at me for a long time, and I could sense no light behind the eyes. They were cold and hollow as a hellmouth, I’m afraid.” She seemed to shake herself, her voice losing the dreamy huskiness and regaining some of the crisp starch his countrywomen were famous for. “But worry not, he’s possessed of an impeccable reputation and an obscene fortune, so you should be proud of your legacy, all things considered… When were you the Earl, my lord?”
“Please, call me John,” he requested. “I’ve technically no title now; I died during the Jacobite rebellion of seventeen forty-five. My brother, James, became the Earl after I perished at the battle of Culloden.”
“You had no heir?”
A bleak and familiar ache opened in his chest. A void that existed whenever he thought of the life he didn’t have the chance to live. “I had no wife.”
She made that noise again, one that made him wonder what she was thinking. That made him want to turn around to search her beautiful face. Her remarkability was evidenced in the description she’d made of his kinsman. Most people, when asked, would recount reputation and accomplishments, not impressions of one’s soul behind their eyes. Miss Vanessa Latimer observed the world in a different way than most.
“It remains strange to me,” she was saying, “that you are here. Culloden is miles and miles away.”
“Yes. Well. I’ve gathered from listening to locals that we English won. That Scotland is firmly beneath the rule of King and Crown.”
“Queen,” she corrected. “Queen Victoria.”
“Still?” he marveled. “Surely she’s dead by now.”
“She’s ruled for fifty-three years. Though, while we’re on the subject, I don’t know many Scotsmen who would deign to call themselves British, though we are technically united under one sovereign. It’s no longer a blood-soaked subject, but it’s still a complicated one, even after all this time.”