“Yes, my lady.” The footman stepped back for her to enter. “If you would care to wait in the library, I shall see if his lordship is at home.”
Of course he was at home; in his greenhouse, no doubt. Anne had little intention of actually seeing the man. She nevertheless permitted the footman to show her into the earl’s spacious library while he trotted off to find his elderly master.
The twin fragrances of pipe smoke and parchment tickled her nose. Lemon polish, too, though there was no sign that the maids had done any recent tidying up. The library was a place of spectacular clutter.
Bookcases lined three of the walls; leatherbound volumes on botany, agriculture, and natural history pulled out at all angles as if an absentminded researcher had wandered from shelf to shelf withdrawing tomes at random only to change his mind midway through extracting them.
The fourth wall was entirely covered in framed sketches of flowers and greenery. Some images were produced in pencil and some in delicately rendered watercolor. They were—along with the teetering stacks of botanical journals and drooping maps that spilled over the sides of the earl’s carved mahogany desk—evidence of his prevailing passion.
Lord March’s love of exotic plants was legendary. He’d spent much of his life traveling the globe, from the wilds of America to the highest peaks of the Himalayas, bringing back rare seeds to nurture into bloom.
A distracted fellow at the best of times, but a kind one, too, as far as Anne recalled. It had been a long time since she’d darkened his doorstep. A lifetime, it felt like.
She tugged restlessly at her black kid leather gloves as she paced the worn carpet in front of the library’s cavernous marble fireplace. She’d never excelled at waiting for unpleasantness to arrive.
Fortunately, she didn’t have to wait long.
“Hello, old thing.” A familiar deep voice sounded from the library door.
Anne spun around, her traitorous heart giving an involuntary leap in her breast.
Mr. Felix Hartford stood in the entryway; one shoulder propped against the doorframe. Lord only knew how long he’d been observing her.
She stiffened. After all these years, he still had the power to discompose her. Drat him. But she wouldn’t permit her emotions to be thrown into chaos by his attractive face and figure. What cared she for his commanding height? His square-chiseled jaw? For the devilish glint in his sky-colored eyes?
And devil he was. The very one she’d come here to see.
“Hartford,” she said. Her chin ticked up a notch in challenge. It was a reflex. There was no occasion on which they’d met during the course of the past several years that they hadn’t engaged in verbal battle.
This time, however, he made no attempt to engage her.
He was wearing plaid trousers and a loose-fitting black sack coat worn open to reveal the dark waistcoat beneath. A casual ensemble, made more so by the state of him. His clothes were vaguely rumpled and so was his seal-brown hair. It fell over his brow, desperately in need of an application of pomade.
There was an air of arrested preoccupation about him; as if he’d just returned from somewhere or was on his way to somewhere. As if he hadn’t realized she was in the library and had come upon her quite by chance.
An unnatural silence stretched between them, void of their typical barb-filled banter.
Greetings dispensed with, Anne found herself at an unaccountable loss. More surprising still, so did Hartford.
He remained, frozen on the threshold, his usually humorous expression turned to stone on his handsome face.
At length, he managed a smile. “I knew one day you’d walk through my door again. It only took you”—withdrawing his pocket watch from his waistcoat pocket, he cast it a brief glance, brows lifting as if in astonishment at the time—“seven years to do it.”
She huffed. “It hasn’t been seven years.”
“Six and half, then.”
Six years and five months, more like.
It had been early December of 1855, during the Earl of March’s holiday party. She’d been just shy of seventeen; young and naive and not formally out yet. Hartford had kissed her under a sprig of mistletoe in the gaslit servants’ hallway outside the kitchens.
And he’d proposed to her.
But Anne refused to think of the past. Never mind that, living in London, reminders of it were daily shoved under her nose. “You’re not going to be difficult, are you?” she asked.
“That depends.” He strolled into the room. “To what do I owe your visit?”
“Presumptuous, as always,” she said. “For all you know, I’m here to see your grandfather.”
“My grandfather is in his greenhouse, elbow deep in chicken manure. If it’s him you’ve come to speak with, you’re in for a long wait.”
She suppressed a grimace. There was no need for him to be crass. “Really, Hartford.”
“Really, my lady.” He advanced into the room slowly, his genial expression doing little to mask the fact that he was a great towering male bearing down on her. “Why have you come?”
Anne held her ground. She wasn’t afraid of him. “I’ve come to ask a favor of you.”
His mouth curled up at one corner. “Better and better.” He gestured to a stuffed settee upholstered in Gobelins tapestry. “Pray sit down.”
She nimbly sidestepped him to sink down on the cushioned seat. The skirts of her black carriage gown brushed his leg as she passed, silk bombazine sliding against fine wool in an audible caress of expensive fabric.
Her pulse thrummed in her throat.
She daren’t look at him, instead focusing on the business at hand with renewed vigor. Withdrawing her copy of the Spiritualist Herald from beneath her arm, she smoothed the wrinkled pages out onto her lap.
He remained standing by the fireplace. “What do you have there?”
“First things first.” She forced her gaze to meet his. “You’ve doubtless heard of Captain Blunt’s abduction of Miss Wychwood?”
His brow creased. “Abduction? That’s quite a charge.”
“Do you dispute it?”
“I haven’t enough of the facts to do so. Still—”
“Allow me to enlighten you.” She sat rigidly on the settee, the dire facts of her friend’s unfortunate situation putting starch in her spine. “Captain Blunt, an ex-soldier of dubious fame, has spirited away a vulnerable heiress and married her against the advice of her friends and her family, possibly against her own will. If that’s not a crime—”
“He’s a war hero,” Hartford said, as if that excused everything.