The Cheer in Charming an Earl(16)

Under his cheek, her hair tickled his skin. She wasn’t touching him back, but he felt like less of a bounder while holding her. But after allowing him to comfort her for several lovely seconds, she pushed against his chest. Paper wrapping tore at the corner of the box pressed between them as she struggled out of his arms. “Let me go. I have nothing to say to you.”

Reluctantly, he released her. It probably wasn’t doing her virginal outrage any good to be crushed against a man who’d just admitted to being a libertine. “We’ll have it out in the morning,” he promised, feeling the need to make everything right for her. How did her teardrops manage to wound him like little knife-pricks in the chest?

He held his arm out for her. She didn’t nod and she didn’t reply to his promise, but she did allow him to see her back to her room. He spent the remainder of the evening attempting to remember what, precisely, had been said, so he could mend things after breakfast.

Yet after a long, sleepless night, he learned there was to be no morning for them. Miss Conley, her trunk, her driver, and her horses had disappeared overnight. As though they’d never existed. Grantham rubbed at his eyes, but the little bedchamber she’d occupied remained empty. “Where do you think she went off to?” he asked de Winter.

As usual, de Winter stood at his side. Because it was morning, he sipped hot coffee rather than brandy. “Not farther than we can find her. They’re bound to leave tracks in the snow, and in this weather, I doubt anyone else will be about to ruin them. But why would you want to go after her?”

He’d had all night to answer that, yet still he didn’t know. He did have one notion, however, one he wanted to test on de Winter. “I think I broke her heart.”

“That’s ludicrous. She was a flighty thing, but far above the impressionable age when a girl sets her cap at a man she’s just laid eyes on. Far more likely, she was distraught to learn your twenty thousand quid came attached to a coven of lightskirts and dissolutes.”

Grantham went over and touched his fingers to a soft dent in the pillow. It might have been where her head had rested, or it might be time to retick the filling. “Still, I can’t shake the sentiment. What if she and I were meant to be?”

“Like some sort of perverse Christmas miracle? Chelford, are you sure she’s the one who hit her head?”

Grantham didn’t laugh. Miss Conley had felt like an extraordinary gift. Her presence had brightened a holiday that had gone dark since his sister’s death. “I’m taking a search party out. Even if I’m not destined to be leg-shackled to a slip of a girl who practically bleeds artlessness, I won’t have her life on my conscience. The snow has stopped but the roads are still icy.” That, at least, explained how she’d managed her trunk. They were probably dragging it behind her horses like a sleigh.

An hour later, he and de Winter rode out accompanied by three footmen and Mr. Tewseybury. It was no surprise the other men had declined to go chasing after a woman who’d left their lives as suddenly as she’d entered them. He expected nothing less from his wastrel friends, at any rate.

As the search party rounded the rear of his house toward the road, Grantham got his first good look at the destruction wrought on his poor kitchens. Chelford was the usual sort of family seat one found in Yorkshire; what had started as a small crofter’s hut had been extended and rebuilt over the years in the direction of rolling hills. But the kitchens abutted the old road, and it wasn’t difficult to imagine how Miss Conley’s carriage had managed to cut a path directly into the back of his house.

An oiled canvas tarp swathed the corner of two stone walls. The makeshift cover had frozen solid overnight. Even with half of the devastation shielded by it, the damage was unmistakably appalling. “Looks like we’re fortunate the house didn’t burn down,” de Winter mused. “Had she come an hour later, the piglet might have been spitted and the hearth roaring at full-blaze.”

Fire. Grantham’s blood went to ice. He stopped guiding his horse as his numbed mind sent him into a daze. Fire.

It wasn’t the fire that had killed his sister. It was the smoke.

He shook himself. Shook his head hard, as if the awful memory could be displaced by anything he could physically do. Stupid, puerile hope. Nothing could help. Nothing could change the past. His sister was gone and there was nothing to be done for it; over the last five years he’d learned the impossibility of wishing otherwise.

It seemed de Winter was waiting for him to speak. “It wasn’t our time,” Grantham said of the notion that they had all escaped being roasted alive on Christmas Eve. The empty words barely squeezed through the tightness in his throat. There was nothing about the thought of burning that didn’t singe him to his soul.