Page 8 of Private Arrangements
At the bottom of the slope, some fifty feet downstream from her, the rider guided his mount to a muscular, graceful leap, jumping clear across the twelve-foot-wide stream. He drew up his reins, halted, and looked at her. He'd been aware of her all along.
“You are trespassing on my land,” she shouted.
He came toward her, nudging the huge black horse with ease, ducking under the denuded willow branches. He didn't stop until he had a clear line of sight to her, about ten feet out. And she had her first good look at him.
He was handsome, though not as pretty as Carrington, who—poor sod, may the she-devils of hell not use him too hard—had been Byron reborn. This man here had features that were both sharper and nobler, set in a leaner, more masculine face. Their gaze met. He had beautiful, deep-set eyes, the irises a gorgeous green. A thinking man's eyes: perceptive, opaque, seeing much, giving little away.
She couldn't look away. There was something about him that was instantly appealing to her, something in his bearing, a confidence that was unlike either Carrington's arrogant sense of prerogative or her own unyielding obduracy. Poise forged with finesse.
“You are trespassing on my land,” she repeated, because she couldn't think of anything else to say.
“Am I?” he said. “And you are?”
He spoke with a subtle accent, not French, German, Italian, or anything else she could immediately think of. A foreigner?
“Miss Rowland. Who are you?”
“Mr. Saybrook.”
Was he—no, not possible. But then, who else could he be? “Are you the Marquess of Tremaine?”
Carrington had died heirless. His uncle, the next male in line, had inherited the ducal title. The new duke's eldest son took on the courtesy title of the Marquess of Tremaine.
The young man smiled a little. “I suppose I have become that too.”
Hewas Theodora von Schweppenburg's beau? She had envisioned a man as spineless and ineffectual as Miss von Schweppenburg herself.
“You are returned from university.”
He had not attended Carrington's funeral alongside the rest of his family because of his classes at the École Polytechnique in Paris. His parents had been vague about what he studied. Physics or economics, they'd said. How could anyone possibly confuse the two?
“The university lets us out for Christmas.”
He dismounted and approached her, leading the black stallion behind him. She tamped down her discomfort and remained where she was. He removed his riding glove and offered her his hand.
“Delighted to meet you at last, Miss Rowland.”
She shook his hand briefly. “I guess you know who I am, then.”
The first snowflakes began to fall, tiny particles of puffy ice. One landed on his eyelash. His eyelashes, like his brows, were of a much darker shade than the molten gold at the tips of his hair. His eyes, she was sure, were the color of an Alpine lake, though she'd never seen one.
“I was going to call on you tomorrow,” he said. “To offer my condolences.”
She chortled. “Yes, as you can see, I am inconsolable.”
He looked at her, truly looked at her this time, his eyes scanning her features one by one. His scrutiny discomfited her—she was more accustomed to being pointed at behind her back—but it was not unpleasant, coming from such a rivetingly handsome man.
“I apologize for my cousin. He was most inconsiderate to die before marrying you and leaving an heir.”
His bluntness took her aback. It was one thing for her mother to say something along that line, quite another to hear it repeated by a complete stranger to whom she hadn't even been properly introduced.
“Man proposes, God disposes,” she said.
“A crying shame, isn't it?”
She was beginning to like this Lord Tremaine. “Yes, it is.”
The snowflakes suddenly increased in dimension, no longer icy sawdust but fingernail-size fluffs. They fell densely, as if all the angels in heaven were molting. In the minutes since Lord Tremaine first appeared, the sky had become visibly darker. Soon dusk would cloak the land.
