Page 12 of Entrancing the Earl
“In the music room?” she asked, her voice lilting as melodically as any instrument.
“It should probably be called the hobby room. It has accumulated everything from oil paints to lutes over the years. I believe balls of string appeared at one time, and a collection of framed moths.” He took the steps down two at a time, then realized he was almost running away and slowed down.
She hadn’t removed her hat and wasn’t wearing the acres of skirts and petticoats more fashionable women wore. In her plain gray gown, she easily kept up with his longer strides, while still looking elegant. How the hell did she manage that? If his sisters had worn that rag, they’d look like frumpy dowds.
“Oh, you must mean the sewing room. It’s currently filled with yarns and threads and fabrics, but I do remember a harp and a spinet. There are drawing materials? I fear I’ve been wasting your stationery.” At the bottom of the wide front stairs, she took a right turn and led the way.
Gerard almost grinned his amusement. Avery was right. This one was an imperious little witch, and she seemed completely unconscious of being so.
Which roused his curiosity. He knew women. His marchioness mother was a Malcolm. So were any number of his aunts and cousins and of course, his sisters. Women abounded in his life. Very few Malcolms adopted the imperiousness of a queen, including his mother.
In his experience, women got their way by being pleasant and making suggestions or dimpling up and flapping eyelashes. They did not take command and charge ahead. Men did that.
Gerard allowed the beekeeper to precede him into the music room. As always, it had one or two women engaged in gossip and playing at needles—he wasn’t certain they ever finished anything. They stared at his entrance. Gerard ignored them and aimed for a cabinet where he’d last seen drawing papers and pens.
His inclination was to take the supplies to the study and shut the door, but he’d learned his lesson there. No more intimate meetings with marriageable females. He needed to return to London where he could find women more interested in his coin and bed than his meaningless title. Every woman in his set wanted to be a countess, it seemed.
He laid the sketchpad down and gestured for Nan to take a seat. She studied the layout warily, then removed her bonnet, leaving her pixie features looking young and vulnerable. She took a seat on the opposite side of the table from him. Fair enough.
“Now tell me what you have in mind.” He sprawled his long legs under the narrow table, brushing her skirts, as he took a seat. He sorted through the various pens, inks, and pencils in the box. Most of them had probably dried up.
She showed him a rough sketch of a rectangle with what looked like thin drawers. “I want to be able to pull the frames from the hive without them sticking to each other. And then there needs to be a special cover between the bottom box and the frames on top to keep the queen from laying her eggs in the upper part of the hive. That way I will only be harvesting the excess honey. I won’t have to burn out the colony or leave them hungry over winter.”
Using her sketch as a guide, he applied rulers to draft a rudimentary box with several layers of frames. Her notes didn’t quite explain the cover needed to prevent the larger queen from moving into the upper frames. He frowned as he tried to work out how to draw what he’d never seen.
“You need the book,” he said in frustration.
“I know,” she agreed sadly. “If I’d had time, I could have traced all the sketches and taken better notes. But I didn’t have the luxury.”
“Then why not just order the book? Give me the author and title, and I’ll write the bookshop. It might take a while to reach here. How soon do you need these?” Gerard glanced up and caught a look of such blatant longing on her face, that it almost knocked him backward.
“I’ve wanted that book since childhood.” She sounded much dreamier than the automaton who had been dictating measurements to him. “It’s that easy? The book must be twenty years old.”
“If it hasn’t been reprinted, the shop will look in the secondhand stores or buy it from a lending library or the publisher’s inventory. There’s bound to be more than one in the kingdom,” he said, concealing his amusement that she blossomed at a book and not him. “But if you’re in a hurry...”
She pensively nibbled on a finger. “I’ve not had enough experience in this climate to know when the bees will settle in for the winter. I’d really wanted the hives done by now. But I suppose we could start in the spring. It’s just... we’d have to start building a fence or hedge now to protect the hives we have.”
“Or Avery will have to train his beast better,” Gerard agreed.
“Nettles,” she said in dry amusement. “I should start a nettle hedge.”
And that was the moment he recognized her...the tart-tongued servant who had saved his life in Rainford’s library.
Five
“You!”the earl exclaimed out of the clear blue sky.
Startled and frightened, Iona pushed her chair away from the table.Did he recognize her?How? She’d been so absorbed in the drawing appearing beneath his talented fingers that she hadn’t paid attention... always a danger. She wasn’t prepared to flee, but her thoughts were already doing mental leaps and bounds.
“You’rethe one who brought Lady Alice here,” he grumbled in a slightly lower voice. “Why the hell did you do that?”
Iona tried to slow her panicked response to read his scent, but beneath his usual façade of indifference, he was so many layers of confusion that she couldn’t sort him out fast enough. He only recognized her from that night? If she didn’t have to run again... She could breathe a little easier.
“She needed help?” A simple response seemed to be her only option.
“Notmyhelp.” He shoved back his chair.
The other ladies were discreetly staring at them over their handiwork.
