Lord, she couldn’t let him touch her. Not when she was so on edge. Even as she cursed her betraying reaction, she jerked away before he made contact.
Her aunt chose that moment to rise and lift Hecuba from her snooze near the empty hearth. The hallway clock struck six. “Perhaps we should move through to the dining room.”
Only the greatest exercise of will stopped Genevieve from bolting for the door. Anything to escape Mr. Evans and that terrifying interval where attraction had turned her into a lunatic.
Pride straightened her spine and insisted that she had nothing to fear. Then she risked a backward glance. Mr. Evans lounged on the window seat and his expression as he watched her tied her stomach into sick knots. She’d expected her erratic behavior to bewilder him. But he didn’t look surprised. He looked like a man who eyed a prize for the winning. He looked like a man who put some great purpose into effect. He looked invincible.
Another chill rippled down her spine and she tore her gaze away. She revolted at the possessiveness that she read in his face. Even as unforgivably, unacceptably, excitement coiled low in her belly, reminding her that she might be a scholar, but she was also a woman. And the woman responded to Christopher Evans in ways that had no truck with intellect.
Slowly, his heavy eyelids lowered, hiding triumph. Her lips tightened and she whirled away to find Lord Neville regarding her with unmistakable disapproval. Her color rose and shame gripped her throat. As though she’d been caught dancing naked in a tavern or kissing a married man in church. For the love of heaven, was her every move under observation?
On a spurt of temper, she marched through to the hallway. Lord Neville followed. When he took her arm, sensitive as she currently was to overbearing males, she resented his proprietorial air. She tried to withdraw, but his grip tightened. Shocked, she looked up. The parlor door had swung shut, closing Mr. Evans and Sirius inside. Ahead past the stairs, the light from the dining room hardly penetrated this dark corner. For a fleeting moment, Lord Neville’s expression struck her as menacing.
What a fanciful idiot she was. Clearly she still wasn’t as easy with last week’s burglary as she’d hoped. Although perhaps she should blame Mr. Evans rather than the thief for her nerves. She’d known Lord Neville most of her life. He wasn’t her favorite person, but he had never hurt her. Nonetheless, she dearly wished he’d unhand her. And stop looming. She forgot what a substantial figure he made until he stood close.
“I can’t like that young fellow,” he said in a low voice. “He has an insinuating way about him.”
“Papa likes him.” She wondered why she didn’t join Lord Neville in deriding Mr. Evans.
His lordship’s smile was sour. “Your father is one of nature’s innocents. And Mr. Evans flatters him.”
This was nothing she hadn’t thought herself, but still she found herself reluctant to agree. “I doubt that Mr. Evans means any harm.”
What a lie that was. With Mr. Evans, she wasn’t sure of very much at all, apart from his ability to turn her into a nitwit.
“But we don’t know, do we?” Lord Neville’s fleshy lips turned down. “He has no right to use your Christian name.”
Her color rose. Hopefully the shadows concealed her embarrassment. “It was only once—”
“He offers you insult. And he has the run of the house.”
Annoyance made her draw herself up to her full height. This time when she tugged, he released her.
“Do you imply there’s something between Mr. Evans and myself?” Her voice was so cold, icicles practically hung from every word.
Even in the gloom, she read Lord Neville’s dismay at her reaction to his well-meant if inopportune advice. “Genevieve, you’re a woman of unimpeachable virtue. I lay no blame at your door. Any wrongdoing is entirely the gentleman’s fault.”
The apology didn’t mollify. “My lord, none of this is your business.”
Now she’d offended him. “A man of principle must speak when he sees a woman he … respects at risk of making a fool of herself.”
His concern struck her as overweening. After all, he was a colleague of her father’s, not a member of the family. “Lord Neville—”
Luckily for her relationship with her father’s patron, the door opened and Mr. Evans emerged with Sirius at his heels. The parlor faced west, so it was purely a matter of geography that the setting sun lit him like a saint in a painting.
She had no idea what Mr. Evans saw, but he went still and his tall body radiated danger. Sirius stood alert at his master’s thigh.
“Miss Barrett, are you all right?” he asked softly. With his back to the light, she couldn’t read his expression. His voice was steady and he sounded protective. Or he would if she trusted his sincerity. Even so, she battled a traitorous surge of warmth.
Lord Neville lurched around. “You interrupt a private conversation, sir.”
Did she imagine it or did Mr. Evans deliberately relax back into his easygoing self? “I go through to dinner, my lord.”
No love was lost between them. But tonight for the first time she wondered if mutual antipathy might verge on something stronger. Something approaching loathing. She’d always considered Lord Neville a dominating character. But it was the older man who shifted on his feet and turned to stump into the dining room.
“I take it he warned you against me.” Mr. Evans stepped into the hallway, clever enough not to crowd her. Right now she thought she’d clout the next man who tried to intimidate her with his physical size.
Genevieve glared at her rescuer, fleeting gratitude evaporating. “Shouldn’t he?”
She waited for Mr. Evans to claim ignorance of her meaning, but she misjudged him. He leaned close enough for her to see his half smile in the gloom. “Do I make you nervous, Miss Barrett?”
With a flick of her skirts, she turned and headed for the dining room. “Not at all, sir.”
She waited for him to challenge an assertion that they both knew was untrue. He merely gestured her ahead with the smooth dispatch that both attracted and frightened her.
Richard woke with a start. Lying motionless in his monastic bed, he tried to work out what had disturbed him. Everything was silent. Moonlight flooded through his open window. The night was stifling and he slept naked, although his clothes were conveniently to hand across the Windsor chair. His door remained open a crack for air.
Sirius stretched out under the sill, his brindled coat lost in the shadows. His great dark eyes glinted. Something had alerted the dog too.
Richard heard a door squeak down the corridor, then a surreptitious rustle as someone tiptoed toward the stairs. The rumble of the vicar’s snoring next door, audible even through the thick wall, indicated that the old man slumbered. Dorcas slept in the attics. Which meant the nocturnal wanderer was Mrs. Warren. Or most intriguing of all, Genevieve.
Carefully so the bed didn’t creak, Richard sat and reached for breeches and shirt. In this heat, even such light clothing felt constricting. As he tugged his boots on, he heard the snick of the kitchen door. Whoever left was as light-footed as a sylph.
He stood at the window. Below, someone wrapped in a dark cloak slipped through the back garden, plotting a deft path between cabbages and lettuces. The figure was anonymous, but he knew that swift grace to his bones. It didn’t belong to middle-aged Lucy Warren.
No, another quarry roamed the Oxfordshire countryside this quiet night.
He