An English Lord's Love Affair

Chapter 10.1.1. A Very Provocative Package

   Benedic realized he had dropped the note the instant he reached the fern-shadowed escarpment that marked the boundary of the woods. He could not believe his own carelessness. It was a dangerous sign. He couldn't afford to go soft or grow reckless because a young woman had distracted him. He walked through the dark trees in disgruntled silence.

   In fact, even as he approached the park behind his own house, he was thinking about Charlotte when he should have been concentrating on not being seen. He had always been an intense, rather private man who did not particularly care for entertainments common to his class, and he was not particularly proud of his past. Yet, he knew how to attract a woman. Unfortunately, he had not made the best of choices in Lady Ramsleigh. She had not waited until his body was cold to warm her bed with another man.

   He could not forgive her. She was part of the life he wanted to forget.

   He didn't care if he was unfair, or if she had been frightened. He did not care if his disgust with her was irrational. He could not blame her for looking after her own interests. But not with his cousin. It turned Benedic's stomach, and he was done with her. The last he'd heard, she had left the village; he did not care whether she returned.

   Charlotte Brumidge presented an entirely different problem. Infinitely more pleasant and perplexing. She had stirred not only his male hunger, but his more human needs for company and understanding, for intelligent conversation and stimulation. His blue-eyed lady provided for all his private wants in a very provocative package.

   He frowned, remembering what little he knew of her family. Rumors had circulated in the ton that one of the Brumidge daughters—he assumed it was Charlotte—had been alone with her father when he died. Robert Brumidge had been said to rule his family so tightly that his children were rebelling in public; perhaps something in this explained why the youngest daughter ran a little wild. Her father's succession of mistresses had probably not been of the nurturing nature to replace the mother Charlotte had lost.

   Of course he could only desire her from afar, thereby frustrating himself to death. With any luck their paths would not cross again. By the time Benedic completed his revenge, which might end up killing him yet, Lady Charlotte would be married off and whisked out of temptation's reach. Fortunately for her.

   He slipped quietly down the darkened hallway of the unused wing of Strathmere Hall, a living ghost who haunted his own house. Who would think to look for him in the secret passages of the very place where he had been murdered? He rather enjoyed the black irony of it, the village ascribing deliciously wicked deeds to him. In fact, the rumors of his ghostly misbehavior could fit in fact. the rumors of his ghostly misbehavior could fit in well with his plans.

   If he did not ruin it all with his own stupidity.

   He should not have left that blasted note behind. He knew full well when it must have slipped from his pocket. When luscious Charlotte had been half undressing him, her capable white hands touching him in a way that had left him breathless with lust. How desperately he had wanted her to keep on exploring his body.

   And now those ladylike hands were in possession of a note that might, or might not, depending on its contents, destroy everything he had plotted for. Would she show it to anyone?

   Would she keep his secret?

   Or would she toss out the paper, thinking it a piece of garbled nonsense? He wondered if the sister of Lieutenant Colonel Lord Henry Brumidge would recognize it for the cryptograph that it was. He wasn't exactly sure himself how important it might prove, or even who had written it for that matter. All he really knew was that it had been found sewn in Sebastian's company jacket. His brother would not have gone to such lengths to hide it unless it meant something to him.

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