The Runaway Countess (8 page)

Trent wasn’t kind. Nor was he happy. What would
His Lordship
do now that he knew the truth of her heritage? A man as intelligent and cunning as he would twist it in his favor somehow. Use it to get what he wanted from her.

And, if he looked into her father’s past, which he surely would, he would know why she had decided to help Roane.

She pressed her hands over her face and groaned. Lady Margaret again. What a mess.

The familiar weight bound her, choked her as if the walls of her prison chamber had closed in and become her own skin. Lady Margaret was a captive, held shackled by a life devoid of joy.

Mazie. Mazie was a free woman, free to do as she pleased, unhampered by expectations and the weight of memory. She dropped her hands and threw her shoulders back. “
Vorrei visitare il centro termale sorgente minerale.
”

Again, a loud knock sounded on her door.

“I am only talking to myself,” she yelled. “Might you please leave me in peace.”

The door opened anyway and in walked a white-faced maid. “Begging your pardon, miss, milady,” the maid curtseyed, “we have prepared another room for you.”

Mazie planted her hands on her hips. They were already “miladying” her? My, news traveled fast. “Where is this other room?” The cellars? Gaol?

“In the guest wing, milady.”

Mazie frowned. She did not think she was going to like this game. “I am comfortable here, thank you.”

“If you please, miss,” the maid glanced toward the door, then back at Mazie, “I’ve clear instructions to show you to your new chambers.”

She sighed. “Very well.”

Having nothing to gather, she followed the maid out of her room and down the narrow hallway to the servants’ stairs, then out into a larger, brighter hallway in the main part of the house. She had never seen this wing of the estate before and trepidation followed her like a shadow. Floor-to-ceiling windows graced one length of the hall and provided views out over the manicured front drive and gardens. The other long wall was broken up by closed doors intermixed with Dutch still-life paintings.

The maid opened the fourth door and Mazie stepped inside.

Lovely, the room was lovely.

Decorated in soft greens, pale blues and buttery yellows over a backdrop of cream and gold, the chamber was elaborate and ornamental and yet delicate and peaceful at once. One wall was comprised almost entirely of windows looking out over the sloping lawns to the lake. The other walls, painted a robin’s-egg blue, were stamped with gilded flowers. Cream furniture with golden accents punctuated the room, while embroidered tulle of the softest silk hung from the windows and around the canopy of the bed.

It was an elegant room, appropriate for the daughter of an earl. Appropriate for Lady Margaret.

Despite herself, Mazie fluttered around the room like a butterfly, appreciating one thing then wandering on as the next caught her eye—seventeenth-century Flemish paintings in gilt frames, Worcester porcelain vases filled with fresh blooms, cut-glass candelabras and a Jacobean walnut side table inlaid with mother-of-pearl.

Old, all of it. And most likely originally owned by former Radfords. She doubted either Trent or his sister had any inclination of what they took for granted. They had grown up among wealth that spanned generations. It was braided into the fibers of their being, as the gilt thread was braided into the silk upholstery around her.

She hardly noticed as two maids entered and only turned when one called her by her title.

“My lady,” the young girl said, “we’ve another gown to alter for you, a dinner dress.”

Mazie smiled at the two seamstresses and was about to tell them she had no use for such a garment when loud footsteps sounded in the hallway. All four women paused to listen. Like a summer thunderstorm, the noise rolled clamorous and heavy toward them.

Everyone froze when Trent appeared on the threshold dressed in his shirtsleeves, the material marred with dirt, his wonderful forearms exposed. Without a coat, his shoulders looked impossibly wide.

His gaze swept the room and landed on Mazie. He stepped into the chamber. “Leave us.”

The maids bumped into each other as they scurried out of the room while gaping at their half-dressed lord. Once they had fled into the hallway Trent banged the door closed behind them.

“So charming.” Mazie huffed with a forced confidence. My God, the man was handsome. “Where did you learn your manners? The stables?”

He raised a brow and his grey eyes flashed with unconcealed emotion. “
Lady Margaret
,” he drawled, “I have spent the better part of the day dusting the cornrows and trying to forget the shattering revelations of this morning. Despite my exertions I fear my anger has only grown fiercer.”

“Perhaps you are unused to such labor.” Choosing self-preservation over pride she walked away and put the length of the room between them. “Toiling in the midday sun is not good for an angry constitution. A cool bath—”

He frowned, his chin and brow cut in harsh angles, making him appear even more masculine and fierce. He continued as if he had not heard her. “What I cannot wrap my mind around, what has stuck there like a sharp stone, is the truth of your bloodlines.”

“Yes, I see.” She did see. The anger and incredulity were etched in his face for all to witness. She looked instead at his bare forearms—corded with muscle and dusted with dark hair. She felt flushed and giddy, and not from fear.

Mazie bit her lip but could not bring herself to look away. She was utterly confused, lost in this tangle of passion and lies. How could she detest Trent so much and yet feel so attracted to him at the same time?

He crossed his arms in front of him, making his chest appear thick with muscle under his linen shirt. “I knew your manners were too fine. I knew you had some kind of education. But I never suspected you were a lady. A
peer
of my sister.”

“Of course you didn’t suspect it. I didn’t want it to be known.” How had a bookish Londoner come by such an athletic form? Boxing perhaps, or fencing.

“Interesting that.” Trent cocked his head to the side and the stray lock of his mussed hair fell over his forehead. Only the hard set of his jaw and the red scratch on his cheek kept him from looking charming. “Why are you hiding such information? What are you protecting?”

She pressed her lips closed and refused to speak until she had her thoughts under control.

“There must be something there. What if I put you on trial as a Chetwyn? The papers would love that. The unwed daughter of an earl fallen to such dramatic ruin. You would be a warning to young ladies for generations.”

Mazie shrugged and tore her eyes away from all that masculine beauty before her. She picked up a glass swan and pretended to inspect it. “I am little concerned with gossip.”

He scoffed. “No one is immune to scandal.”

“I have lived through it before, I can again. The opinions of others no longer hold sway with me, my lord.”

“And what of your cousin, the current earl? He would not want such a thing to occur.”

A sharp laugh cracked through her. “Eliot would have a fit, and all the better I say.” She put the swan down.

“You’ve no concern for your family?”

Her
family
? “The man threw me out with nary a penny.”

“I thought he had restored the Chetwyn fortune?”

“He has.” Trent already knew too much about her. It was unsettling. If he dug too deep, pulled too hard at the random strings of information, everything would unravel.

“Perhaps you are hiding from someone?” He tapped his hand against his leg. “A former victim?”

She made herself face him. “I am not hiding.” Not precisely anyway. Hiding had such connotations of powerlessness. She was not languishing behind the name Mazie Bell, not buried in some dark hole.

His eyes narrowed, scrutinized her as if it were his mission to uncover all her secrets. “There must be some cause.”

There were many reasons she did not want her heritage to be known. Some related to Roane, and some did not. But all her motives were difficult and personal and not things she wished to share with her enemies. “I am not a trunk, my lord. My past is not something to be rummaged through like so much baggage.”

Again, the raised brow. “I would not want to dirty my hands with your past,
my lady
. But you must understand my need to know. Perhaps you would prefer to tell me how you met the Midnight Rider?”

Mazie huffed and sharply smoothed her skirts. He would not leave her until she gave him some sort of answer. “I simply have no place for Lady Margaret Chetwyn in my future.”

“So you chose to become Mazie Bell.”

“Yes.”

“So you think to make yourself someone new. To escape your past.”

“Yes. No. I am not escaping, my lord. I am simply creating a new life for myself.”

“Ah, I see. You feel the life that was created for you is not satisfactory.”

Her toes curled in her shoes. Must he always be so irritating? “I can improve upon it, yes.”

“You can improve upon the life that the heavenly Father created for you?”

She shrugged. What had been created for her, thus far, was a disaster. Before she had reached her nineteenth birthday she had been made an orphan, a pauper and an outcast. Certainly she could do better than that. “I suppose so, yes.”

He blinked, looked away from her, then looked back, his face a tableau of surprise.

She had finally silenced him.

“But that is an absurd amount of control.” He found his voice. “Prideful and without reverence or humility.”

Ha! “Who are you to talk of power? You, the lord above all?”

“Even I bow to the Creator.” His face was flushed from anger or perhaps discomfort.

“Are you so religious, then?” She was tired of those who would preach that her parents’ death had a purpose. That, like a baker taking bread out of the oven, or a conductor drawing out the end of a symphony, a higher power had deigned their lives to be fully lived.

“I am not a religious man, but neither am I cynical.” His mouth twisted as he said the words, as if they had an ill taste.

“I am not cynical. How dare you accuse me of that? I have simply chosen to take charge of my life rather than leave events up to fate.”

He shook his head, his expression mocking.

“It is my life to control.” Her anger boiled over into her voice.

“A higher power is necessary, Mazie, moral guidance is needed. Otherwise we fall into habits of crime and deceit.”

His words were like a slap. She crossed her arms and looked toward the windows. She had said too much, revealed too much. No one wanted to hear that she had lost faith in God, doubted that there was a force of good watching over the world.

“In any case,” Trent ground out, his voice controlled as usual, “you cannot remain here as Mazie Bell. You will stay as my sister’s guest. You will be known to us as Lady Margaret Chetwyn, and you will dress and comport yourself accordingly.”

She glanced over at him with a snort. “So you think to decide my identity for me?”

“I think to maintain the identity that is rightfully yours.”

“And you say I am controlling and without humility.”

“I did not bring you into this world, Mazie, but your father did. You are a Chetwyn whether you wish it or not.”

She rubbed her temples. Her head was beginning to ache.

“Have you no care for family honor?” he asked. To a man like him, honor was everything. He would never understand her reasons for changing her name, no matter how hard she tried to explain. He did not wait for an answer anyway. “We will talk more later. At dinner. See that you are prompt and dressed appropriately.” He opened the door, turned back to look at her. “Don’t ever lie to me again.”

Mazie rolled her eyes at his retreating form. If there was anything she hated it was being stuck. Powerless. Managed. Controlled by someone she could not trust and unable to know or exercise her own decisions.

Really, the man was too conceited by half. Someone needed to take him down a peg or two.

Chapter Five

“The miserable have no other medicine/But only hope.” Shakespeare

Lady Margaret Parthena Harlan Chetwyn was restored to life in the course of two hours by an upstairs maid named Alice.

After a brief fitting for her dinner dress, Mazie stepped aside as an elegant bathtub was brought into her new chamber. Constructed of hammered copper, the tub was enormous, large enough for two people, and a vast difference from the hip-baths she had grown accustomed to. Determined not to think of her argument with Trent, she watched a parade of maids fill the tub with buckets of steaming water. Alice added a generous handful of rose petals and fresh milk before she helped Mazie step in.

With a contented sigh, Mazie leaned back and rested in the warm water.

It was a luxury she had missed.

She had missed soft, velvety towels and silk dressing gowns as well. Thirty minutes later, she sat in a chair surrounded by bright afternoon sun and let Alice brush out her hair. She felt everywhere soft and warm and fragrant, free of the anxiety that had plagued her for days. When her hair was adequately dry, the maid led her to the dressing table and bade her sit.