Darling Beast (Maiden Lane #7)(3)

“You coddle the boy,” Maude sniffed, but Lily noticed the older woman didn’t make any further protest.

Lily hid a smile. If anyone coddled Indio it was Maude herself. “I’ll be back in a bit.”

Maude waved a hand as Lily turned to the door to the outside. The door screeched horribly as she pulled it open. One of the hinges was cracked from the heat of the fire and it hung askew. Outside, the day was overcast. Deep-gray clouds promised more rain and the wind whipped across the blackened ground. Lily shivered and wrapped her arms around herself. She should’ve brought her shawl.

“Indio!” Her shout was thinned by the wind.

Helplessly she looked around. What had once been an elegant pleasure garden had been reduced to sooty mud by the fire and the spring rains. The hedges that had outlined graveled walks were burnt and mostly dead, meandering away into the distance. To the left were the remains of the stone courtyard and boxes where musicians had played for guests: a line of broken pillars, supporting nothing but sky. To the right a copse of straggling trees stood with a bit of mirrored water peeking out from behind—what was left of an ornamental pond, now clogged with silt. Here and there green poked out among the gray and black, but she had to admit that, especially on an overcast day like this one, with wisps of fog slinking along the ground, the garden was ominous and rather frightening.

Lily grimaced. She should’ve never let Indio out to play by himself, but it was hard to keep an active young boy inside. She started down one of the paths, slipping a bit in the mud, wishing she’d stopped to put on her pattens before coming outside. If she didn’t see her son soon, she’d ruin the frivolous embroidered slippers on her feet.

“Indio!”

She rounded what once had been a small thicket of trimmed trees. Now the blackened branches rattled in the wind. “Indio!”

A grunt came from the thicket.

Lily stopped dead.

There it was again—almost an explosive snort. The noise was too loud, too deep for Indio. It almost sounded like… a big animal.

She glanced quickly around, but she was completely alone. Should she return to the ruined theater for Maude? But Indio was out here!

Another grunt, this one louder. A rustle.

Something was breathing heavily in the bushes.

Good Lord. Lily bunched her skirts in her fists in case she had to leg it, and crept forward.

A groan and a low, rumbling sound.

Like growling.

She gulped and peeked around a burned trunk.

At first what she saw looked like an enormous, moving, mud-covered mound, and then it straightened, revealing an endlessly broad back, huge shoulders, and a shaggy head.

Lily couldn’t help it. She made a noise that was perilously close to a squeak.

The thing whirled—much faster than anything that big had a right to move—and a horrible, soot-stained face glared at her, one paw raised as if to strike her.

In it was a wickedly sharp, hooked knife.

Lily gulped. If she lived through the day she was going to have to apologize to Indio.

For there was a monster in the garden.

THE DAY HADN’T been going well to begin with, reflected Apollo Greaves, Viscount Kilbourne.

At a rough estimate, fully half the woody plantings in the pleasure garden were dead—and another quarter might as well be. The ornamental pond’s freshwater source had been blocked by the fire’s debris and now it sat stagnant. The gardeners Asa had hired for him were an unskilled lot. To top it off, the spring rains had turned what remained of Harte’s Folly into a muddy morass, making planting and earth moving impossible until the ground dried out.

And now there was a strange female in his garden.

Apollo stared into huge lichen-green eyes lined with lashes so dark and thick that they looked like smudged soot. The woman—girl? She wasn’t that tall, but a swift glance at her bodice assured him she was quite mature, thank you—was only a slim bit of a thing, dressed foolishly in a green velvet gown, richly over-embroidered in red and gold. She hadn’t even a bonnet on. Her dark hair slipped from a messy knot at the back of her neck, waving strands blowing against her pinkened cheeks. Actually, she was rather pretty in a gamine sort of way.

But that was beside the point.

Where in hell had she come from? As far as he knew, the only other people in the ruined pleasure garden were the brace of so-called gardeners presently working on the hedges behind the pond. He’d been taking out his frustration alone on the dead tree stump, trying to uproot the thing by hand since their only dray horse was at work with the other men, when he’d heard a feminine voice calling and she’d suddenly appeared.

The woman blinked and her gaze darted to his upraised arm.

Apollo’s own eyes followed and he winced. He’d instinctively raised his hand as he turned to her, and the pruning knife he held might be construed as threatening.

Hastily he lowered his arm. Which left him standing in his mud-stained shirt and waistcoat, sweaty and stinking, and feeling like a dumb ox next to her delicate femininity.

But apparently his action reassured her. She drew herself up—not that it made much difference to her height. “Who are you?”

Well, he’d like to ask the same of her but, alas, he really couldn’t, thanks to that last beating in Bedlam.

Belatedly he remembered that he was supposed to be a simple laborer. He tugged at a forelock and dropped his gaze—to elegantly embroidered slippers caked in mud.