Romancing the Duke (Castles Ever After #1)(2)

She was alone.

Dizzied from her strange surroundings and weak with hunger, Izzy closed her eyes. She coerced air into her lungs.

You cannot faint. Only ninnies and consumptive ladies swoon, and you are neither.

It started to rain. Fat, heavy drops of summer rain—the kind that always struck her as vaguely lewd and debauched. Little potbellied drunkards, those summer raindrops, chortling on their way to earth and crashing open with glee.

She was getting wet, but the alternative—seeking shelter inside one of the darkened arches—was less appealing by far.

A rustling sound made her jump and wheel. Just a raven taking wing. She watched it fly over the castle wall and away.

She laughed a little. Really. It was too much. A vast, uninhabited castle, rain, and now ravens, too? Someone was playing her a cruel trick.

Then she glimpsed a man across the courtyard, standing in a darkened archway.

And if he was a trick, he wasn’t a cruel one.

There were things in nature that took their beauty from delicate structure and intricate symmetry. Flowers. Seashells. Butterfly wings. And then there were things that were beautiful for their wild power and their refusal to be tamed. Snowcapped mountains. Churning thunderclouds. Shaggy, sharp-toothed lions.

This man silhouetted before her? He belonged, quite solidly, in the latter category.

So did the wolf sitting at his heel.

It couldn’t be a wolf, she told herself. It had to be some sort of dog. Wolves had long been hunted to extinction. The last one in England died ages ago.

But then . . . she would have thought they’d stopped making men like this, too.

He shifted his weight, and a slant of weak light revealed the bottom half of his face. She glimpsed a wide, sensual slash of a mouth. A squared jaw, dark with whiskers. Overlong hair brushed his collar. Or it would have, if he had a collar. He wore only an open-necked linen shirt beneath his coat. Buckskin breeches hugged him from slim hips to muscled thighs . . . and from there, his legs disappeared into a pair of weathered, dusty Hessians.

Oh, dear. She did have such a weakness for a pair of well-traveled boots. They made her desperate to know everywhere they’d been.

Her heart beat faster. This didn’t help with her lightheadedness problem.

“Are you Lord Archer?” she asked.

“No.” The word was low, unforgiving.

The beast at his heel growled.

“Oh. I-is Lord Archer here?”

“No.”

“Are you the caretaker?” she asked. “Are you expecting him soon?”

“No. And no.”

Was that amusement in his voice?

She swallowed hard. “I received a letter. From Lord Archer. He asked me to meet him here on this date regarding some business with the late Earl of Lynforth’s estate. Apparently he left me some sort of bequest.” She extended the letter with a shaking hand. “Here. Would you care to read it for yourself?”

That wide mouth quirked at one corner. “No.”

Izzy retracted the letter as calmly as she could manage and replaced it in her pocket.

He leaned one shoulder against the archway. “Aren’t we going to continue?”

“Continue what?”

“This game.” His voice was so low it seemed to crawl to her over the flagstones, then shiver up through the soles of her feet. “Am I a Russian prince? No. Is my favorite color yellow? No. Would I object if you were to come inside and remove every stitch of your damp clothing?” His voice did the impossible. It sank lower. “No.”

He was just making sport of her now.

Izzy clutched her valise to her chest. She didn’t want Snowdrop getting wet. “Do you treat all your visitors this way?”

Idiot. She cursed herself and braced for another low, mocking “no.”

He said, “Only the pretty ones.”

Oh, Lord. She ought to have guessed it earlier. The fatigue and hunger had done something to her brain. She could almost believe the castle, the ravens, the sudden appearance of a tall, dark, handsome man. But now he was flirting with her?

She had to be hallucinating.

The rain beat down, impatient to get from the clouds to the earth. Izzy watched drops pinging off the flagstones. Each one seemed to chisel a bit more strength from her knees.

The castle walls began to spin. Her vision went dark at the edges.

“I . . . Forgive me, I . . .”

Her valise dropped to the ground.

The beast snarled at it.

The man moved out from the shadows.

And Izzy fainted dead away.

The girl crumpled to the flagstones with a wet thud.

Ransom winced at the irony. Despite all that had happened, he still had the ladies swooning. One way or another.

He released Magnus with a low command. Once the dog had completed his wet-nose investigation, Ransom brushed the animal aside and took his turn.

He ran his hands over the limp heap of joints and limbs before him. Damp muslin, worn boots. Small hands, slender wrists. There wasn’t much of her. She seemed to be half petticoats, half hair.

And God, what hair. Thick, curly, abundant.

He felt the warm huff of her breath against his hand. He slid his touch lower, searching for the girl’s heartbeat.

His palm brushed over a full, rounded breast.

A surge of . . . something . . . passed through him, unbidden. Not lust, just male awareness. Apparently, he should stop thinking of her as “the girl.” She was most definitely “the woman.”