The Leopard Prince (Princes #2)(34)

“Do be careful,” George called. If he lost his footing, he might be swept downstream. Did he know how to swim?

He didn’t acknowledge her call and kept wading. When he reached the rope, he grabbed it where it stretched above the water and started to saw. The strands unraveled rapidly, and suddenly the sheep spun away downstream. Harry turned and began to wade back, the water whirling angrily about him. He slipped and his head disappeared beneath the water without a sound.

Oh, God. George’s heart leaped painfully in her chest. She started for the bank without knowing what she could do. But then he was upright again, his soaked hair plastered to his cheeks. He emerged and wrung out the front of his shirt, transparent now from the water. George could see his nipples and the swirl of dark hair where the shirt stuck against his chest.

“Someday I’d like to see a man nude,” she said.

Harry froze.

Slowly he straightened from pulling on his boots. His green eyes met hers, and she could have sworn a fire burned there. “Is that an order, my lady?” he asked, his voice so deep it was almost a dark purr.

“I—” Oh, goodness gracious, yes! A part of George desperately wanted to see Harry Pye take off that shirt. To see what his shoulders and belly looked like naked. To find out if there really were curls of hair on his chest. And after that, if he removed his breeches… She really couldn’t help it. Her eyes dropped to that part of a man’s anatomy that a lady never, ever, under any circumstances let her gaze wander to. The water had done an exquisite job of molding Harry’s breeches to his lower limbs.

George drew a breath. Opened her mouth.

And Harry cursed and turned away. A cart and pony were coming up the lane.

Well, damn.

“YOU CAN’T REALLY THINK Harry Pye is poisoning your sheep.” Bennet’s words were phrased as a question but said as a statement.

Not two minutes back and the lad was already setting himself against him. But then the boy had always taken Pye’s part. Silas snorted. “I don’t think. I know Pye is doing the killing.”

Bennet frowned and poured himself a tumbler of whiskey. He held the decanter up in question.

Silas shook his head and leaned back in the leather-covered chair behind his study desk. The room was his favorite, all male in its feel. Mounted antlers circled the study, just below the ceiling. A deep, black fireplace took up the entire wall at the room’s far end. Over it was a classical painting: The Rape of the Sabine Women. Swarthy men tearing the clothes from fair-skinned, screaming wenches. He sometimes got prick-proud just looking at the thing.

“But poison?” Bennet threw himself into a chair and started tapping his fingers on the arm.

His younger son aggravated him; but even now, Silas could not help feeling proud of him. This one should have been his heir. Thomas would never have the balls to confront his father. Silas had known it the moment he’d first seen Bennet, bawling and red-faced, in his mother’s arms. He’d looked into the infant’s face and a voice inside him had whispered, this one—this one out of all his other get—would be the son he, Silas, would be proud of. So he’d taken the babe from that whore’s arms and brought him home. His wife had pouted and wept, but Silas had soon let her know he wouldn’t change his mind and she’d had to relent. Some might still remember that Bennet wasn’t legally born, that he’d come from the loins of the gatekeeper’s wife, but they wouldn’t dare speak that knowledge aloud.

Not while Silas Granville ruled this land.

Bennet shook his head. “Poison isn’t the method Harry would use if he wanted revenge on you. He loves the land and the people who farm it.”

“Loves the land?” Silas scoffed. “How can he? He doesn’t own any land. He’s naught but a paid custodian. The land he tends and works on belongs to someone else.”

“But the farmers still come to him, don’t they?” Bennet asked softly, his eyes narrowed. “They ask him his opinion; they follow his guidance. Even many of your own tenants go to Harry when they have a problem—or at least they did before all this started. They wouldn’t dare come to you.”

A line of pain shot along Silas’s left temple. “Why should they? I’m not the tavern keep, someone for the farmers to bawl their troubles to.”

“No, you’re not interested in other people’s troubles, are you?” Bennet drawled. “But their respect, their allegiance—that’s a different matter.”

He had the allegiance of the local people. Didn’t they fear him? Stupid, dirty peasants, to seek the council of one of their own just because he’d risen a little from their ranks. Silas felt sweat drip down his neck. “Pye’s envious of his betters. He wishes he was an aristocrat.”

“Even if he was envious, he wouldn’t use this method to get back at his betters, as you term it.”

“Method?” Silas slammed the flat of his hand on his desk. “You talk as if he were a Machiavellian prince instead of a common land steward. He’s the son of a whore and a thief. What type of method do you think he’d use other than sneaking around poisoning animals?”

“A whore.” Bennet’s lips thinned as he poured himself another finger of whiskey. Probably how he spent all his time in London—on drink and women. “If Harry’s mother—my mother—was a whore, who do you think made her so?”