Ethan: Lord of Scandals (13 page)

“For now.” Nick looked mightily disgruntled at the idea. “It isn’t that simple.”

“No,” Ethan agreed, rising, “it isn’t, but you are my first houseguest in the seven years I’ve been here, and I am not inclined to spend your afternoon rehashing ancient history. How long can you stay?”

“Miller mentioned that George might be out this way,” Nick said, getting to his feet.

“I’ve invited him and Adolphus both. We’ll see if he accepts.”

“Let’s say I’ll head back to Kent on Thursday morning. My business in London is done, and if I can spend time with George, I’ll consider my travels a success.”

“You may already consider your travels a success,” Ethan said, pausing with the pitcher in one hand and the wine bottle in the other. “I am glad you’re here, Nick.”

“I’m glad to be here.” His tone and his expression suggested this was not an entirely genuine sentiment.

Ethan set his burdens on the counter. As younger men, they might have settled this—whatever
this
was—with a round of fisticuffs. “I know you mean well, Nicholas, but please bear in mind, I am not you, and I am not the affable, innocent boy with whom you shared your childhood.”

This was an understatement the proportions of which defied description. Ethan wasn’t going to tell Nick that, either.

Nick sidled along the counter and hooked a beefy arm around his brother’s shoulders. “You are my brother, and if you are not happy, it’s hard for me to be happy.”

“We aren’t boys anymore.” Ethan wanted to pull away, but that would hurt Nick’s feelings. “You can’t create happiness out of a long summer afternoon, two boys, bare feet, and a cold stream.”

Nick didn’t say anything. He just put his other arm around Ethan and hugged him until Ethan stepped back and resumed tidying up their lunch.

***

“It’s Sunday,” Ethan said as he crossed the threshold to Alice’s room. “You cannot be working, Alice.”

“Says who?” Alice put down her pen and capped her inkwell. Why was it that Ethan Grey in riding breeches, boots, and waistcoat looked handsomer than any man she’d laid eyes on? His sleeves were rolled back to the elbow, exposing tan muscle dusted with golden hair. She wanted to lay her cheek against that forearm, taste the strength in his wrists.

“Almighty God gave us the example of resting on the Sabbath.” Ethan ambled over to her escritoire and peered over her shoulder. “Because I am the almighty lord of this property, I condone the notion. What are you about?”

“Making a list of Latin aphorisms,” Alice said as Ethan leaned over and scanned her work. Her imagination suggested he inhaled through his nose, but then, so had she.

“Why do you laugh?” Ethan quoted. “Change the name and the same can be said of you.”

“That one’s too long, though your boys do a great deal of laughing.”

“More lately.” He remained half-bent over her while Alice tried to lecture herself into ignoring him. “This is an interesting collection, Alice Portman. Is Hazlit’s Latin as facile?”

Ethan straightened and crossed to sit on her bed. The door was open, and nobody was about, but still, sitting on her bed was intimate, and Alice liked the look of him there—heaven help her.

“It is not, and neither is Vim’s.”

“What of your sister, the one you haven’t seen for five years?”

“Avis.” Alice’s smile dimmed. “She was neither a bluestocking nor given to competing with our brothers.” She did, however, run the entire estate of Blessings so their brothers could lark about all over the realm.

Ethan ran a hand over her pillow, and Alice’s insides became muddled. Just like that, drat him. “Have you made up your mind about going to visit her?”

“You were serious when you said I might?”

He did it again—ran his palm over the linen and wreaked havoc with Alice’s composure. “We can agree, I think, I am generally serious.”

Not as serious as he wanted people to think. “I’ve written to Avis, suggesting she might come south, and I could come north, and we’d meet in the Midlands, but there hasn’t been time for a reply.”

Another stroke over her pillow, over the very spot where she laid her head. “Can’t your brother send one of his famous pigeons? He must have some flying between Blessings and his southern residence.”

“I hadn’t considered Benjamin’s pigeons. Even if he has such, they can carry only very brief messages.”

He rose and turned to smooth over the covers where he’d sat, and the back of him was no less unsettling to look upon than the front. “You should send such an invitation. I am here, in fact, to issue a summons to you.”

“To me?” Alice tidied her papers and set her pen in its stand. “It’s Sunday. One may not be summoned.”

“Nicholas has taken it into his head to make muffins and has asked you to attend him and the boys in the kitchen.”

Alice rose, relieved—truly and honestly relieved—to be getting Ethan out of her bedroom. “If I have to go, then you have to as well.”

“Nick didn’t include me on the writ,” Ethan said as they made their way down the back stairs. “You are female, so he assumes you will know where things go in the kitchen.”

“I avoid the kitchen. Your cook is a cantankerous and territorial old dame. Mrs. Buxton made it clear Cook is not to be trifled with.”

“Valid point, but Cook also consumes a fair amount of the cooking sherry and takes her Sundays off to heart.” Ethan lowered his voice and bent near as they walked along. “I think she has a follower.”

“Or a drinking companion.”

“Who has a drinking companion?” Nick asked. He stood at the kitchen counter, a towel around his waist as an improvised apron. “If there’s any drinking going on, I’d like to be informed. Joshua, stop kicking the drawer and find us three clean spoons. Jeremiah, we’ll need some mugs of cold milk to sustain us.”

Ethan quirked an eyebrow at his brother. “Perhaps we, who have been mucking around the stables, ought to wash our hands, hmm?”

Nick’s expression was arrested. “Good idea. Boys, wash up, and then step lively. Uncle Nick is hungry for muffins.”

Ethan scanned the counter, where ingredients were lined up in recipe order. “You’re not going to drown the apples in cinnamon, are you?”

To the ears of any governess, the question was laden with challenge from one boy to another.

Nick propped his fists on his hips. “You blaspheme on the Lord’s day, Ethan Grey. I do not drown my apples in spices, but I am not stingy with cinnamon or cloves.”

“So you completely overpower the equally worthy, less pungent flavors,” Ethan scoffed. “As usual.”

“You could do better?” Nick glowered at him, the boys watching the exchange with round eyes.

“I always have.” Ethan’s smile appeared exactly designed to goad a younger brother.

“You’re on.” Nick slapped his towel against the counter. “Alice and the boys will judge, and may the best muffin win.”

“Muffin him silly, Papa,” Joshua said.

“Make yours double enormous, Uncle Nick,” Jeremiah joined in.

“Joshua Grey!” Nick turned to his smallest nephew in mock offense. “How can I name you one of my seconds if you’re rooting for the other team?”

“I can root for Papa and be your second. Miss Alice can be Papa’s second.”

“Alice?” Ethan crossed his arms over his chest. “This is a matter of honor, and my sons are turncoats. That leaves me you or the pantry mouser.”

Alice plucked the towel from Nick’s hands. “I’m your man, Mr. Grey.” She gently whapped the towel across Nick’s chest, while the boys hooted and shrieked with glee.

When she was left alone in the kitchen an hour later, and the boys had dragged the men out to the garden, Alice did not immediately start to clean up. Instead, she sat down with a cup of hot tea and enjoyed the silence. If anyone had told her two weeks ago she’d be participating in a duel-by-muffin between two grown men, she would have laughed.

And this afternoon, with Ethan, his brother, and his sons, she
had
laughed. That set her to thinking about the recipe that was her life—too much caution and observation, not enough participation or spice.

She was thinking so hard she didn’t hear the door open or the footsteps behind her. A pair of lips settled on her cheek, and her first instinct was to melt into the kiss, except…

“Nicholas, behave yourself for once.”

“I was thanking you.” Nick smiled at her and slid onto the bench across the table from her. “You looked so serious and pretty sitting there, staring at your teacup as if it held the answer to all life’s mysteries.”

“I’m English. A good cup of tea does hold the answer to many of life’s mysteries. That doesn’t excuse your kissing me, Nicholas, and I’ll thank you to keep your lips to yourself in future.”

“Or what? You’ll paddle my backside?”

“As if you’d mind.”

“Did I truly offend?” Nick asked, his smile fading. “If I did, I do apologize.”

“You nearly did, except I know you are harmless. You left Ethan outside with the boys?”

“I did.” Nick rose. “I am off to fetch some paper and pencils from the library. Ethan suggested we sketch designs for a tree house. When will the muffins be ready?”

Alice rose, because dishes had never once in the history of kitchens washed themselves. “The muffins won’t be ready until Wednesday next. Shoo, or I’ll issue another edict.”

Nick scampered out of the kitchen, his hands playfully covering his behind, so Alice had to snap a towel at him for good measure. She turned around, intent on piling dishes in the sink, only to find Ethan lounging against the hallway door, observing her with a slight smile.

“Forgive my brother his airs. The title weighs on him heavily.”

Alice took down an apron from a peg. “I think it does, too. Bring me some hot water, please, and I’ll get these soaking.” He brought her the kettle from the hob, and leaned in to kiss her jaw as he did.

Alice smiled, closed her eyes, and forgot entirely about the dishes. “You’re as bad as your brother.”

“That scamp did not offer to help with the dishes.”

“He did not. If you and Nick are in the house, who is with the boys?”

“They popped down to the paddocks to stuff carrots into the shoats named Lightning and Thunder.” Ethan refilled the kettle, and the reservoir in the stove for good measure. He tidied up as Alice rinsed things off and added them to the collection soaking in the big kitchen sink.

“Ethan Grey, did you just finish my tea?”

“There was only one cold swallow left.” Ethan brought her the empty mug. “Shall I make you another?”

“So you can pilfer from that too? I think not. What are you… Oh, Ethan.”

He’d come up behind her and linked his hands around her waist to pull her back against his chest. She kept her hands in the water, closed her eyes, and enjoyed the simple, warm proximity of him.

Ethan’s voice rumbled at her ear, as she felt his lips graze her jaw. “I told myself I would not pester you, but you look so desperately pesterable, with the apron around your waist and your mouth all pinched up like that.”

“And my hands sopping wet and not a towel within reach. I used to think you weren’t anything like Nick, you know?”

“How could you think such a thing?” Ethan murmured, and dear Jesus, was that his
tongue
tracing her ear? “We are both tall, blond, blue-eyed, and of an age. We have features alike, and we both make excellent muffins, though mine are better.”

“Turn loose of me.” Alice wiggled a little against him, but not to get away. “Somebody could come along, and this isn’t how you preserve anybody’s reputation, Ethan Grey.” He stepped back, slowly.

“You are a woman of considerable resolve, Alice Portman. Right now, I do admire you for it, but I cannot like it.”

“I’m crushed.” Alice fluttered her lashes dramatically. “Go find your sons and collect your brother before I’m interrupted again by some errant pair of lips. And do not think of peeking into that oven, Mr. Grey, or you’ll forfeit the contest.”

“That wasn’t one of the rules.”

“And neither was it good sportsmanship to try to cozen a judge.” Alice gave him her best The-Governess-Is-Not-Happy glare. “The other team is guilty of the same, so I will not assess a penalty.”

“I will take my leave.” Ethan executed an elaborate bow. “If you see my opponent, tell him I’m at the stables, corrupting his seconds.”

“Out!”

Horses needed the occasional drink, especially in warmer weather. At least the coachy looked apologetic when he insisted Hart Collins pause on his journey between house parties.

Boring, staid, excruciatingly proper house parties held by those whose social aspirations meant a title—any title at all—would find welcome in their midst.

“Very well.” Hart Collins stood beside the coach and surveyed the unprepossessing village green. “But if I sicken from drinking the dog piss that passes for ale in such surrounds, be it on your head, John Coachman.”

“Aye, milord.”

The coachy would have a nip too, of course. The man drove better drunk than sober, something Collins did not hold against him—a drunk being less inclined to carp about timely payment of his wages.

The inn was, like its setting, tidy, clean, and completely unremarkable. A bucolic Tudor exponent of English respectability such as Collins occasionally pretended he missed when dealing with the infernal heat and insubordinate servants in Italy.

And sometimes, the barmaids in such establishments were not averse to earning a few extra coins. Then too, the horses would move along more smartly if they were given a chance to blow, after all. One shouldn’t neglect one’s cattle.

“A proper squire would come in occasionally for a pint.”

The speaker was hunched over the dark, polished wood of the bar, and his tone suggested this was not the first drink with which he fueled his discontent.

“Hush, ye, Thatcher. We don’t all of us need to cast our business to the wind. Mr. Grey pays his tithes and minds his own.” The rebuke came from a plump matron sitting in the snug with the unsmiling specimen who must have been her yeoman spouse.

“He can well afford to pay his tithes,” Thatcher retorted, straightening. “Man’s a bloody nabob, and watches every coin.”

Yokels would ever complain about the gentry, the gentry would complain about the nobs, and the titles would complain about the Crown. Merry Old England was predictable, at least.

Collins stepped up to the bar. “A pint of your best, and some decent fare.”

“There’s ham and cheese, and bread just out of the oven,” the bartender said while pulling a pale pint. He wasn’t an old man, but he had the self-contained quality of most in his station.

“Ethan Grey’s cheese,” Thatcher spat. “You purchase your goods from a man who’s too high and mighty to patronize the only inn in the neighborhood.”

Ethan
Grey?

“That’s enough from you, Thatcher,” the conscience in the corner piped up. “Most would be spending their free time with family, not biting the hand that feeds them.” She sent a significant glance at Collins, a clear reminder that foreigners—those from outside the parish—were not to be parties to local grievances.

“This Ethan Grey,” Collins said, sliding his drink down the bar and taking a position next to Thatcher. “He’s one of the landholders hereabouts?”

“Owns one of the prettiest properties in the shire,” Thatcher replied. “Imports his sheep and cattle, keeps a prime stable, but spoils his wee brats rotten and thinks he’s too good for the rest of us—and him nothing but some lord’s bastard, or so they say.”

Sometimes, just when it seemed those fickle bitches known as the Fates turned their backs on a man, they were in fact leaving in his hands the means to solve all his problems.

Ethan Grey had children—small children. “Is this Ethan Grey tall, blond, and blue-eyed? Serious as a parson?”

“
More
serious than Vicar Fleming,” Thatcher groused. “A hard man and hardheaded. Hard on the help what gives him an honest day’s work.”

From the scent of Thatcher and the dirt on his boots and clothes, the man was a hostler of some sort. In pursuit of self-interest, Collins was willing to have truck with even such a one as this.

“And you say he’s wealthy and dotes on his children? Come, Mr. Thatcher. Perhaps you’d like to share in the plebeian offerings that pass for sustenance at this establishment.”

Thatcher looked momentarily wary, until the bartender put a plate of sliced ham, cheese, and brown bread on the bar.

“I’m a mite peckish,” Thatcher allowed.

Collins picked up the plate with one hand and his drink with the other—a surprisingly mellow summer ale. “Come along. I have a few questions for you.”

As they made their way to a corner table as far as possible from the bar and the snug, Collins’s mind began to spin possibilities. Across the room, the bartender scrubbed out a mug with a dingy white rag and said nothing.

***

When Nick returned to the kitchen, he brought paper, pencils, and a gum eraser, and sat at the worktable. Alice peered over his shoulder as he sketched, startled at the whimsy of the structure on the page.

“You could really build that?”

“Of course.” Nick didn’t look up. “It would take some doing. On a raised structure like this, we might have to paint the boards before we build, which means being able to see how the whole fits together from the raw lumber.”

“These are like your bird houses, but bigger.”

“And one must plan safe entry and exits, because little boys don’t generally fly. Bring your tea over here, Alice. I’m about to interrogate you.”

“So interrogate,” Alice challenged him as she took the bench opposite him at the table. “Be warned I’m not the tattling kind.”

“It’s only tattling if somebody has misbehaved. Are you happy here?”

Not the question she’d anticipated. “Happier than I thought I’d be. Overwhelmed too.”

“Overwhelmed?” Nick frowned at his sketch. “I’m not sure I can credit that such a thing is possible. They are good boys, Alice. How can you be overwhelmed to be teaching them their sums and declensions? Priscilla was overwhelming, with her wild imagination and careless heart.”

“Wild imagination?” Alice took a sip of her tea, aiming a pointed look at the sketch on the page. Nick had designed a two-story affair patterned to blend right into the surrounding foliage, complete with birds and a birdhouse secreted among the leaves and branches.

“Wild.” He used the eraser the better to shade the foliage, while the scents of cinnamon and clove filled the kitchen. “The stories that child concocts should be published.” He frowned at his sketch then paused to help himself to a sip of Alice’s tea. “You put cinnamon in this, and you’re dodging my question.”

“The boys are busy,” Alice said, “and you’re right. Academically, they are well within my abilities.”

“But?” Nick set his sketch aside and regarded Alice closely, all hint of teasing gone from his features.

“But I realize I am tromping around Tydings like a mountaineer, Nick. I used to go for days at Sutcliffe without leaving the walls of the manor. My hip hurt, true, but here, it seems the more I walk, the less it hurts.”

“This overwhelms you? And why didn’t you just tell us you stayed indoors because you hurt?”

Yes, why hadn’t she? “It doesn’t bother me much now. That’s a change, a big change. Miss Portman,” she said with some consternation, “does not enjoy the outdoors.”

Nick cocked his head. “But you do. You were positively beaming on that horse, Alice. You were enjoying the outdoors and being on horseback.”

“That overwhelms me too. Before this week, I’d gone twelve years without managing a horse, Nick. I’d avoided titled company, but ended up on the arm of an earl here in Ethan’s gardens, and we’re off to do the pretty with more of same on Wednesday. It makes my head swim, to tell the truth.”

“I’m a title.” Nick swiped more of her tea.

“You’re just you, for which I am grateful.”

“So are you overwhelmed with joy, or worries?”

“Both.” Alice peered at her almost-empty mug. “Then there is your brother.”

“Ah.”

What a man could do with one syllable. “He overwhelms me too.”

“It’s the family charm. We’re endowed with it in proportion to our size.”

“Abominable man.” Alice stalled by sipping the last of her tea. “Ethan is charming, and you should not mock him.”

Nick sobered. “I don’t mock him, and I don’t understand him either. He used to have charm to burn, Alice. I was convinced, growing up, he would have made a much better earl than I, and I used to pray he’d end up with the title, though it was a legal impossibility.”

“Why would he have made the better earl? You’re the heir.”

“Ethan is so much more of a man than I am. He’s not just smarter, he’s wiser. He’s not quite too big, whereas I have the dimensions of an ox. He never descended to chasing skirts out of immature resentment of life’s responsibilities. He managed to dust himself off after Papa’s wrongheaded foolishness, and he comprehends finances with an intuition I lack. He’s just… better. I am glad Leah did not meet him first.”

“Have you told him this?” Alice asked, wondering why women were considered less rational than men.

“He would just give me that cool, kind smile of his.” Nick scrubbed a hand over his face. “He’d tell me he hadn’t any idea what I was going on about, then change the subject. It unnerves me.”

“Why would that unnerve you?”

“Because the old Ethan, my brother Ethan, would have argued me right out of my positions, because they are not entirely logical—I comprehend that—and he would have done so without causing me to resent his superior reasoning. He took a first in mathematics, you know.”

“And his Latin is excellent. Where did he go to school before Cambridge?”

“Stoneham,” Nick replied. “Some dreary place up north. Lady Warne about tore a strip off Papa when she got wind of it. I gather it is not a congenial environment, as boarding schools go.”

Alice felt the tea in her belly abruptly curdle. “God above. Stoneham is not far from Blessings, Nick. It’s a horror.”

Nick’s hand went still, the eraser poised above the whimsical sketch. “A horror? What constitutes a horror, Alice? And don’t spare me the details.”

“Adequate academically, and probably not too harsh for the typical meek younger son, but for an earl’s disgraced bastard… Stoneham is one of the places boys go when they’re sent down from the better schools. There’s an assumption at such institutions that ‘boys being boys’ means many boys will be hurt, deprived of their meals, beaten, and worse.”

Nick looked heartsick, a disquieting thing on a man so large and generally sunny. “What you describe is bad enough. Ethan did nothing to deserve such a fate.”

“Some would call such a fate an opportunity. He got into Cambridge, and did well there.”

“What aren’t you telling me, Alice?” Nick met her gaze squarely, but Alice could see him steeling himself for her reply.

“My half brother Vim attended Stoneham at one point,” Alice said. “He came home with a broken arm after only a few weeks of the Michaelmas term. He got crosswise of some baron’s lordling and was attacked by a gang one night on the way to the privy. He lost the hearing in one ear for most of a year as well, and we weren’t sure he’d be able to see out of one eye.”

Nick stood, almost knocking the bench over. “At Stoneham?”

“At Stoneham. And from what Vim said, the proctors and deans regarded this as tolerable behavior between young men of unequal standing.”

“Because your brother was a bastard?”

“He wasn’t. He was my mother’s son from a prior marriage, wealthy, much loved, and very bright. His family was right at hand and outraged on his behalf.”

“Ethan was there for two years. He didn’t leave the premises even once.” Nick scrubbed a hand over his face again, and his gaze slewed around toward the door. His expression was tortured as he backed away from Alice. “I have to… You’ll excuse me.”

And then he was gone, leaving a sketch of such whimsy and grace on the table, Alice thought it worthy of framing and hanging on the schoolroom wall.

***

“You look a little tired,” Ethan remarked, pushing off the door jamb to Alice’s room and settling himself at her escritoire. The desk wasn’t far from the bed, but Alice was relieved he’d stopped there.

And… disappointed.

“I am tired. I sleep better here at Tydings than I did at Sutcliffe or Belmont Hall. I think it’s because the boys keep me moving, and not just about the house, but all over the grounds.”

“Does it bother your hip?”

“At first, yes. It ached, but now it seems stronger.” A good deal stronger. How had this happened in just a few weeks?

“Maybe the riding helps. Are you ready for tomorrow?”

“I will be relieved to have it over with, though the boys are looking forward to it and promising to be on their best behavior.”

“I’ll bring Davey,” Ethan said. “If there are three adults to manage two little boys, we might stand a chance.”

“You aren’t to manage them. You’re Mr. Grey, the invited guest, and Davey and I will see to the children.” To remind him of the hierarchy reassured Alice, or it ought to.

Ethan rose and ambled the short distance to the bed, coming down beside her. “I wish you did not see yourself as subordinate.”

With his weight on the mattress, Alice was pitched against his side. “I don’t see myself as subordinate. I see myself as
employed
.”

“You don’t have to be,” Ethan went on. “Your brother said there’s a great deal of family wealth.”

“There is, and when I’m too old to keep up with a child, I’ll have need of it. Benjamin invests my share, and it does quite nicely.”

Ethan had turned his head, as if he’d study Alice’s ear. The thought was unnerving. “I’d be happy to speak with him regarding some worthy projects. I don’t bruit it about, but I am occasionally called to Carlton House to whisper in the Regent’s ear regarding his finances.”

Whisper in the… “You’re
what
?”

“That’s my reaction as well.” Ethan looked a little puzzled. “I peer at the records for that monstrosity he’s building in Brighton, assess which roads ought to be improved in which order, that sort of thing. Suggest a few investments that might turn him a profit. He’s an intelligent man, is Prinny, and in a difficult position, but he does listen and seldom forgets what he’s heard—unless he’s passed out or far gone with some other sin.”

“Sin. Always a worthy topic in lofty circles.” And in the bedrooms of lowly governesses.