The Scarred Earl. Elizabeth Beacon

      ‘You tell me, my dear,’ he replied, and suddenly he was too close for comfort and even more impossible to ignore.

      ‘I suppose I might want to murder you in your bed.’

      ‘I sleep so lightly not even a sleek little hunting cat like you could slip into my bedroom without my knowing. You would be in far more danger than I if you ever tried it, Miss Seaborne, and it wouldn’t be murder I had on my mind.’

      All she had intended was to make him see she disliked him, but he’d turned her words on her. She shivered with apprehension and something more disturbing as his softly muttered threat seemed to fill the air between them with false promise.

      ‘If I were such a discerning animal, I doubt I would look to you for comfort by night, or any other time of day, Lord Calvercombe. Cats of any sort are too wise and independent to need aught from such as you,’ she managed to say, as if the idea of purring under his stroking hand didn’t send a dart of something hot and uncomfortable shivering through her, as if her body had plans for Alex Forthin the rest of her didn’t want to know about.

      He smiled blandly at her defensive words and she cursed the man for seeing too much, whatever he could physically see or not see. More civilised men would realise she wanted to be alone when they found her in this quiet garden. A true gentleman would turn and leave at first sight of her staring at the statue of her namesake at the heart of a garden intended to glorify spring and its goddess. As the garden was long past its best and waiting for next spring’s abundance to be astonishingly lovely again, why would he come in here if he didn’t want to speak to her? Yet now he was here, he infuriated her with his aloofness and looked as if he preferred her room to her company.

      ‘I wouldn’t believe anything you heard about me until you know me better than you do now, Miss Seaborne,’ he warned silkily.

      ‘Why on earth would I gather gossip about you?’

      ‘I can think of one very earthy reason,’ he said softly and suddenly there was a different danger in the air from the one that had frightened her earlier.

      ‘Then think again. I wouldn’t tangle with a bitter and disillusioned man like you if you came gilded and anointed by the gods,’ she told him militantly.

      ‘I wonder if your namesake argued with Hades before he bore her off to join his dark world?’ he mused with a nod at the artfully carved Persephone nearby.

      It felt as if he was drily discussing classical mythology with a tutor at Oxford or Cambridge, except she was sure he’d never looked at one of them with lust in his fathomless deep-blue eyes. There was a spark of something more dangerous than mere need lurking in them to disrupt her peace of mind as well, and she struggled to free herself of a spell she was sure he hadn’t wrought deliberately, since he seemed to dislike her almost as bitterly as she did him.

      ‘Persephone’s mother raged after her daughter to wrest her from her dark lord and his underworld,’ she managed to argue, despite a fast-beating heart and this odd feeling of being cut off from the real world in here, with him.

      She ought to turn and walk away, of course, but the reckless Seaborne spirit had got into her along with her fidgets, so she stood her ground and met look for look. Trying not to acknowledge a terrible heat had sprung to life deep inside her and was making her a stranger to herself; she reminded herself he was a stranger and would remain one if she had any sense.

      ‘Only for half the year, remember?’ he argued. ‘Do you think she was content above ground and missing her lover until winter came back and she could join him? I suspect she couldn’t wait to lie in his arms again while the earth rested and she could escape the constant pleas and botheration of mere mortals.’

      ‘It’s just a myth, a neat story to entertain simple people and explain away the seasons without need for deep thought,’ she replied in a breathy voice so different from her usual tone that she scolded herself for being a fool and letting him unnerve her.

      ‘Persephone was a fertility goddess, Miss Seaborne. Her cult wove deep into the fabric of ancient Greek life and held her responsible for far more than a little extra daylight and the wearing of lighter clothing for a few months.’

      ‘I understood that Greece, being a Mediterranean land, enjoyed little change in climate between summer and winter, Lord Calvercombe,’ she said in as unemotional a tone as she could manage.

      He was so close it seemed almost a crime not to touch his scarred face and explore the smooth firmness of the unmarred side. He seemed to be two facets of man: one smooth and bronzed and as perfect as man could be, the other battle-scarred, cynical and deeply marked by the terror and evil he must have met. Intriguing to find out how a young Apollo like Lieutenant Forthin had become bitterly reclusive Lord Calvercombe and if much of one remained in the other, despite his hardened exterior. Also incredibly dangerous to her peace of mind—she had enough to worry about without him fascinating and infuriating her by turns.

      ‘Tell the men of the mountains there’s no winter there when they battle feet of snow, Miss Seaborne, and all their kin and cattle crowd in the house for warmth and travellers and luckier souls stay by the sea to seek what warmth there is. Winter exists everywhere, Persephone, even if sometimes it lives only in the souls of men.’

      ‘How do you know?’ she had to ask softly, sensing the real Alexander Forthin beneath all the armour and scepticism and wanting to know him better.

      ‘I’ve seen it,’ he said, seeming continents away, lost in a bleak place where men carved their hatred of others on the faces of their captured enemies, either to extract their secrets, or for the twisted pleasure of torture itself.

      Her fingers itched to soothe those silvery, healed scars of his and assure him he wasn’t at the mercy of merciless men any longer. He seemed to remember where he was and who he was talking to, and stepped away as though he could read her mind and her thoughts burned him.

      ‘You have a way of extracting secrets that could be a potent asset, Miss Persephone Seaborne,’ he accused, as if she had broken his solitude and peace after a hectic day, not the other way about.

      ‘It might indeed, if I wanted to know them in the first place,’ she said as icily as she could.

      ‘Touché, my dear,’ he said with a rueful smile that almost disarmed her.

      ‘Go away, Lord Calvercombe,’ she ordered coldly.

      ‘If only I could, Miss Seaborne,’ he said regretfully, ‘but something evil this way comes, to paraphrase those witches in Macbeth you probably know all about, given your erudite education. I can’t let it harm you whilst Jack is otherwise engaged.’

      ‘Why not?’ she said childishly. Though she was acutely disturbed to know he felt as if a dark blight was eating at the edges of Jack and Jessica’s glowing happiness as well, she was unwilling to acknowledge she and this apology for an Earl might have more in common than either of them desired.

      ‘I’ve seen what a man’s worst enemy is capable of, more often than I care to recall in India. Do you think you’re immune to the evil we humans do each other purely because you’re lovely, rich and well born? You could only cling to that belief for seconds after stepping on to a battlefield, unless you really are as impervious to the lives of mortals as yon stone depiction of your namesake,’ he told her, as if she were the unreasonable one and he temperate as a May morning.

      ‘No, I’m not so arrogant, whatever poor opinion you may have cobbled together from second-hand gossip and supposition. Nevertheless, I have a brother out in this wide and weary world somewhere and I fear deeply for him, Lord Calvercombe, despite my selfish, shallow and hard-hearted nature. If facing whatever threatens Rich is the only way to find out what happened to him, and why he either can’t or won’t come home, then I will face it. I certainly don’t need your help to do so.’

      ‘Then you really are a fool,’ he said harshly, and she couldn’t resist giving a shrug, as if his opinion didn’t matter.

      ‘Not