Page 4 of Win Me, My Lord (All’s Fair in Love and Racing #5)

CHAPTER TWO

T hat voice.

The low contralto with a subtle rasp that edged along every word it spoke.

The words it uttered.

The past it evoked.

Lady Artemis Keating.

Bran knew it down to the cells that composed his very being.

Ten.

The number of years that voice had traveled through time to reach him here, at this very point in the universe.

How could it possibly be?

He wouldn’t put it past himself to have turned the bend into madness.

After all, he’d been through nearly everything else in the ten years since he’d last heard that voice.

He must say something.

What did one say to a ghost materializing from one’s past?

Forgotten her?

He’d certainly tried—and sometimes even succeeded.

“Lady Artemis,” he said.

As greetings went, it sufficed— just .

A beat of time ticked past before a laugh cut through the quiet. More scoff than laugh, as it was entirely devoid of humor.

Utter silence followed.

Well, not actual silence.

For in the crook of her arm, she held a basket, which was the source of the disquiet and from which overflowed a litter of mewling kittens.

He squinted.

One kitten was perched on her shoulder and another crawled up her arm. Further, a larger cat, presumably the mother, was standing on her hind legs and attempting to inspect the basket.

Lady Artemis Keating— kitten thief ?

Then there was the dog, whose one good eye remained unflinchingly fixed on Bran.

This last quarter-hour, he’d been laboring to track the figure he’d thought a poacher. Given the limitations of his mobility, it wasn’t as if he’d been furtive about it. But Lady Artemis and her retinue of misfit animals hadn’t noticed.

Well, the dog had.

As manners went, it was Lady Artemis’s turn to say something.

Instead, she gave a low whistle and her dog snapped to attention. Without another word, she impelled her legs into motion. Striding , as was her way with those long legs of hers—even as she wrangled kittens and cat.

All Bran could do was stand in place, his brow digging deep trenches into his forehead, while he watched her disappear into the woods.

Doubts about his sanity returned.

Lady Artemis Keating … here … in Yorkshire?

Where he was—and she wasn’t supposed to be.

He’d been at the Roost for a week now and never had there been a single word about Lady Artemis Keating.

He would have noticed.

Further, if he had known, he wouldn’t have started this morning routine of rambling about the Roost’s lands in the hour preceding dawn. Only three days ago, he’d discovered its eastern boundary ended at the sea. Now, every day since, he’d added a pre-dawn swim to the ritual.

Rambling . He supposed it was another word for walking, if what he was doing could be characterized as such.

For the walking, rambling, or whatever one wanted to call it was nothing more than limping, and he preferred to do it under cover of darkness rather than by light of day.

He couldn’t bear the pity or disgust in people’s eyes.

Actually, that wasn’t true.

He would choose the disgust over the pity any day.

Anyway, as far as this morning routine went, he much preferred the swimming to any other part of it. His body adrift in the indifferent currents of frigid saltwater was the sole hour of the day when he felt himself to be the man he remembered himself to be.

He hadn’t been much of a swimmer before his injury, but one day while his leg was healing, a nurse appeared at his bedside and asked if he could swim.

A surge of bitterness had welled up inside him, so powerful its expulsion could have blown the building apart, but he’d held it dammed deep and gave a single nod, though he hadn’t the faintest idea what his body could still do. Pride moved his head, not certainty.

Her eyes softened with understanding—really, her eyes understood too much, and he could hardly stand it—but half an hour later, which had involved much grunting, sweating, and gritting of teeth, he was in the back of a horse cart, trundling across the rugged land.

He’d kept his eyes closed against the wide crystalline-blue sky for the duration of the journey.

He could no longer stand the sky, either.

His nose had caught the scent before his eyes opened to it— the sea —and his heart threatened to lift out of his chest.

Before—his life was now cut into two parts, before and after —he’d never given much thought to the sea.

He’d taken it for granted, as did everyone in good spirits and good health.

But improbably, he was alive in the after , and the mere sight of the sun glittering across its fractious surface had him experiencing a human emotion other than bitterness or frustration or seething anger in months.

The nurse tossed him a smile over her shoulder, and that was the moment he felt it—that he could go on living.

He wouldn’t call it a will to live, but rather an acceptance of remaining alive.

He supposed that was something.

His career and entire future had been ripped from him when that bullet tore through his horse.

He’d been physically crushed, scarred, and trapped that day, but in all the days since, a tighter trap had closed around him—one that seized his mind and cast it into darkness. A propensity for it, in fact.

Still, his injury wasn’t the first time the future he’d expected had been snatched from him.

The ghost who had just disappeared into the woods …

He’d once thought he had a future with her, too.

As the initial shock of the encounter wore off—perhaps he should have expected as much. England was only so big—his brain began to catch up to what he’d actually seen.

Lady Artemis—established fact.

A one-eyed, three-legged sheepdog.

An angry mother cat.

A basket of rambunctious kittens.

A basket of rambunctious kittens.

If he’d ventured to predict an encounter with Lady Artemis, it would have been in the context of a lord’s grand ballroom or a lady’s elegant drawing-room soirée.

As unlikely as either prospect was, considering he had no plans to return to London or society, they existed within the realm of distant possibility.

The point was this—Lady Artemis Keating should not have been in these woods at this hour of day.

Madness yet remained open as a possibility.

A sudden, sharp spike of pain streaked through his right thigh up to his hip bone.

He’d been standing still too long, and his leg was barking its displeasure.

His remaining good foot in the lead, he moved forward, the action a constant negotiation with his right leg.

What had once been natural— movement —was now an intentional choice.

He could count one small blessing.

Lady Artemis wasn’t here to witness him in motion.

He snorted.

Witness him in motion.

An elegant turn of phrase for something that was anything but.

An image skittered across his mind— her in his arms, whirling around a sparkling ballroom, lighter than air.

He willed the image away.

A long-acquired skill.

This movement, this slow, hitched negotiation with gravity, it got the job done, didn’t it?

He didn’t set his feet in the direction of the stables, as he usually did after his morning swim, but toward the manor house—the orangery, specifically. There he would find Sir Abstrupus taking his morning tea.

Bran had a question for the old rascal.

Dramatically, the house appeared through the mist. Chateau Bottom’s Roost .

An imposing structure of weathered gray stone, it was constructed in the opulent Baroque style of a true French chateau, so as to appear as grand as those palaces built before the collapse of the Ancien Régime .

Sir Abstrupus had overseen the construction himself, as quaint medieval Bottom’s Roost had been transformed into Chateau Bottom’s Roost.

One wasn’t likely to see another structure like it on this side of the Channel.

Bran skirted the outside of the house to enter the orangery from the exterior door. He grabbed the wrought-iron handle of the weighty glass door and pushed it open. A blast of heavy, moist air met him full in the face—a welcome effect in January, he was sure, but much less so in August.

But Sir Abstrupus was nothing if not a man of habit. So, if his habit was to break his fast in his orangery, then nothing between heaven and hell was going to stop him. The old eccentric swore by the revivifying effect of humid flora in the morning.

In truth, it was a difficult argument to counter, given the man was well past his ninetieth year, though he kept mum about which year. A man is entitled to his secrets , was all Sir Abstrupus would say on the subject.

Fair play.

Bran supposed a man was.

Soft morning sun peeked through the glass wall of east-facing windows, permeating the air with muted, hazy light through dense greenery.

Sir Abstrupus’s orangery was neither elegant nor curated—much like the man himself.

Impenetrable jungle would be the fitting descriptor for this space, stuffed to the skylights with all manner of flora from every corner of the world—palm trees from Burma …

orchids from the Kingdom of Brazil … cacti from the Mexican Empire …

a plant called a Venus’s Flytrap from the Carolinas in America.

Not all were exactly thriving—the cacti looked in dire need of a dry desert—but Sir Abstrupus would have them.

They were the gateway to a world he would never experience firsthand, for it was known that Sir Abstrupus hadn’t left the Roost in decades—since the final slate tile was fitted to the roof. So, he made the world come to him.

Bran could understand the logic.

He’d had about enough of the outside world himself.