CHAPTER FIVE

This hadn’t exactly gone as he’d intended. Some people might even add, as the door clicked shut that his attempts at starting tomorrow to deal with Destiny Rhodes, hadn’t just failed, they’d failed so catastrophically, the success rates for landing a cat on the Moon by throwing it up in the sky, were probably greater. It was ‘tomorrow,’ wasn’t it?

“Wait.”

Ignoring the smell of moth balls, he tore a scarlet ball gown from its hanger. The scarlet dress, the emerald one, hell’s teeth with bells on, the crimson one, danced from the hangers as if they were bloody alive. The burgundy one. Why the hell did she have to have a dress that shade? The shades he remembered her in. Of course pink, or pastel, or cream, were too boring for her.

Forget exotic siren written all over her, lips of beckoning sin, eyes like stars and all that stupid stuff. At sixteen, she'd been brash, beautiful and more knowing than King Solomon in a very different way from other girls. Earthy. Outspoken. Provocative. Dripping honey one minute and tight-faced sarcasm the next. And dangerous. Dangerous as a sea of sharks. She'd been casually, not that different from what she was now in some ways. Or she’d never have gotten one up on him.

“Destiny.”

What was he doing even thinking about her at sixteen when she’d just turned tables on him? Firstly by sprawling on the floor like a helpless giraffe. So he’d touched her, for God’s sake. Secondly with all that other stuff. He wasn’t going to think about thirdly. But so long as he got her out of here before there was a fourthly, this was fine.

He bent down, gathered up the scarlet dress. Not the one to go after her carrying. Christ, weren’t there any rags like that dress she was wearing? She was getting away from him, burning like Rome while he fiddled like some befuddled Irish ploughboy. He rummaged, yanked some silken effort from its hanger--black, beadless. She went. And she did it now.

Did he reach the door handle quicker because his boot caught in the skirt, or because he needed to catch her? Whichever it was, he whacked his nose off the panelling. He cursed, ran the back of his hand across his face. It wouldn’t do to face her with blood dribbling down his chin. Physicality was everything in this job. Especially now he almost found her brass-neck entertaining, himself rising to it in ways it didn’t pay him to. He tugged the door open.

“Miss Rhodes.”

He straightened his shoulders, hurried past two moldering suits of armour and the grandfather clock, gained the wooden stairs. Gained the wooden stairs and clattered down three of them, before righting his fall.

“Mr. O’Roarke?” She paused halfway across the hall.

Rose.

Oh, Jesus Christ, rustling leaves on the staircase, when there was nothing, just his shadow on the bare boards. As if that wasn’t bad enough, the dress sprung to life like a snake, the kind charmers coaxed from baskets.

“Something wrong, is there?” she asked.

“No.” He shoved the dress, rolled up behind his back. “Not that I know of.”

“So?”

But maybe she’d froze given the house ball was in his court? And it was. She hadn’t stumbled on anything. “I was just …” Because if she had stumbled? And she compromised this? After that business with Eirwin? Or she thought she had a bargaining counter …? “…looking for Gil.”

“I see.”

So did he. That the door was there and he needed to put her out of it. Now he'd been stupid enough to dismiss the servants because to know him was death, he also knew Lyon would want her here for the time being, if she could shed a light on Raven’s Passage, the thing that would give him the in. Lyon certainly wouldn’t want her wandering the wilds of Cornwall, blabbing what she knew, until Divers had established whether that was all or nothing.

"I’ll just be getting on my way then?” she added. “Check the estate for damage, that is? So your lovely wife—Lydia--doesn't come in to a mess. Because I wouldn’t like to be the cause of any trouble between you.”

So help him to whatever God there was, if she said that word wife again, she’d be wandering Cornwall a lot quicker than she thought.

“I hope you think you’d get to. Now, if you don’t mind I’ve work to do.”

He certainly did now.

And it didn’t involve cooling his sweating brow, calming his pounding heartbeat either. Lyon would want her here, but not if Divers found that damned in for himself. He would now. If he’d to turn up every stone in this place, dismantle it piece by piece, he would.

She hadn't undermined him. He'd undermined himself. Now he knew this, he'd dig his grave with a thimble before it happened again.

***

Destiny leaned harder against her bedroom door, letting the beadless black silk fall from her grasp as the breath—rather a lot of it, in fact she probably sounded like a charging rhinoceros--rushed down her nose. After Tom Berryman had been as much help as a sodding Christmas pudding to an overweight donkey--who the hell was the Cleanser exactly?--and the smack in her soaring wings with the shovel, her attempts at digging had been, Divers O’Roarke still meant to throw her out.

Well, why the hell else would her gowns be in heaps on the floor, at the door, the black silk on the staircase? Unless Gil Wryson had come in here and sodding slavered all over them? About as imaginable as her waving a fairy wand and transporting Doom Bar Hall lock stock and barrel, to the Moon. Some might say he was the kind but she had her doubts.

That lying son of her aunt’s husband was though. A stepson. For God’s sake that was how tenuous the connection was. One even she struggled to remember. How could her aunt’s husband do that to them all? Win the prize for falling off his horse and getting his head stoved in by a boulder? His first wife too, although she hadn't had her head stoved in exactly? But there was a connection with horses in that she'd had galloping consumption. As for her aunt marrying the grieving widower? Couldn't she have got someone else, who was footloose and fancy free for example? Who didn't ride horses either? Or at least took a bit more care when he did?

As for the world and its aunt for bringing Divers and Rose O’Roarke here? Talk about shutting the stable door after the horse had bolted. Why could she not have put them in a place for orphans like any decent, self-respecting aunt?

No wonder she'd sunk down against the door and slammed her heels off the floor. As for sounding like a screaming banshee? Well, the last thing she could afford to do was sink to the floor and lie here as useless as her gowns, a thread for the unpicking, could she? But she had sunk, so she might as well make a noise about it. Tom Berryman’s point blank refusal to move that stash, and the fact that Divers O'Roarke saw her out there last night, were her undoing. To come back to find her dresses had all been hauled from their hangers, was the final straw. Why fight what she couldn’t change?

If she had some dirt on Divers O’Roarke, perhaps, but there wasn’t even half a trowel-load. As for the idea that her dresses were all over the floor because Divers O’Roarke meant to put them out only; had maybe even taken them out the wardrobe and put them on the floor because he wanted to see her in them? Well, pigs would fly through her window, without cutting their wings. Maybe if she’d stayed in her room, put on one of those dresses and been enticing instead of battling out in the storm to leave that lantern all for nothing? Maybe Divers O’Roarke had come here for that matter? Then what he’d come was out to see what she was up to?

She hugged her cloak tight, tighter than her stomach had drawn these last two hours as she’d battled along the headland and back. At least look on the bright side. The fact the dresses had been thoughtfully laid out saved her the trouble.

And truly? She was tired. More tired than if she was a hundred. Certainly too tired to go down these stairs and engage in another battle to no good end with Divers O’Sodding Roarke.

How much easier just to sit here and dream of Ennis.There was sod all point to anything else.