Free Darling Beast (Maiden Lane) by Elizabeth Hoyt

shock.
    “Indio!”
    But Edwin was laughing so hard he was spilling his wine, much to the delight of Daffodil, who was lapping it up off the settee.
    “Here now.” Thankfully Maude intervened. “Best come outside, Indio, you and Daffodil.”
    “Aw!”
    “I seem to remember…” Edwin looked theatrically about the room. “Ah!” He picked up the parcel he’d earlier left by the settee. “This might be for you, young nephew.”
    Indio eagerly took the parcel and unwrapped it, revealing a toy wooden boat, cloth sails and all.
    Indio looked up, his mismatched eyes shining. “Thank you, Uncle Edwin!”
    Her brother waved a hand magnanimously. “Think nothing of it, scamp. No doubt you’ll want to try it out in that pond I saw.”
    “But only with Maude nearby,” Lily said hastily.
    “Or Caliban?” Indio asked.
    Lily hesitated for a moment, but the big man had been exceptionally gentle with her son last night. “Or Caliban,” she agreed.
    “Huzzah!” Indio rushed from the theater, chased by a barking Daffodil.
    Maude gave her a look that promised a talk later on and then followed her charge.
    Lily sighed, taking a seat on one of the wooden chairs from the table. “You shouldn’t have spent so much on him.”
    Her brother shrugged carelessly. “It was hardly a king’s ransom.”
    And yet the money could’ve been better spent on clothes or food.
Lily pushed the thought aside. Edwin had never been frugal with his money and a boy needed a treat once in a while as much as clothes and food.
    He grinned at her as if he could tell the path of her thoughts. “Who is Caliban? An imaginary friend?”
    “No, he’s quite real.”
    “And Caliban is truly his name?” Her brother’s eyebrows were high arches of curiosity.
    “Well, no—not that we know of, anyway. He’s a gardener here. Indio has taken to following him about.”
    But Caliban was much more than that, Lily realized as she pleated her skirt between her fingertips. She remembered those huge hands, deftly holding his pencil as he impatiently wrote. Those beautifully airy sketches in his notebook. It was laughable, really, that she’d at first taken him for an idiot. It was only the day after his confession and she couldn’t think of him as anything but intelligent.
Wonderfully
intelligent.
    And for some reason she didn’t want to discuss the big, gentle gardener with her sometimes devious brother. She glanced up at him. “Will you sup with us?”
    His own look was swift and calculating, but he took her abrupt change of subject meekly enough.
    “I’m sorry, no.” Edwin got up to pour himself more wine. “I have an appointment I must keep this evening.” He took another swallow of the wine and then turned one of his most charming smiles on her. “I came to see how the play is going.”
    “Terribly.” She groaned and slumped in her chair. “I can’t think how I ever wrote dialogue before—it’s so wooden, Edwin! Perhaps I should burn it and start over.”
    Usually this was the point at which her brother teased her out of her doubts, but he was oddly silent.
    She straightened, looking at him.
    He was grimacing into his wineglass. “As to that…”
    “What is it?”
    He shrugged. “It’s nothing really, but I promised to have the play done by next week. I have a buyer who wants to use it for a house party theatrical.”
    “What?” She gasped, feeling her chest tighten. For a moment she wondered if the house party the play was intended for was the same one she herself was to act at, but then sheer panic swamped the thought. However was she to finish in a
week
?
    Edwin grimaced, his mobile mouth stretching into a comical shape. “It’s just that I’ve had a bit of bad luck at cards lately. I need my portion of the play proceeds and this is a quick sale. Apparently the buyer had originally engaged Mimsford to write the play, but the old sod has fled London and his creditors.”
    They’d made a bargain years ago, when Lily had started