Free The Wedding Night by Linda Needham Page A

have in you."
    "Exactly. I am what is known in the world of British finance as a mining baron."
    A devil. A dragon. "So I understand."
    She hated them all and appreciated his reminder, but not the intensity of his dark gaze and all the shards of crystal color she could count there.
    "Investors and adventurers watch me closely in everything I do; they follow when my viewers appraise a coalfield. If my competitors or anyone else discovers that Viscount Jackson Rushford is looking for Celtic silver, every barrow and stone circle, every museum vault and private collection in the country, will be swarming with treasure-seekers. Holding my silver for ransom! Where would that leave us?"
    His silver. Mairey exhaled. She had never imagined this kind of threat to the glade and to her village. The vestiges of the Willowmoon legend were still whispered in the hills of the northern marches. Scavenging scholars like Arthur Brawlings would beat the woods for its mysteries. Rushford might just as well hire a circus parade and reporters from every rag in Fleet Street to tag along behind them.
    "If you'd left me in Oxford , where I could have continued my work in secret—"
    "In secret, Miss Faelyn? Where this collection of pot shards and rabbit pelts and untold treasure was housed behind a paper-thin door, which was hanging badly on pig-iron hinges and secured by a lock that had rusted open eons ago?"
    "We never once had so much as a bottle of ink stolen." Yet she had never given much thought to thieves.
    "Until someone like me, with a large enough wad of bank notes, came along to tempt the impeccably ethical Dean Hayward and his trustees?"
    "You are the exception to every rule, my lord."
    "Think what you will. If rumors should arise about our little enterprise, this library—bloody hell, this entire estate—will become a target for robbery. We need locks and we need privacy. I'm having a cupboard safe delivered tomorrow."
    Rushford went to his desk, stripping out of his jacket—a wholly improper action, given the late hour and the fact that they were alone. But Mairey's objection never made it past her admiration. The man's shoulders were broad enough when bound by the sturdy seams of his jacket, but they grew massive and straining under the stark white of his shirt and silken waistcoat.
    She grabbed a breath. "A cupboard safe, for what?"
    "For locking up your notes when you're not with them." He studied her from under his brow as he unlinked his shirt cuffs and pocketed the studs. A thoroughly intimate sight, made of bedchambers and rumpled counterpanes … his male scent on her pillow, on her breast.
    "Rushford!" He'd rolled his sleeves to his elbows; past his corded forearms, and had taken up a pry bar. "What are you doing with that?"
    "Unpacking." He thunked the bar into place under the lid of a crate and yanked downward. The nails came away with a squawk. "I'll open and you can put things away."
    Rather than fling herself across the crate and demand that he stop right there, Mairey smiled with as much gratitude as she could muster. "I'd rather unpack myself."
    "And I'd rather help you. Here." He eyed her pointedly and handed her a bristly armful of wood shavings out of a crate marked Desk Drawers. He nodded in the direction of the enormous hearth. "For the firebox."
    The nosy beast was going to pick through everything. All her notes and private papers from her father, exposed to his questions. She deposited the wad of shavings. Erecting a fortress against the man was going to be more difficult than she had imagined.
    "I'll take that, Rushford." Mairey scooped the small desk drawer filled with letterhead and envelopes out of his hands.
    "And while you do, you can tell me how your father came to have such an interest in this Willowmoon Knot."
    She'd already planned the answer for that most unanswerable of all possible questions.
    "He just fell into it, I suppose." She fit the drawer into the desk and then scooted past him, on his way