Free Linda Needham by My Wicked Earl Page B

at his hairline that raised his curls and sent them tumbling off in a natural part.
    And if she had any doubt at all, Everingham himself erased it completely when he appeared in the doorway in the next breath. Father and son both frowning at her.
    The man was dressed like a country squire, in rough trousers, a linsey-woolsey shirt, and a knobby wool jacket with sagging pockets.
    Far more handsome now than he’d been in his linen and silk and far more dangerous.
    Charles had expected the gatehouse to be empty and echoing, had thought to inspect it before he sent a cleaning crew to ready it for his reluctant new tenant, who ought to have still been beneath her counterpane, sleeping off the night’s adventures.
    But here she was in the gatehouse, dressed in a godawful long coat that looked damned familiar, wearing an over-big pair of muddied Wellingtons, her hair swept up into a loose tangle atop her head and fastened there with a stick of some sort, save for the wild curls that fringed her collar and made a halo around her face.
    And the boy. Crowded up against her, caught inside the cocoon of the coat, his back pressed to her legs—clinging to her in terror or defending her from the ogre in the doorway, he wasn’t certain.
    He felt large and out of place, extraneous.
    “Welcome, my lord,” the woman said finally, tousling the boy’s hair and picking up the wadded sheet that had fallen to the floor. “We weren’t expecting visitors, were we, Chip?”
    “Nope. Not that one.”
    That one. The little hooligan. He’d never in his life felt so thoroughly dismissed and certainly never by a creature who barely reached his waist. The boy caught the loose ends of the sheet and mirrored Miss Finch in her careful folding, his square chin in the air. A damning miniature of the one he saw every morning when he shaved.
    Which was the problem. He hadn’t the slightest idea how to be a father. He only knew his own had been unsuitable.
    “I meant for you to remain in the house, Miss Finch, and wait for me—”
    “For our meeting in the library, I know. But you were busy with your estate agent and I wanted to see the gatehouse, to settle in and be ready.”
    “You needn’t do all this,” he said, moving into the room. “I’ll send the staff.”
    “We can manage this much, can’t we, Chip?”
    “Yup.” The boy kept at his folding, his eyes averted now, when for the last three days Charles had felt them on him like a beacon. The surprise was that he felt the loss, felt an inexplicable emptiness.
    “That is, if our plan fits yours, my lord.” She was looking directly at him, her eyes more dazzlingly green than he remembered, a challenge in her stance, and the boy at the heart of it as she finished with the sheet.
    This domesticity would keep her occupied, and would do the boy some measure of good—more than good, if he recalled rightly the motherly needs of a boy. “As you wish, madam.”
    She smoothed her gentle fingers through the boy’s curly hair, bending down to his beaming, upturned face. “Chip, why don’t you take all the sheets off the furniture and put them in a pile right there in the corner.”
    “The upstairs too?”
    She smiled at him, and touched her fingertip to the end of his nose. “What an excellent idea.”
    The boy leaped to his task, knocking a table askew as he yanked off its cover, basking in her attention as he dragged the sheet to the corner and dumped it.
    “I trust the gatehouse will do, madam.”
    Spots of rose defined her cheeks as she tuckeda stray strand of hair behind her ear and then sighed. “Actually, I swore that I wasn’t going to admit it to you, my lord, but…it’s quite lovely.”
    That pleased him for an instant, had him almost wallowing in pride, until he realized that she was doubtless imagining meeting her captain here in secret: a rendezvous, a happy marital reunion. In the bed upstairs.
    Which left him wanting to renege on his offer and take her back to the house,