Free Liz Carlyle - [Lorimer Family & Clan Cameron 02] by My False Heart Page B

squared her shoulders and tried to look stern. “Mr. Roberts, I have taken you in, had you brushed, bathed, and fed—”
    “—like a stray dog, I know,” interrupted Elliot, hanging his head mournfully.
    “And you’ve paid me not a penny so far, so I fail to see—”
    “Come, Miss Stone.” Elliot sighed and extended his hand. “You are right on every villainous count. Ere someone suggests I sleep with Fritz, please take me off to your Tower. It is where I belong, no doubt.”
    “No doubt,” she muttered, laying aside her book. Then, resolutely, she lifted her gaze to catch his once more. “Though I almost fear being alone with you, Mr. Roberts. You have altogether too much charm,” she added grimly.
    Her guest seemed taken aback by her forthright confession, his teasing expression immediately gentling to one of grave concern. “I am exceedingly sorry, Miss Stone. I give you my word as a gentleman that in the future you shall have no cause to feel even a moment’s discomfort in my company.” So saying, he rose smoothly to his feet and offered her his arm.
    With a sigh of resignation and an irrational sense of disappointment, Evangeline rose, then politely escorted her guest back up the main staircase, down the second floor, and around the twisting tower stairs to his third-floor bedchamber. Elliot promptly made a very proper thank you, then bid her a pleasant good night.

    It was precisely half past midnight when the ancient butler, MacLeod, swung open the heavy door at Strath House, the century-old Richmond residence of the marquises of Rannoch. The knocking had been loud, intense, and unremitting. Fully expecting, therefore, to see his exhausted master standing on the threshold, MacLeod was taken aback to find instead Major Matthew Winthrop and his cohort, Aidan Grant, Viscount Linden, weaving unsteadily and begging admittance.
    “Evening, MacLeod,” called Linden jovially, holding his gold-knobbed walking stick aloft in his fist. “We come bearing news of a most ursh—urk—no,
urgent
nashure. For his lordship!”
    “Gossip!” echoed Winthrop with another drunken wobble. “For Rannoch!”
    MacLeod peered through his silver spectacles and down his hooked nose at the two strikingly dressed and cheerfully drunken gentlemen who stood staggering upon the broad marble steps of Strath House.
    “Verra sorry, my lord and Major Winthrop,” replied MacLeod civilly. “Lord Rannoch is oot and hasna returned.” The butler watched as the two men glanced at each other with what was obviously crushing disappointment.
    Other than the aura of privilege and the odor of alcohol, both of which copiously emanated from them, the two men were a contrast in every possible way. Winthrop was raven-haired, broad-shouldered, and attired in a dark, conservative coat of a military cut, while Linden, tall, blond, and angelically handsome, was every inch the immoderate town dandy. How the irrepressible pair had come to be the partners in debauchery of Elliot Armstrong was no secret to the elderly butler.
    It was astonishing when one now considered it, but in his youth Lord Rannoch had been worse than unsophisticated. He had been recklessly naïve. By the close of his first year in town, Rannoch’s reputation lay in ruins. The young lord then set about worsening matters by steeping himself in that most volatile of concoctions: alcohol, mixed with heated despair, topped by a froth of high-stakes gaming.
    Late one night, following a remarkably profitable run at hazard, the inebriated marquis had found himself on the wrong end of a disgruntled competitor’s sword. Unarmed and friendless outside a London stew, Rannoch had been fortunate indeed when both Linden and Winthrop, only marginally more sober, had leapt to his defense. Rannoch’s wounds had healed quickly, his vengeance had been swift, and ever after the effervescent viscount and the dour army officer had been the marquis’s best—indeed, his only—companions.
    MacLeod