5. Chapter 5

Luck wasn't on her side.

Callum had watched, tired, yet oddly entertained as Nemity had spent an hour switching back and forth from railing at Thomas, to pleading with Charley for his assistance. Charley abandoned her after the first twenty of those minutes, mumbling something about getting back to Ravenstone.

Whatever Charley and Thomas had talked about out of earshot had crushed Charley's mood to the point of sulking.

A sulking Charley was no fun for anyone.

Even, apparently, Nemity, who seemed to adore him.

Which made him wonder just what Thomas had said to Charley to make him heel.

Thomas had let Nemity's spoiled rantings go on for an hour before leaving. Which was an hour longer than Callum thought he was going to allow Nemity to plead her case.

That had been two hours ago, and since then, Callum had been given a quick tour of Springfell Manor, a short walk around the grounds, and then was shown to a bedroom on the opposite end of the sprawling house from Nemity's chambers.

The woman may be spoiled, but was polite, if nothing else. Though aside from noting the basic placements of things on the tour—"here are the gardens… here is the drawing room… here is your chamber… here are the kitchens… here are the stables…"—she'd said little else to him.

Across the table from him in the conservatory where she took her meals, Nemity pushed the asparagus tips around her plate, forming them into a ring around her cut of beef. Apparently, she had little appetite when she was sharing dinner with her new jailer.

She was now stuck alone with him. Him with no Charley to soften the blow.

His feelings might be bruised if he had feelings to hurt. Which he didn't. He'd been in this position before, protecting people that didn't want to be protected. Nemity was just the latest in a long line of jobs.

She was probably the most headstrong of all the women he'd ever had under his care—he already recognized that about her. Also one of the most beautiful, though he'd recognized that when Pharaoh had almost trampled her on the lane.

Chewing on a bite of beef, Callum sighed internally. Best to start chipping away at the frost in the room, or time was going to drag on and on in this place.

He looked up from his nearly empty plate to her. "We can eat in silence for as long as it takes, but I think you're going to eventually break if you are as akin to Charley as I believe you to be. That man always needs to be talking."

Her blue eyes that drifted into purple along the outer edges of her irises lifted to him. "What you know of Charley and what you know of me are nowhere near the same thing."

His head angled to the side as he studied her. He wasn't going to argue the point, even though he was pretty well assured Nemity and Charley came from the same cut of flamboyant cloth. Flippant and carefree and not accustomed to any of life's harsh realities.

He set the tines of his fork onto his plate, giving her his full attention. "How are you two different?"

"Charley doesn't like to think, Charley likes to do." She pushed a piece of asparagus to the middle of her plate to snuggle with her beef. "I have a slightly more well-honed sense of danger afoot, which is another reason you don't need to be here."

"I thought that particular conversation was over with upon Thomas's exit."

She glanced up at him. "Just because he was done arguing doesn't mean I was done arguing."

Callum grabbed his glass of wine, stifling a chuckle at that comment. This woman was salty to no end.

But one could be lulled into thinking everything from her mouth was sweet. She had a light Scottish accent, like she'd been schooled by an English governess and spent much of her time in London, but there was just enough lilt that he could make out she was a native of the north. The lilt of it was entirely too pleasant, the type where she could swear up and down like a sailor and he wouldn't even notice what she was saying.

She jabbed an asparagus tip with her fork with as much malice as she could muster. She took the bite, chewing as she stared at him. She swallowed. "Tell me, whose husband have you saved Charley from recently?"

Forehead scrunching, his head shook. "I'm afraid that is information that must stay wrapped under the silence of the code."

"The code?"

"The code that says I never tell who I see coming or going from any bed. It's not my business."

She nodded. "It's a code I would adhere to as well. Charley doesn't have a code like that. He loves to tell me of his exploits."

He tilted his glass of wine toward her. "Just like you and Charley are very different people, Charley and I are very different people."

"Why do you spend time with him?"

"He's easy to get lost with." Callum lifted his shoulders. "Lost from life."

Her jaw shifted to the side as she nodded slowly at him, her look running over his face, studying him. "That, I understand." Her voice came soft, almost a whisper.

But in the next instant, she shook her head. "It's easy to get lost with him, but repercussions can be the cruelest rubbish. For as much as you think Charley and I are alike—living lives of madcap revelry—I've learned about repercussions in life. Charley never has."

"What repercussions have you learned of?"

"Well…" She grabbed her glass of wine and leaned back in her chair, holding the fine crystal between her fingertips, but not drinking it. "For a start, I've learned that if I ever get control over my own fortune, I will be very specific about not putting any restraints on it for my heirs. And I will certainly not force my grown daughter to have a trustee such as Thomas controlling her money."

"Yet you have no heirs. Thomas said you were a spinster?" This, he had been surprised at once he saw Nemity up close. If ever there was a woman that shouldn't go down the path of spinsterhood by looks alone, Nemity would be it. Her dark red hair, wild like it was earlier in the day, would be enough to send any man to his knees, begging to get lost in it. High cheekbones and a delicate face framed her blue eyes that never lost that indescribable spark of life—not when she was arguing with Thomas, and not even when she was sulking and giving him a tour of Springfell.

Though it was seared into his mind, he hadn't allowed himself to conjure back up the image of Nemity in that transparent white shift, taut rosy nipples straining against the cloth, the swell of her hips—it was a body meant to be explored and worshipped.

In short, most men wouldn't think twice about bedding her.

A damn brutal shame she was off-limits to him.

"Spinster." She echoed the word, a laugh on her lips. "I do like that word even if it's awful. But freedom comes along with it, so I'll happily take the title."

"You never met a man you would like to marry?"

She took a sip of her wine. "I spent plenty of time in the marriage mart. But I never met a man that I could convince myself I would like for the rest of my life."

"Not love?" He was genuinely surprised by that statement. He figured during her early London seasons she would have been a fanciful young chit with dreams of a grand love in her eyes. Much like how Charley moved through life, emotion dictating every decision in front of him.

She snorted a guffaw. "Love doesn't exist for a single young woman with a fortune. The only thing that exists for someone like me is the pressure to be ever vigilant so as to not be trapped into a marriage with a fortune hunter by a brutal scandal. Love has always been far beyond my grasp—I knew that. I was settling for like, and even at that, the pickings were slim."

"Better to just live alone for the rest of your life?"

"I have plenty of friends in London and I entertain most of them here at Springfell Manor throughout the year. I'm not alone." She took a sip of her wine. "Besides, I'm mostly just biding my time."

"For what?"

"For some of the wives of all the men that had to marry for money to die."

He choked on the wine going down his throat and had to cough it out of his lungs. "You're waiting for people to die?"

She flipped her hand in the air. "Well, not all the wives, of course. That would be sad and some of them are my friends. But inevitably, some wives will die in childbirth or an illness will befall a household. My theory is that many of the widowers will no longer be beholden to marry for the coin, for they have already done so once. That leaves opportunity for their true characters to thrive. I imagine some of the men on my dance cards were truly honorable people, and I imagine some of them were vile creatures with masks of gentility. But it was impossible for me to know what was in front of me at nineteen, or at twenty, or at twenty-one. Even when I was twenty-two and in the last season where I was seriously entertaining the idea of a match, I couldn't tell the vipers from the virtuous."

He stared at her. Bloody fascinating, this creature was.

He set his wine glass down on the table. "So you wait on death?"

"I wait. As morbid as it sounds." She nodded, a determined half-smile slipped onto her lips. "I do hope to have children, so I hope I will not be waiting forever. But I also refuse to settle and marry and lose all control over my life and money, especially if it is a viper I have fallen for."

"It is morbid." He nodded. "But also, I understand the reasoning. People aren't what they appear."

He ate the last bite of his beef, setting his gaze on the fireplace behind her, watching the flames as he tried to not stare at her. Tried to not peel back her layers and figure her out.

Nemity was already proving to be nothing like Charley, even if she herself had said they were alike.

Maybe this latest assignment from Lord Hedstrom wasn't going to be nearly as taxing as tromping after Charley's flamboyant ass.

A nice break. Real sleep. All he really wanted at the moment.

Finished chewing, he looked to her. "Tell me what happened when those men tried to kidnap you."

She leaned forward, setting her glass down and picking up her fork. "It was nothing, truly. Like I said earlier, Thomas is making far too big of a to-do about it."

His eyebrows lifted. "Having a sack thrown over your head and being tossed into the back of a wagon was not a big to-do?"

"It is only of consequence if I let it be. Mr. Youngstrom stopped them. If he hadn't, I imagine I would have found a way to untie my hands and jump from the wagon. I'm quite nimble."

"If you had escaped, you don't think they would have come after you? Then what was your plan?"

She shook her head, dismissing the question as she popped a bite of beef past her lips and chewed slowly.

Not afraid to shove food into her mouth as an avoidance tactic.

Try as she might to play it off like it was nothing, her very avoidance of the topic told him she'd been shaken by the situation.

The other guardians, Rory and Seth, that he had brought up from London to help investigate had better come up with some leads on the men that had abducted her, and quick.

Quick, because he didn't want to be here at Springfell Manor longer than necessary. For he was beginning to rather like Nemity, and any emotion, good or bad, was never welcome on jobs like these.

It rarely turned out well.