Chapter 7

Chapter Seven

Christmas Day

"Never wait for a man to help you. You must always save yourself." –from The Masculine Inconvenience: Memoirs of a Superior Lady

J osiah yawned as he stepped foot into the hallway the next morning. Or tried to. The sound caught in his throat, turned into a guttural choke when his brother slammed him up against the wall.

"What the hell?" he tried to say, but it came out more like grraacckkk .

"What the hell," Xavier growled, low and feral, "are you doing with Lady Georgiana?"

What was he doing with her? Trying to save her from a fate she didn't fully understand. A fate she didn't seem to want to understand.

Josiah curled his hands into fists and curled all his muscles into steel to push against his brother, who held fast. "You can't get an answer if you strangle me."

Xavier loosened his grip, and Josiah shoved him hard, sending him stumbling back a few steps. Josiah's hand made a fist, itched to connect with his brother's eye, but he shook it out and strode toward the stairs.

"Answer me." Xavier's hand on his shoulder yanked him back. "The entire house heard you arguing yesterday when Sarah and I were out gathering greenery. You, they say, demanding to be let into her bedchamber." He hissed the last two words. "Then neither of you show up for dinner, and today she left with the rising sun, refusing to stay for the ball this evening. Answer me. What the hell happened?"

She'd left? Josiah's beating heart shocked the air from his lungs. Breathe. He could not breathe. He pulled at his cravat and pushed some words through. "We. We had a. A disagreement. She's gone?" He found a window at the end of the hallway and peered out, hands clenching the frame. Snow fell hard and fast, and at least two inches of the powdery stuff covered the ground. She'd left for London at the beginning of a snowstorm, and on Christmas day, the anniversary of the day she'd left her family, of her own transformation from poor earl's daughter to heiress. Alone.

A small growl rumbled through him, a determination to stop that fate.

"Do you care she's gone?" Xavier demanded, striding toward him.

"Of course, I do! In this weather? It's much too dangerous for travel." He headed toward the other end of the hall, Xavier following.

"Is that the only reason you care she's left?" Xavier asked. Another demand.

And one that poked at a scratching discomfort in Josiah's gut, a screaming banshee whose wail he could not quite understand over his fervent need to bring Georgie back. Yesterday… yesterday had sent him reeling from the heights of pleasure to the depths of anger and dismay. Frustration, determination, a bit of awe as well—all had wound him tight and clouded his mind. He'd avoided her the rest of the day. She was an intelligent woman. She would realize with rational thought that they must marry. He'd hoped this morning to meet her over the breakfast table and see that recognition in her eyes.

But she'd gone. At the beginning of what might be a snowstorm if the low-hanging gray sky were any indications.

"Is that the only reason you care she's left?" Xavier jolted down the stairs at Josiah's back, his voice a bark in Josiah's ear.

No. No. Something else, damn him.

"I told her we would marry," Josiah said, incapable of answering his brother's question. "And she refused. If you roar at anyone, roar at her."

Xavier's hand on Josiah's shoulder stopped him near the bottom of the staircase, and Josiah curled his fingers round the polished, dark oak banister and turned with the speed of molasses dripping from a dish to face his brother. Xavier didn't flinch away, though Josiah knew rage sparked in his eyes. For slowing him down, keeping him from going after her.

"You told her?"

Was Xavier going deaf?

"You can't tell a woman like that what she is and is not going to do." Xavier groaned and scrubbed his palms over his face before looking at Josiah like he was the world's biggest nodcock. "Last year she wore a wig and domino and followed Sarah about on a series of dares that could have ruined them. Almost did ruin them! She has her own money, her own home, and you think she's going to bow to you and say, As it pleases you, Mr. Evans , when you tell her what to do?"

Josiah's hands became fists, and his ribs became a vise. Not because of the insult but because Xavier was right. He'd mucked up good. "I wasn't thinking."

"That's clear."

"I want her." No, more than that. "I've wanted her for quite some while, but… she does not fit into my plan."

"Plan?" Xavier grasped Josiah's shoulder and dragged him down the stairs, pulling him into an empty sitting room just off the foyer. "Hell." The curse a grouchy mumble. "I'm supposed to be hanging mistletoe and ribbon and greenery and smiling and singing right now. Sarah wanted tonight's ball to be perfect, and this nodcock mucks it all up."

"Nodcock!"

Xavier pushed Josiah into a chair. "Explain this plan of yours."

"To improve the estates. Starting here. Moving on to your northern estate, then—"

"I told you it was a bad idea, Josiah."

Josiah jumped from the seat, paced to the fireplace, needing something to warm his icy bones. "But I have good ideas."

"I know. I'm well aware. But you're a man, not an automaton, and—"

"I want to make it up to Mother."

Xavier froze, then inhaled slowly, nodding his head as he focused on a point far across the room. "Ah. I see. That I do understand."

Of course, Xavier would understand. He'd spent the years since their mother's death becoming a better man, too, the kind of man who would make her proud, protect his family. Josiah wanted—no needed—to follow in his brother's footsteps. Not his father's. Never his father's.

Josiah braced his elbows on the white mantel above the fireplace and rested his forehead on its sharp edge, closing his eyes, listening to his heart, trying to calm his thoughts, order them. "Georgiana will never live here, and I cannot do my work in London. But there's something between us, some leaping flame that ignites whenever we're in the same room, that draws us toward one another through a crowd. I've kissed her. She's kissed me." They'd done more than kiss, and God, he wanted to do more than that. "I would marry her in a heartbeat if I could. Demanding she marry me is the only way I can have her. If she has a choice, she'll choose London over me. Choose independence."

Josiah turned to gaze out the window. Snow was falling faster now. How far along the road had she gotten before the snow had started? Does the driver know how to navigate the roads in such weather? Every nerve in his body felt frayed and deadly.

"You didn't give her the choice to decide, though, did you? And truly… must she choose?" Xavier kept his place across the room, and dressed impeccably in buckskins, bottle green waistcoat, hessians, and jacket, he seemed the epitome of the country gentleman. His size and the scruff on his jaw were the only signs of the brute he'd once been. A transformation willingly done for the woman he loved.

Xavier was a happy man, a man who had everything he'd ever wanted and many things he'd not known he desired. Until he met Sarah, a daring, determined, outspoken, passionate, rebel of a lady. She'd certainly not been in his plan. The soft rug beneath Xavier's feet stretched across the room in pinks and greens until it ended at the tip of Josiah's scuffed boots. It seemed an ocean between them, between the man who'd bent for love and… Josiah who did not.

He would not. He could… not…

A blanket of freezing certainty fell over him so thick and cold and suffocating it might as well have been an avalanche, and when it melted, it left him with a burning purpose.

He strode for the door. "I must go."

"After her?" Xavier trotted behind him.

Josiah nodded. "When did she leave?"

"Not more than an hour ago while you slept like a babe. Take a horse. You'll catch her easily, but the roads—"

"I know."

"Be careful. And bring her back. Preferably betrothed. To you."

He'd try.

Josiah had his gelding Arrogance saddled and barreling down the road in a quarter of an hour. He did not know how long he rode, and he had to slow at points to avoid ruts that had formed. Sooner than he expected, the large, hulking shape of a coach rose before him. He pulled up on the rein, slowed to a trot, and patted Arrogance's neck. "Thank you."

As he approached, the coach grew larger. It sat heavy and still, gathering snow on the side of the road. It tilted a bit with the curve of the road into the gutter, one set of wheels lower than the other. Had she changed her mind? Was she even now debating returning to Apple Grove, returning to him? Or had they gotten stuck?

He dismounted and strode forward.

"Mr. Evans!" The coachman turned around from his perch, his brown hat and greatcoat dusted white. He tipped his hat, and snow fell off it.

"It's you, John." Good to see she had an experienced driver at least.

John's face softened from curiosity to something like relief. "She found help, then? Reached the big house?"

"What do you mean?" Dread pooled heavily in Josiah's chest as he stopped just below the coachman, his gaze flickering toward the coach windows, its wine-colored curtains drawn tight.

"The lady I was taking to London. Lady Georgiana, I think. She set off down the road a half an hour ago to get help. The front wheel on the other side is broken. We hit a rut."

"And you let her go?" Josiah swung open the coach door. Empty.

"I couldn't stop her. I tried to go myself, but she said she'd do it herself and that she expected me to stay here with her luggage to keep it from getting stolen by the highwaymen."

"We have no highwaymen, John! And damn the luggage. She's more important! She's everything! Where's the second coachman?"

John's eyes grew wide. "Everyone's gone home for the day who wished to. And I didn't have time to scavenge up a footman. The lady wasn't interested in waiting."

Josiah cursed under his breath. "I shouldn't have yelled. Apologies, John. Take Arrogance and tell Lord Flint she's missing. I'll look for her on foot. Starting here and moving toward the house."

John's face took on the pale sheen of newly fallen snow. "I'm so sorry, Mr. Evans. I didn't mean… I should have…"

"Don't worry about it, John. You couldn't have stopped her unless you physically locked her up." And that might have angered him more than this, to see her stripped of her freedom, her independence crushed under lock and chain. He'd lost sight of that yesterday in his need to have her by any means necessary. But now he knew having her wasn't the most important thing. Her happiness was. From now on he'd protect that as fiercely as he protected her.

Worry was a feral beast inside his belly, he turned into the forest that lined the left side of the road as John mounted Arrogance and galloped away. She'd not been on the road itself. She'd not been at the house or in the stable. He would have seen her on his mad ride to catch up with her. But she would be somewhere in the world between there and here. He knew this land better than he knew himself some days. The trees swallowed him whole, the snow fell faster, and he would find the woman he loved.