Chapter Eight

An hour later, after Lady Lemons had packed a bag and sent it on to the earl’s house with a local who had been heading in that direction, Nick was once again stuffed into a too-tiny car for a short drive on the wrong side of the road and fighting to keep his eyes open. It was a sad testament to how trying to sleep on the flight over hadn’t done diddly-shit to alleviate his jet lag. He’d had three-alarm hangovers that left him more lively than he felt now. Even when Brooke slid into a busy roundabout with barely a tap on the brakes and zipped off at the second exit, his heart rate barely jumped.

“Home again,” Brooke announced as she drove between the iron gates denoting the back entrance to Dallinger Park.

“It’s someone’s home, but not mine,” he grumbled.

She parked the car on the gravel driveway near the barely maintained rose garden and turned off the engine before pivoting in her seat to give him an exasperated stare. “I don’t mean to be telling your grandmother how to suck eggs, but that doesn’t seem to be the best attitude to take when you voluntarily agreed to our little wager.”

“Grandmother to suck eggs?” His brain couldn’t translate it.

She let out an irritated huff. “It means tell you what you already know.”

“I would have figured that out if there’d been context clues.”

He never would have figured that out. The whole idiom brought up too many questions that his sleep-deprived brain couldn’t fight off. Why would anyone suck eggs? Could someone even fit an entire egg in their mouth? Were the eggs hard-boiled first? Was the grandmother supposed to eat the egg after or spit it out? The whole thing made his head ache as the beginnings of a migraine started to scratch at the backs of his eyeballs.

Brooke must have noticed the sour look on his face, because instead of continuing with her lecture, she set the parking brake and opened the driver’s door. “Come on—you look knackered. Let’s get you a bed.”

Even if the bed happened to be in the poisoned family homestead, he wasn’t about to turn it down. He got out of the car and followed Brooke into the musty old pile of bricks his grandfather called home.

Luckily, Earl Go Suck On an Egg was nowhere to be found, which was the first stroke of good luck he’d experienced since landing in this gloomy country. Nick was too tired for more family bullshit right now. All he wanted was a bed. His gaze wandered down to Brooke’s cute butt as she led him up the back stairs. If it looked that good in loose-fitting pants, there was no doubt it would be phenomenal out of them. What he wouldn’t give— He shook his head to knock that train of thought off the tracks. She was the enemy. Well, not the enemy, but definitely the antagonist and a no-go zone.

They turned right at the top of the staircase—decorated with the moth-eaten stuffed stag’s head that had probably seen better days about half a century ago—and walked to a door at the end of the hall with a knob that sat far enough down that he had to lean down just a bit to open it.

The door swung open with a quiet squeak, revealing a large bedroom. Maybe it was because of the last of the sunset coming through the huge bay window with six panes of individual beveled glass or it could be the fact that he was running on fumes, but the bedroom was the first part of the meandering mansion that didn’t make him want to take a hammer to it. A carved walnut four-poster bed with a canopy took up the wall to the right of the windows. On the opposite wall, there was a fireplace with a love seat, coffee table, and two chairs arranged in front of it. Smack in front of the window, which had ivy climbing up some of the panes, was a large, sturdy desk.

“The bathroom is right here,” Brooke said, gesturing toward a door near the sitting area.

Curious despite how tired he was, he opened it and peeked in. It had a shower, a clawfoot tub, and all the rest of the normal bathroom things, plus the addition of a wall-mounted towel warmer with two fluffy white towels placed onto it. It screamed out fire hazard to him, but judging by Brooke’s expression, everything was just the way it should be.

“There aren’t any outlets in the bathroom,” she said as she gave the room a cursory once-over. “So if you brought an electric razor, you’ll have to use it out here.”

Nick glanced around the bedroom. There was a narrow full-length, standing mirror near the fireplace, but shaving outside of the bathroom seemed weird. “Why aren’t there any plug-ins?”

A teacher once told him that there weren’t any dumb questions. Judging by the look on Lady Lemons’s face, she didn’t agree with that assessment.

“It’s against code because it’s a hazard,” she said.

That made absolutely no sense. “Wait, you have an electric towel warmer hanging from the wall that you purposefully put cotton towels on, but a plug-in is too much?”

She nodded. “Yes.”

His brain hurt. Not just from the migraine getting ready to kick his ass but also because the riddle of that logic was too twisted for him to untangle. And judging by the just-try-me expression, he wasn’t going to get to win a debate in his current condition anyway. Some days, it was better to concede the battle.

“Is that the closet?” he asked as he strode to the door by the bed.

“No, you have an armoire over here for your clothes,” she said, her voice a little more strained than before. “Mr. Harleson already put your bag in there.”

Ignoring the armoire, he grasped the knob. “So what’s in here?”

“It should be locked.” Her words were clipped, in full Lady Lemons mode.

Even as dead-ass tired and achy as he was, he couldn’t stop himself from pushing the issue. The knob turned. “Not locked.”

“Bloody hell.” Brooke let out a strangled groan. “You know curiosity killed the cat.”

“Maybe,” he said. “But satisfaction brought it back.”

He opened the door, and the scent of stale air, dust, and abandonment wafted in from the connected bedroom. The same golden sunlight came in through the matching bay window in the other room, but after that, the similarities ended. There were cobwebs hanging from the light fixture. The four-poster bed was unmade, with a stack of sheets and a comforter in the middle of the bare mattress along with a medium-size suitcase. He took a few steps into the room. The view didn’t get any better upon closer inspection.

“Whose room is this?” His money was on the house’s resident ghost.

“Mine,” she said, sounding about as thrilled as someone preparing to get six root canals without pain meds.

It wasn’t clean, but it was nice—a more feminine version of his own room with a pale-pink color scheme instead of the navy blue.

“Is there something you want to tell me, Lady Lemons?” he asked, turning to face her.

“Yes.” She screwed up her mouth and narrowed her blue eyes at him. “Stop calling me that.”

“Not gonna happen.” But the deflection was first-rate. Too bad he wasn’t the type to fall for it. “Spill.”

She let out a sigh as she stood in the doorway, looking a little more dejected than she had when they were driving back to the manor house. “I told you at the pub that this was the only room available for me, since you insisted I stay. There wasn’t time to get it cleaned up before we arrived, so that’s what I’ll be doing while you sleep off your jet lag.”

Damn, he really was tired if he’d already forgotten that they’d be sharing a door. He glanced back at the shine and clean of his room and then out at the dust-covered sheets on top of the furniture in her room. “There isn’t another room?”

“Unfortunately, no,” she said. “The earl is the lone inhabitant of the east wing and the other rooms haven’t been open to guests for decades.”

Her lips pressed into a firm line as she walked past him into her room. It took all of about half a second before she started sneezing and her eyes got watery and red rimmed.

“Allergies?” he asked, being the keen observer of the obvious.

“Nothing major.” Covering her mouth, she let out four tiny squeaks of a sneeze in a row.

The woman looked miserable and stubborn enough to make him realize that she wasn’t going to ask for another room or go back on her promise to stay at Dallinger Park. Instead, she’d suffer with a stiff upper lip in as much silence as her allergies would allow. That wasn’t gonna happen.

Crossing his arms, he stepped directly into her presumably blurry line of vision. “You can’t stay in here.”

Up with that chin. “There aren’t any other options.”

“Think again.” He wasn’t backing down. Not on this one. His mama would come back from the dead to skin him alive if he did.

“Mr. Vane, this is highly irregular and I don’t—” Whatever else she would have said was canceled out by a rash of sneezing.

The woman needed a Benadryl blast just to walk within four feet of the door; she’d never make it all night no matter how stubborn she was. Arguing the point with her, though, wasn’t going to get him anywhere. So he went at the puzzle of Lady Lemons another way. Curling his upper lip just slightly, he looked down at her with what he imagined was a close approximation to the snarl the earl had tried to use on him earlier.

“Even though I’m half dead on my feet, you’ll keep me up with that sneezing racket. You’re staying in my room and I’ll sleep in here,” he said, his voice gruff, continuing even as she began to voice her objections. “As much as I’m sure someone like you would rather think that I’m doing this to be nice, I’m not. I don’t want to listen to that all night when what I need is to be dead to the world. I need my sleep more than you need to be proper.”

Pivoting, he encroached on her space. As expected, her eyes flared wide and she began to backpedal until she was on the opposite side of the door in his room. She wet her bottom lip with that teasing pink tongue of hers—a move that drew his attention like a question mark.

He grasped the door before she could reach it. “Night, Lady Lemons. We’ll battle more in the morning.”

Knowing she’d only gear up for an argument if he waited any longer, he shut the door on her as she stood there gaping openmouthed at him. Another rash of squeaky sneezes sounded from the other side of the closed door. He waited a minute, half expecting her to charge the door. But she didn’t. She also didn’t sneeze again.

Allowing himself a self-satisfied smile, he grabbed the sheets and began to do the tug-and-pull war of putting the fitted sheet on the mattress. It was a pain in the ass but worth it. Brooke would get some decent shut-eye tonight. But him? He hoped like hell that the jet lag would kick his ass as soon as his head hit the pillow, because otherwise he was going to spend the night imagining what Lady Lemons looked like in his bed.

…

Brooke could sleep in her clothes. In her contact lenses? Only if she wanted to spend the next day feeling like her eyelids were glued shut or blinking madly in an attempt to wet her dried-out contacts so she could focus.

She needed her contact stuff.

Which was in her suitcase.

Which was next to the dust-covered bed where Nick was sleeping.

Which was a problem.

In the middle of her oh-so-professional allergy attack, she hadn’t thought about retrieving it before he’d shut the door in her sneezing face two hours ago. After that, she’d been busy tracking down Kate, the only full-time household servant at Dallinger Park, to work out the logistics of her stay and had gotten waylaid by the earl, who’d informed her he needed her help tying up a few loose ends on his behalf before he left for London to meet with his solicitor in the morning. So she’d gotten the earl sorted and had gotten back to her room—really Nick’s room—as soon as humanly possible. Now she just had to get her suitcase.

Too tired to be nervous—or to think about what he was or wasn’t wearing to bed, really she wasn’t—she tapped on the connection door. “Mr. Vane?”

Nothing.

She rapped against the door again. “Excuse me, sir?”

Zilch.

The temptation to tuck tail and scurry into a bed despite her already itchy eyes was strong. She glanced over at the four-poster bed bordered by long curtains of navy and cream hanging from the wood canopy that could be closed to block out the morning sun. Really, would it be so bad to sleep in her contacts? Unconsciously, she pressed a finger against the corner of her already dry right eye, catching herself before she started rubbing the eyelid in earnest. An eye infection was the last thing she needed on top of everything else she’d be dealing with over the next few weeks. She all but stomped her foot in frustration. Oh, this was just ridiculous. Nick was asleep. All she had to do was quietly go in there and retrieve her suitcase. She could do that.

Mind made up, she squared her shoulders and turned the knob, opening the door only enough to squeeze through. It wasn’t quite pitch dark inside the room. That turned out to be good and bad.

The positive being that there was enough light for her to spot her suitcase beside the bed right away. The con? The light allowed her to visually confirm that the earl’s private investigator was not a Photoshop guru. Nick did, indeed, have eight individual abs. They rose and fell in time with each of his deep breaths as he lay in the middle of the canopy bed on top of the fitted sheet. The duvet was hanging half off the bed and wasn’t covering him a stitch. She shouldn’t notice that he was lying with one well-muscled arm flung over his eyes or that he was only wearing his pants—but she did.

The sight stopped her cold.

Or hot.

Or bothered.

Or…bloody hell.

He was a man—a very impressively endowed man if the bulge in his navy boxer briefs was anything to go by—but, more importantly, he was the earl’s heir, which made him totally, completely, and utterly off-limits. Not that her body gave a care. Everything south of her ears was enthralled and embarrassingly tingly. This would not do. Not. At. All.

Forcing her gaze away, she spotted his jeans, socks, and T-shirt on the floor in a pile right next to the bed and her suitcase. That’s when she remembered that getting oxygen in her lungs was necessary in order to not pass out at Nick’s bedside. However, that’s also when she forgot about her allergies. She took a deep breath and instantly regretted it. The dust coating so much of the room tickled her nose, making it twitch as her eyes watered and pure one-hundred-proof panic shot through her.

Waking Nick up by having a sneezing fit in his bedroom while she was standing by his bed watching him sleep (not that that’s what she’d been doing, but how else was it going to appear?) was not how she’d let this evening go. Forcing her entire body to still, she willed herself to focus on something—anything—that wasn’t the dust making her nostrils twitch. Of course, her gaze fell to the man sleeping on top of the fitted sheet in just a pair of navy boxer briefs that clung to his strong thighs and…her pulse kicked it into high gear…other parts of him. Her brain fizzled out at the sight, and it took her a few breaths before she realized that just-about-to-sneeze feeling was gone.

Well, thank the bloody fates for that.

Setting her sights on her suitcase, she took in a deep breath to test her allergies. Her nose tickled and her eyes were watery, but she could take it. She would endure. Six steps to the bed. Six steps back. After that, she’d close the door behind her and forget she ever saw Nick Vane in just his pants.

Brilliant plan. So move already, Brooke.

She shook out the last of her hesitation and tiptoed across the carpet decorated with roses and ivy done up in muted shades of pink and green. By the time she got to his bedside, her cheeks were flaming and her stomach was knotting. Her pulse was pounding in her ears loud enough that she was surprised it didn’t wake him. Letting out a breath, she gripped the handle of her suitcase and picked it up, the urgency of the move lifting up a swath of nearby dust.

Her nose twitched. Her eyes watered. A tingling force built up. She froze, trying to will the damn thing into submission, but she had run out of freebies already. This one would not be denied.

Her sneeze boomed in the otherwise silent room. A startled Nick jackknifed into a sitting position and grabbed her wrist, yanking her off balance so she fell onto the bed. Well, somewhat on top of the bed. Mostly she was on top of him, which wasn’t awkward at all. It was more like it wasn’t only awkward. It was so many things at once—petrifying, lust-inducing, embarrassing, nipple-hardening to name just a few—that she was going to get internal-reaction whiplash.

“Are you watching to make sure I sleep like an earl?” he asked, his voice sleep rough but still teasing.

“Suitcase.” She managed to squeak out the single word without busting into lust flames. It was a miracle. Really.

She should get up. She would get up. She couldn’t move.

“Brooke?” he asked, concern thick in his voice. “Are you okay? Did you hurt yourself?”

“I’m fine,” she managed to get out as the reality of her imminent death from embarrassment broke the spell of immobility.

She put a hand down on the bed so she could push herself up and off him. At least she meant to put her palm on the bed. Instead, it landed on something warm and hard and lightly dusted with a happy trail that disappeared under the waistband of his pants.

Nick let out something that sounded like a cross between a needy groan and a tortured sigh as his gaze dipped down to her hand splayed across his abs.

Gulping down a squawk of mortification, she practically flew off the bed. Once she was on her own less-than-totally-stable two feet, she grabbed her suitcase and then headed out with as much dignity as possible considering she’d nearly given the earl’s heir an accidental handy and she was all but running.

Only once she was safe in her room—well, Nick’s room—could she breathe again. She squeezed her eyes shut and took a deep, calming inhale, but all the action did was give her a full-color mental image of Nick on the bed with that look on his face that promised things. Good things. Bad things. Things she couldn’t have.

Bloody hell, it was going to be a long night.