Tempted

“I know.”

She took his hand and turned it over to examine the position of the hook. “It would probably be less painful to push it the rest of the way through and nip it apart rather than trying to extract it.”

“Can you do it?” he asked, fascinated by having her handle him rather than the other way round.

“I do have a brother. I can manage it if you don’t wince too much. Come to the stable. There are sure to be some cutters there.”

“What did happen to you?” she asked, to distract him as she deftly twisted the hook and exposed the barb on the other side of his hand. He did not flinch at all, just watched dispassionately.

“I fell off that big rock at the end of the path.”

“Hence the cut on your head. But why?”

“If you must know, someone took a shot at me,” he said with a reckless smile.

She looked suitably horrified. “I thought I heard shooting.” She bound up his hand, which was not bleeding at all, with her worn, lace handkerchief. It was a quite unnecessary operation, but Evan would never have said so. He did not mean to return the handkerchief, either.

“What are you two doing, or shouldn’t I ask?” Terry propped his shotgun against the wall.

“Someone fired at Evan near the stream,” Judith told him.

To Evan’s surprise, it was Terry who glanced at the shotgun, not Judith.

“It was a pistol shot,” Evan supplied. “I saw who did it, but only at a distance.”

“I heard the shot and went to investigate, but I didn’t see anyone by the time 1 got there. What did the person look like?”

“I was upside down in the creek with blood and water in my eyes. I have only the vaguest impression of someone in white.”

“And yet you made out that the shot came from a pistol?” Judith questioned.

“I could tell that from the sound as it whizzed by.”

“They don’t sound anything alike, Judith,” Terry advised. “Someone in white?”

“Is that significant?”

“No, why should it be?” Terry asked with a laugh.

Evan did not like the way Terry and Judith glanced at each other. They knew who it was and they were not going to tell him. He had never felt like one of the family, but had never felt such an outsider as at that moment.

Evan had been under fire for years, sometimes for days at a time, yet none of it had unnerved him as much as that one bullet, perhaps because it had been fired by a woman. And neither Judith nor Terry had said “he,” though the natural assumption would be that it was a man.

It had to be Lady Mountjoy. She must be unhinged to think she could get rid of him this way. He had already decided that she was unsettled by her pregnancy. And she had given him fair warning. He would just have to be careful…but for the rest of his life? He thought of carrying the tale to his father for only a moment before discarding that idea. How could he tell such a man that his wife was mad or close to it? He certainly could not tell Judith he suspected her sister, even if she suspected her as well.

By the time Evan delivered his battered body into the hands of the stunned Bose, he was in the mood to pick up and leave, and said as much.

“I knew it! I knew it couldn’t last! You’ve argued with him again, haven’t you?”

“No, as it happens. But someone shot at me near the stream. I might as well stay in the army, if—”

“Are you serious? They shot at you on purpose?”

“Yes. It wasn’t you, was it?” Evan asked playfully.

“Don’t tempt me. Did you get a look at him?”

“No.”

“Then how do you know it was on purpose?”

“You’re right. It was probably an accident,” he said to appease Bose. Being sniped at was such an ordinary thing to an engineer that, after the initial surprise, he was inclined to shrug it off, anyway.

Chapter Four (#ulink_6a8bf221-337a-54e3-a1f8-8d8ec008dfb6)

Ralph’s shirt points drew no more than a sniff from Lord Mountjoy at dinner. Evan had gone to the library early so that he could observe Lady Mountjoy when she came into the room, but she did not seem at all surprised to see him alive, merely offended at his stare.

Perhaps she did not even remember shooting at him, Evan decided. It was possible that once the child was born the madness would leave her—or get worse. He glanced anxiously at her and drew such a look of sheer hatred that he had no stomach for dinner.

Perhaps Judith’s reluctance to accept his attentions came from her sister’s poisonous comments about him. And why not? They were probably true, whatever she said. He was a soldier, flighty, unreliable, violent. He must have done far worse things than even Lady Mountjoy could imagine.

“Stop it!” his father said in the middle of the second course.

Evan froze, convinced his abstracted crumbling of his bread had drawn this censure. But when he looked up, it was Lady Mountjoy his father was staring at.

“Helen, I won’t have you looking daggers at the boy all through the meal.”

“Father, don’t,” Evan pleaded.

“Then I will eat in my room, sir, until you find your wife’s company more to your taste than your son’s.” She rose and left with the stateliness of a queen.

“You don’t help matters by saying nothing.” Lord Mountjoy turned on Evan this time. “Have you no conversation?”

Evan sighed. “It’s not working, Father.”

“Ralph!” Lord Mountjoy shouted, redirecting his attack. “Tell me what you have learned so far from this wastrel.”

To Evan’s surprise, Ralph threw himself valiantly into the breech and discoursed on algebra for a good three minutes with more enthusiasm than accuracy. Judith then filled the ensuing silence by leading her nephew on to speak about his poetry.

“I didn’t know you wrote it yourself,” Evan finally said in amazement, comforted by the assurance that Ralph, at least, was not his would-be assassin.

“Mere schoolboy stuff,” Ralph declared.

“It is not,” Judith vowed. “He sends me a poem in nearly every letter, and they are good.”

“Why does he never send me poems?” Angel demanded.

“You wouldn’t understand,” Ralph said. “It’s no good if you have to explain them.”