Unleashing Mr Darcy

London was charming.

Elizabeth had been in the country for all of fifteen hours, and she was smitten with the place. The street was quiet now. The cupcake bakery’s windows were darkened. Some of the quaint row houses had lights on, but only in one or two windows. Even the church down the street had stopped ringing its bells every hour, on the hour. South Kensington was packing it in for the night.

But as Elizabeth scooped all sixteen pounds of Bliss’s dead weight into her arms, ready to head for bed, she spotted something out the window that gave her pause.

Another Cavalier!

She planted Bliss back among the pillows and leaned toward the windowpane for a closer look.

Her bedroom was three floors up, but she could spot a fluffy, wagging Cavalier tail from any distance. The dog prancing around on the threshold of the house across the street was most definitely a Cavalier King Charles spaniel. She squinted and tried to make out the dog’s owner.

It was a man. But from so high up, and in the dark, she couldn’t tell much else. He appeared to be wearing jeans and a sweater, but there was something about the way he moved that carried an air of formality.

They meandered down the street and, once they’d reached the church, turned back toward home. The man kept a watchful eye on his Cavalier until they’d made it about halfway down the block. Then he suddenly turned his face toward her window.

Elizabeth couldn’t make out his expression in the darkness, or his features, for that matter. But her face flushed with heat as she watched him watching her. He stood on the sidewalk with moonlight caressing his broad shoulders for a long while. Longer than seemed appropriate. Not that anything about spying on the neighbors was necessarily appropriate.

Elizabeth knew she should back away from the window and head for bed. She couldn’t seem to make herself do it. For some inexplicable reason, she felt drawn toward the pair outside. She told herself it was because of the dog, of course. Another Cavalier. Why wouldn’t she be curious? But the way her heart pounded told her there was a bit more to it than that.

He waved. It was just a slight movement of his free hand, but the stir it caused inside Elizabeth was sizable. She returned the gesture.

The man tilted his head, as though studying her. She was struck with the sudden worry that he could see her face. Could he tell who she was?

Surely not.

What did it matter, anyway? She didn’t know a soul here, besides the Barrows. She was anonymous. Invisible.

She swallowed, but a flutter rose up from her belly and settled in her chest. Sitting there, in silent communion with this stranger on a London street, she didn’t feel invisible at all. In fact, she felt anything but. She felt alive.

Disappointment tugged at her consciousness when he looked back down at his dog. They headed toward home. Elizabeth kept watching as he opened the door and the pair slipped inside.

“Come on, sweetheart,” she murmured to Bliss. “Time for bed.”

She crawled under the covers of the impressive four-poster bed, with Bliss curled by her side. Even though she’d traveled clear across the Atlantic Ocean that day and was exhausted beyond comprehension, Elizabeth lay awake for quite a while before she fell asleep. She tingled all over, from head to toe.

At last her eyes fluttered shut. And for the first time in a week, she wasn’t awakened by nightmares of Grant Markham.

6

Donovan stared into his tea and wondered if there was enough caffeine in the world to get him going the next morning.

“Lawrence, I won’t be going to work today,” he muttered.

“Yes, sir.” Lawrence just stood there, gaping at him in stunned silence until he vanished back down the hall.

Donovan never missed work. Not that “work” was an actual location. It was more of a metaphorical place. At Chadwicke, he conducted business in the library, surrounded by books that had been on the shelves for generations but were hardly ever touched. Sometimes he stared at the spine of the first-edition Dickens as he listened to Aunt Constance ramble on and on about some minute detail of the family trust while silently wishing he could tune her out and flip through its pages instead.

In London, he worked from the drawing room. But the only thing in the pale green room that interested him now was the whelping pen and its contents—Figgy’s tiny, wriggling pups.

He decided to give in and spend the day looking after his dogs. He wouldn’t be of any use to the Darcy Family Trust today anyhow. After his sleepless night, he’d probably give away half the family fortune without even realizing what he’d done.

And what was more, he couldn’t have cared less. How could anyone expect him to get any sleep after what he’d seen? That vision, for lack of a better term.

He’d taken Finneus out for a final walk up and down the block when he’d looked up and spotted her.

It wasn’t really Elizabeth Scott, of course. He still possessed enough sanity to know he’d only been imagining things. Or the dim light had been playing tricks on him. Whichever, it didn’t really matter. He’d seen her again, if only in his imagination. And she was as lovely as ever.

He’d debated leaving for Chadwicke in an attempt to get his wits about him. He couldn’t go on like this forever. His behavior was beginning to worry him, to some extent.

Why her? Of all the women in the world, why was he so preoccupied with thoughts of Elizabeth Scott? She may have had a naturally beautiful, captivating quality about her, but that sharp tongue of hers was less than wholesome. In the improbable event he ever did see her again, she’d be more likely to use that sensual mouth to hurl a string of insults at him than what he had in mind.

That prospect brought with it a surge of arousal that confounded him even further. What he needed was rest. Some relaxation, time with the dogs, a good night’s sleep. Then he’d be good as new.

He nodded to no one but himself. Donovan Darcy was going to skive off, and he intended to do a right good job of it.

He took a final spot of tea, pushed himself out of his leather chair and stepped over the wire walls of Figgy’s whelping pen. She scrambled into his lap when he sank down cross-legged on the floor, leaving her pups confused and searching for their mum as best they could with their eyes not yet open. They stood on wobbly legs, stumbling here and there until they began mewing like kittens.

“Your babies are looking for you,” Donovan whispered in Figgy’s ear.

Her eyes grew wide, even wider than usual, which was significant considering Cavaliers had such big, round eyes to begin with. Her furry brow creased with worry as she eyed her pups.

“Go tend to them. I’ll be here all day.” He picked her up and set her back down on the fresh, clean bed in the center of the pen.

She kept her gaze fixed on him as all the puppies, save one, found their way back to her. The wayward pup squealed her displeasure as she nudged her little pink nose against the bumper of the dog bed.

“Don’t worry. I’ll give you a hand, love.” With great care, Donovan plucked the puppy off the ground and gathered her into his palms.

He turned her so she faced him. Her muzzle and nose were bald and pink as bubble gum. It would take a week or so for her nose to begin the transition to black. She had a perfectly proportioned white blaze down the center of her face, framed on either side by rich chestnut. Best of all, she had a much-coveted Blenheim spot square in the center of her little head. Donovan ran his thumb gently over the spot and, as he did so, noticed something unusual.

He narrowed his gaze at the pup’s face and turned her toward the light, just to be sure. “Well, would you look at that?”

Beneath her right eye, halfway to her nose, there they were...a tiny cluster of peach-colored specks. He wiped at them to make sure they wouldn’t disappear. They didn’t, naturally.

“Would you look at that?” Donovan repeated and laughed in wonder. “I’ve bred a puppy with freckles.”

It was a rarity, both in his breeding lines as well as in puppies of such a young age. That he could see the spots at all when she was only a few days old guaranteed they would be most visible later on.

Oh, the irony.

If this had happened weeks ago, he would have made arrangements to place the puppy in a pet home as soon as she was old enough to leave her mum. Chadwicke Cavaliers were in high demand, whether pet or show quality. Donovan had a waiting list of pet homes as long as his arm.

Things were somehow different now. He couldn’t say why, but this was the puppy he would keep even though the rest of them were picture-perfect. All he saw when he looked at those faint hints of freckles were Miss Scott and the little dog she loved so much. For some nonsensical reason, Donovan wanted to hold on to that memory. What was it he had compared her complexion to?

A pastry dusted with sugar and spice.

A dessert.

He brought the pup closer and tucked her against his cheek. “I think I’ll call you Pudding.”