The Leopard Prince (Princes #2)(28)
Author: Elizabeth Hoyt

His father’s favor. A firstborn son usually had that without question. How strange that Thomas Granville did not. But she was more curious about something else. “So you spent a lot of time in Bennet’s company when you two were boys?”

Rain was dripping off the brim of Harry’s tricorn. “We played and I sat in on his lessons if the tutor was in a good mood that day—and if Granville wasn’t around.”

She frowned. “If Lord Granville wasn’t around?”

He nodded grimly. “The man hated me, even then. Said I had too much pride for a gamekeeper’s son. But the tutor disliked his employer as well. I think he got some small revenge in teaching me.”

“That’s where you learned to read and write.”

Harry nodded. “Bennet was better at letters than I, even though he was younger, but I best him at numbers. So, yes, I spent quite a bit of time with him.”

“What happened?”

He looked at her. “His father whipped my father when I was twelve and he ten.”

George thought about what it would be like if she’d lost someone close to her when she was twelve. Someone she saw every day. Someone she fought and played with. Someone she took it for granted would always be there. It would be like having a limb cut off.

How far would one go to correct such a wrong?

She shivered and looked up. They were at the river that divided the Granville land from her own. Harry slowed the horse to a walk as it splashed into the ford. The rain was coming down hard now, making the muddy water jump. George looked downstream where the water deepened and swirled in a whirlpool. A shape floated there.

“Harry.” She touched his arm and pointed.

He swore.

The horse waded from the stream, and he pulled the gig over, tying the reins off quickly. He helped her down from the gig before walking to the bank ahead of her. George’s shoes sank into the mud as she followed. When she reached him, Harry was very still. Then she saw why. The body of a sheep twisted slowly in the water; the rain pelting the fleece gave it a strange, lifelike movement.

She shuddered. “Why doesn’t it float away?”

“It’s tethered.” Harry nodded grimly to a branch hanging over the water.

She saw that a rope was tied around the branch and disappeared into the water. Presumably, the other end attached to some part of the sheep. “But why would anyone do such a thing?” She felt a frisson run down her spine. “It’s mad.”

“Maybe to foul the stream.” He sat and began to pull off his boots.

“What are you doing?”

“I’m going to cut it loose.” He unbuttoned his coat. “It’ll fetch up on a bank farther downstream and a farmer will pull it out. At least it won’t spoil the whole stream.”

By now he was in shirtsleeves, soaked through by the rain. He pulled his knife out of his boot and slid down the bank into the stream. The water came to midthigh, but as he waded slowly out, the water quickly rose to chest level. The rain had made the normally placid stream boil.

“Do be careful,” George called. If he lost his footing, he might be swept downstream. Did he know how to swim?

He didn’t acknowledge her call and kept wading. When he reached the rope, he grabbed it where it stretched above the water and started to saw. The strands unraveled rapidly, and suddenly the sheep spun away downstream. Harry turned and began to wade back, the water whirling angrily about him. He slipped and his head disappeared beneath the water without a sound.

Oh, God. George’s heart leaped painfully in her chest. She started for the bank without knowing what she could do. But then he was upright again, his soaked hair plastered to his cheeks. He emerged and wrung out the front of his shirt, transparent now from the water. George could see his nipples and the swirl of dark hair where the shirt stuck against his chest.

“Someday I’d like to see a man nude,” she said.

Harry froze.

Slowly he straightened from pulling on his boots. His green eyes met hers, and she could have sworn a fire burned there. “Is that an order, my lady?” he asked, his voice so deep it was almost a dark purr.

“I—” Oh, goodness gracious, yes! A part of George desperately wanted to see Harry Pye take off that shirt. To see what his shoulders and belly looked like naked. To find out if there really were curls of hair on his chest. And after that, if he removed his breeches… She really couldn’t help it. Her eyes dropped to that part of a man’s anatomy that a lady never, ever, under any circumstances let her gaze wander to. The water had done an exquisite job of molding Harry’s breeches to his lower limbs.

George drew a breath. Opened her mouth.

And Harry cursed and turned away. A cart and pony were coming up the lane.

Well, damn.

“YOU CAN’T REALLY THINK Harry Pye is poisoning your sheep.” Bennet’s words were phrased as a question but said as a statement.

Not two minutes back and the lad was already setting himself against him. But then the boy had always taken Pye’s part. Silas snorted. “I don’t think. I know Pye is doing the killing.”

Bennet frowned and poured himself a tumbler of whiskey. He held the decanter up in question.

Silas shook his head and leaned back in the leather-covered chair behind his study desk. The room was his favorite, all male in its feel. Mounted antlers circled the study, just below the ceiling. A deep, black fireplace took up the entire wall at the room’s far end. Over it was a classical painting: The Rape of the Sabine Women. Swarthy men tearing the clothes from fair-skinned, screaming wenches. He sometimes got prick-proud just looking at the thing.

“But poison?” Bennet threw himself into a chair and started tapping his fingers on the arm.

His younger son aggravated him; but even now, Silas could not help feeling proud of him. This one should have been his heir. Thomas would never have the balls to confront his father. Silas had known it the moment he’d first seen Bennet, bawling and red-faced, in his mother’s arms. He’d looked into the infant’s face and a voice inside him had whispered, this one—this one out of all his other get—would be the son he, Silas, would be proud of. So he’d taken the babe from that whore’s arms and brought him home. His wife had pouted and wept, but Silas had soon let her know he wouldn’t change his mind and she’d had to relent. Some might still remember that Bennet wasn’t legally born, that he’d come from the loins of the gatekeeper’s wife, but they wouldn’t dare speak that knowledge aloud.