A Well Favored Gentleman Read online

  CHRISTINA

  DODD

  A Well Favored

  Gentleman

  To Scott

  my well favored gentleman

  Contents

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Someone held a knife to his throat.

  Chapter 2

  “She’s a witch, Mr. Ian.”

  Chapter 3

  “Ooh, she was ugly.” Wilda shivered in the saddle in…

  Chapter 4

  Dressed as the witch, Lady Alanna eased open the door…

  Chapter 5

  “Miss Witch?”

  Chapter 6

  Ian had sworn he would never look directly at the…

  Chapter 7

  Ian straightened away from the wall. “There’s an heir?”

  Chapter 8

  The breeze turned colder as the sun slipped behind the…

  Chapter 9

  Hands. Hands smoothed hair from her face. They held her…

  Chapter 10

  It didn’t take an uncanny sense for Ian to know…

  Chapter 11

  Alanna slid off the tail of the cart as the…

  Chapter 12

  “My dear, dear ward, where have you been?” Leslie asked.

  Chapter 13

  Ian was annoyed.

  Chapter 14

  A moment of stunned silence followed Leslie’s announcement.

  Chapter 15

  Ian came to her like a mist, materializing out of…

  Chapter 16

  She made it down the corridor without seeing so much…

  Chapter 17

  Bees buzzed around Quigley’s hand as he culled the queen…

  Chapter 18

  Ian didn’t look angry, or aggravated, just…determined. And, she…

  Chapter 19

  The stone felt cool and smooth, almost alive. Ian trapped…

  Chapter 20

  “Did I hurt you?” Ian watched Alanna closely as he…

  Chapter 21

  Alanna stood and discarded her hat. “Come along. I have…

  Chapter 22

  About time ye two got here. If ye’d been much…

  Chapter 23

  As Ian and Alanna stepped across the threshold of Fionnaway…

  Chapter 24

  “What do you mean, someone has stolen the stones?” Ian…

  Chapter 25

  Edwin gave his cravat one last touch, and smiled into…

  Chapter 26

  Ian stood outside the witch’s hut, gazing toward Fionnaway Manor…

  Chapter 27

  Alanna hadn’t meant to confess it. She had known it…

  Chapter 28

  Alanna slipped away from the hut, dressed and in her…

  Chapter 29

  Ian strode through the woods toward the church. The storm…

  Chapter 30

  “What do you think you’re doing?” Alanna shouted at her…

  Chapter 31

  She was all alone. Trying to comprehend, Alanna stared out…

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  By Christina Dodd

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Chapter 1

  Scotland, 1800

  Someone held a knife to his throat.

  Ian Fairchild snapped out of his deep slumber and held himself perfectly still, eyes closed and breathing even in a parody of sleep.

  Someone held a knife to his throat, and it wasn’t the first time, but this time he’d been caught by surprise. He hadn’t had time to make enemies in Scotland. He’d arrived only today, and had found his father, the only person here who would gladly kill him, too sick to leave his bed.

  So who was it who had slipped into his bedchamber as the hour struck midnight?

  Carefully he opened his eyes a slit—and stared into the face of a ghost.

  A lovely, feminine, fiercely determined ghost, if her expression was anything to go by.

  His eyes widened. “You’re an idiot, Ian.” He spoke aloud, seeing no harm in addressing a phantom and finding the sound of his own voice vastly reassuring. “It’s only a dream.” And he tried to move to prove it.

  He couldn’t. The ghost sat on his chest, the dream held him in thrall, and he couldn’t bloody move.

  A normal turn of events in a dream, he supposed. If only that steel pressed against his windpipe didn’t feel so cold and so real. If only he didn’t feel so…odd. More than sleepy, he was drifting, illogically relaxed beneath the threat of violence.

  He blinked, bringing the phantom into focus. Wisps of hair sprang defiantly from her hairline. Her features were angular: square jawline, sharp cheekbones, wide mouth. Her eyes slanted up, her brows slanted up, her snub nose rose to a little point. A fascinating face, one filled with character and lively convictions. Not ghostly at all. “I know who you are. You’re dead. You’re Lady Alanna.”

  Both of her hands gripped that knife. He could see them in his peripheral vision, and they shook a little at the sound of her name.

  Fear cleared his brain for one brief moment. The tip of that imaginary blade seemed so very honed. “Careful, there. We wouldn’t want a bloody accident.”

  “No accident at all.” Her voice was husky, touched by a defiant Scottish accent, and it sounded real, too.

  This was the most vivid dream he’d ever had. “Lady Alanna. I didn’t think I’d get to meet you. You’re prettier than your portrait.”

  “A compliment from a Fairchild.” The dream knife nudged close to his jugular. “I value that as it deserves.”

  Sharp-tongued and prudent as well as pretty. The portrait had portrayed her as a girl balanced on the cusp of maturity, looking eagerly toward the day she would inherit Fionnaway Manor. But she had disappeared on the eve of her seventeenth birthday, never to be seen again.

  In a bit of dream magic, she now appeared to him all grown up. The night candle in the headboard illuminated her piquant features and her generous curves. It found a companion flame in the red of her hair, and her large eyes were the color of the sea before an encroaching storm.

  Yet she watched him as cautiously as one watches a trapped wolf.

  With justification. He could be a dangerous man, but she didn’t know that. Her wariness came from having known his father, and from the Fairchilds’ well-deserved reputation. His family were as famous as the Borgias, and for much the same reasons. The desire for money and power ruled them; no crime was too heinous when committed in the name of the Fairchild pocketbook.

  Everyone he had met this day had watched him, waiting for his pleasant facade to peel away and show him to be as despicable as his father. For today, at least, he had managed to recall the values his mother had taught him. But Lady Alanna and the residents of Fionnaway were right to treat him gingerly; sometimes the Fairchild blood prevailed.

  For instance, right now the temptation to shout “boo” was almost irresistible. Only that nervous, two-handed grip on the knife stopped him. “You seem worried. What’s wrong, sweet lady?”

  “You weren’t supposed to be awake.”

  “I’m a light sleeper.”

  “Yes, but the smoke was supposed to…”

  “To what?” His mind suddenly sharpened, and he noted the haze around her figure. He noted, also, an odor he had not smelled since India. Hashish. Someone had tried to drug him.

  He considered the woman leaning one knee on his chest. She had tried to drug him, and she had done a very good job. He was drugged.

  But in a clear, analytical corner of his mind he knew several things. He had experienced hashish before. Soon he would recover the use of his limbs.
Even sooner, he would recover his ability to tell between fantasy and reality. And as the air cleared, so would his head, and as the ghost stayed, so she would breathe in the remaining fumes and get groggy.

  A question occurred to him, and he asked, “Do ghosts inhale?”

  “No.”

  But her chest rose and fell. So she was not a ghost. The recovery of his logic pleased him, but with it came another inescapable piece of information. If she wasn’t a ghost, then that knife she held to his throat was real. With a drug-induced astonishment, he said, “You’re trying to kill me.”

  Her gaze was frigid and steady. “It seems a good idea.”

  “To who? Not to me.” He tried to gesture, and found movement had returned to the tips of his fingers. Information he kept to himself.

  When he’d gone to bed, he’d pulled the covers up to his chin to shut out the inevitable drafts and pulled the bed-curtains tight. Now the curtains stood open to let in the light and smoke from the hearth, and her weight kept the covers tight against his body. Still, she was small-boned and light, and would not be a deterrent—if his muscles would work. “Why would the good, sweet Lady Alanna of whom the servants sing praises want to murder anyone?”

  “You’re a destructive, wastrel Fairchild who has come to steal Fionnaway. I’m the mistress of Fionnaway, responsible for its care, and I cannot allow you to desecrate it.”

  He stared at her, and she twitched backward. As she should have, for if she could read his thoughts, she would know the danger she had stirred with her condemnation.

  He expected her scorn, but he still despised people like her, who had grown up knowing where they belonged. For the past seven years, he’d searched the world for a home, yet never had he settled for more than a month or two before the spur of discontent moved him on. To London, when business summoned. To India, to the Americas, to places increasingly exotic.

  And now his father’s summons had brought him to cozy, prosaic Fionnaway, where old castle walls clutched a precipice thrusting into an arm of the western sea. What had once been the keep wherein the noble MacLeods had dwelled had evolved slowly through the ages into a manor house, neither as fashionable or as comfortable as Fairchild Manor in Sussex, and certainly not as warm. Fionnaway Manor’s windows oversaw all. All the fields, all the meadows, everything to the edge of the distant forest. Ian knew this, for he had looked.

  Ian had looked, also, to the west, and seen the miles of sandy beaches separated by great crags of granite. There the breakers pounded in an everlasting rhythm that called his name. Ian, Ian…He heard the echo of his mother’s voice in the waves.

  He hated the sea, yet despite its overwhelming propinquity, he knew his long search had ended. Fionnaway satisfied the fitful longing of his soul, and soon it would be his.

  Not Lady Alanna’s, be she ghost or living, breathing woman. This land would be his. “You abandoned Fionnaway,” he taunted.

  “That’s not true!” Deliberately she bounced her weight against his sternum.

  Her bony knee knocked the air out of him, but he didn’t care. The drug still tumbled through his bloodstream, and as soon as he got his breath back, he spoke the truth without a thought to the consequences. “You were weak. You died. If you were still here, you could have your Fionnaway, but to the victor go the spoils.” He grinned, utilizing all his rakish Fairchild charm. “I am the victor.”

  “Never!” She leaned forward into his face, and the blade nicked his Adam’s apple. “I’ll never leave Fionnaway to you or any of your kind.”

  As the cut stung and the blood trickled down his neck, he realized he’d better shut up. If her indignation burned any hotter, he’d be singing in the choirs of heaven—or maybe burning in the fires of hell.

  With a faint moan, he closed his eyes and concentrated on relaxing. Somehow he didn’t think Lady Alanna, or her ghost, had the guts to kill a sleeping man. If he was lucky, she wouldn’t have the guts to kill at all—although if he kept spouting off as he had, she might make an exception.

  As he lay there, motionless, the pressure of the blade eased, and she shifted uncomfortably, releasing some of the burden on his chest. “What’s wrong?”

  “My head aches.”

  One of her palms flattened on his forehead. “You’re not running a fever.”

  “It’s the smoke.” He coughed pathetically.

  “Take some willow bark in the morn—” She caught herself, apparently remembering he wouldn’t be alive in the morning.

  “Why kill me?” Feeling had returned to his toes. He flexed them, and surreptitiously flexed his hands. “My father’s been here for five years. Why not Leslie?”

  With a bluntness he thought the lingering smoke encouraged, she asked, “Why waste murder on a man who’s dying?”

  “Dying.” Ian tasted the word and found it true. He had been shocked by Leslie’s appearance when he’d seen him. The old man had barely been able to sit erect. The sound of fluid rattled in his lungs, and he was so swollen the skin was peeling back from his fingertips. Ian had never imagined he would see one of the gorgeous Fairchilds in such a condition—especially not his father. His omnipotent father, whose cruelty was legend.

  But for this ghost, this woman, to say so with such certainty…ah, that was food for thought. “How do you know that?”

  “Rumors circulate among the…angels.”

  She sounded so sure. Opening his eyes, he stared at her. Her mouth was too wide for her face, inviting a man to explore it with his lips, to find out whether her acerbic tongue could be sweetened by passion. Her outgrown, tattered gown nipped at her tiny waist, and a creamy swell of breasts pressed above the neckline. Most of all, her eyes snapped with challenge and fire.

  Heavenly? No. Lady Alanna was no angel. Deliberately, knowing if he was right, she would certainly kill him, he asked, “Did you poison him?”

  She reared back. “No!”

  Good enough. He believed her. But—“Did someone else do it for you?”

  “No one’s poisoned your father. He’s dying because…”

  Her hesitation captured all of Ian’s interest. “Because?”

  “Mr. Fairchild visited this part of Scotland years ago.” She seemed to know that without question.

  “Thirty-five years ago.” Thirty-five years since Ian had been conceived. “Surely you’re not saying he contracted a disease then!”

  “I don’t have to tell you anything. I’m holding the knife.”

  True enough. But she knew—or suspected—something about his father’s illness. And his steady gaze was making her squirm guiltily.

  “I’ve got to kill you. I’ve got no choice.” She sounded as if she were arguing with herself. “Mr. Fairchild said you were a bigger villain even than him.”

  Stunned, Ian stared at her before laughter, uncontrollable laughter, erupted from his throat.

  “Sh.” Her lower lip stuck out like a sulky child’s. “What’s so funny?”

  “It’s just that”—he sputtered again, took in air, and laughed again—“I’ve never met anyone who actually believed a word my father said. Now it has to be someone who wants to kill me because of it.”

  “Sh.” She flushed bright red, but glanced toward the door. “Someone will hear.”

  She didn’t like being laughed at, he could see that, but nothing could contain his incredulity. “My father’s the biggest liar in all the British Isles,” he hooted, “and you believe him!”

  “Be quiet!”

  His amusement died a sudden death. “For a ghost, you’re certainly concerned with being caught.” The laughter had cleared his lungs and invigorated him, and with a swift movement he knocked her off of him. “When it’s me you should be concerned about.”

  She tumbled off the bed. The knife went flying. Throwing back the covers, he came to his feet on the mattress.

  “You’re naked!”

  He looked down at her and wondered how he ever could have thought this petite and ruffled minx anything but
flesh and blood. Certainly she sounded as shocked as a maiden, an occurrence he hadn’t expected from a woman intent on murder. Yet she sat on the floor, skirt hiked to the knees and two very shapely calves extended straight out in front, and stared at his towering form—and his towering erection—with every imitation of offended astonishment.

  “Yes, I am.”

  “You’re…you’re…”

  “Aroused?” He didn’t mind showing off, but standing ten feet high while the girl sat on the floor seemed a bit self-indulgent. Testing his muscles, he gingerly climbed off the bed. “You may claim to be a ghost, but I am not, and I cherish every physical desire known to man.”

  She edged away on her rump. “I was just surprised that a Fairchild could indulge in physical desire.”

  What did she mean by that? What did she mean, mocking him with her smile?

  Infuriated, he launched himself at her—and found he had not recovered quite as much as he hoped. One knee buckled, and he caught the edge of the night table. It fell with him, clattering harshly in the still night.

  She ducked and rolled. Standing, she tried to run toward the door.

  “No more pranks, little one. Come here at once.” He caught her skirt, and found himself holding a handful of shredded cotton. Good God, did the girl wear rags?

  He lunged again, but she snatched up her knife and swiveled to face him. Balancing it expertly on her fingertips, she said, “If you come near me, I swear I’ll stick this through your heart.”

  She hadn’t been able to murder him in cold blood, but she looked frightened and desperate enough to kill him now, and she handled the knife like someone who knew how to aim and throw.

  “All right.” He held up his empty hands as she backed toward the door. “I won’t do anything.”

  “Damned right.” She groped for the doorknob behind her back and opened it. “You’ll stay right where you are.” As she prepared to step across the threshold, she looked at him one more time. At the sweep of his body, and then into his eyes.

  Without words, he promised—he would find her. Somehow he would find her.

  She shivered and slammed the door.

  With a curse, he grabbed up his robe and ran, jerked the door open and looked down the hall.