Gentlemen Prefer Mischief by Emily Greenwood

hand. Then it would be a matter of beguiling to find out what she knew about the Woods Fiend.
    When he sat down on his bed to remove his boots, his hand pressed against something wet. He lifted it and blinked at the evidence that a bird had been in his room.
    He didn’t know if Lily had had anything to do with that as well, but he was more than willing to believe it.

Six
    Lily was standing near the top of a little hill at the edge of the pasture the next afternoon and discussing sheep shearing with Malcolm, their shepherd, when Buck, who’d been keeping watch over the sheep from under the shade of a tree, jumped up and ran barking over the other side of the hill.
    He returned with surprising company: Roxham.
    She was startled to see him at Thistlethwaite, and after reading her own words about him in her journal the night before, the sight of him made her insides jump a little. Was he coming to confront her?
    He strode toward her on his long legs, of whose muscular firmness she now had personal knowledge. In his beautifully tailored buckskin breeches and gleaming black top boots, he ought to have looked as out of place among the sheep and mud as a decorative Hepplewhite chair taken from a London drawing room and set down in their muddy fields, but he looked at home. His shirt was snowy white, the cravat tied in a snappy knot, and his coat was a distinctive, forget-me-not blue. Ha, a visual joke, as she doubted any woman who’d ever seen him had forgotten him.
    He offered a warm greeting to old Malcolm, who looked disreputable and cantankerous with his grizzled beard and knotty hair.
    To Lily, he said, “Delia told me you’d be out here.”
    Malcolm, who in general was interested in little beyond the welfare of animals, nonetheless seemed intrigued by the viscount’s presence in their pasture. She sent him away to see to a broken gate before turning to Roxham. Knowing that her journal was now sitting in her desk drawer made her want to gloat, but she resisted the urge.
    “To what do I owe the pleasure of your visit?”
    Buck was circling around their visitor, who crouched down and ran his hands generously over her dog’s fur. He cast a glance up at her.
    “As if you didn’t know.”
    “Indeed I can hardly imagine why my lord should favor us with a visit to our pasture.”
    He left off petting Buck and stood up. “My lord?” he repeated, the corner of his mouth ticking upward and something wicked lighting his eyes. “So formal. ‘I am going to write here about Hal…’” he quoted, squinting as if to remember the rest.
    She wanted to put her finger right across his lips and stop the flow of her own words from them, but that would pose its own problems. She forced a light tone and tried not to wonder how much he’d read. “Goodness, what does any of that signify now? I was but a child.”
    “A child. Of sixteen.” Those arrogant green specks in his blue eyes mocked her, said he’d never written such things to anyone. “Funny, I’ve seen ‘children’ that age married. I’d say you were merely a younger version of the woman you are now. Though the years have, I grant you, been exceedingly kind to you.”
    It was out of her mouth before she could stop herself: “Is that why you find it more appealing to have a conversation with me now than you did then?”
    He absorbed her words. She wanted them back.
    At the same time, though, she wanted him to be uncomfortable, and he did look uncomfortable. Briefly.
    “I don’t remember avoiding your conversation, Lily. I was simply busy.”
    After he’d taken her journal four years ago, she’d told herself he was only a butterfly of a man, flitting from flower to flower looking for nectar. “Yes, you were,” she agreed, though it didn’t seem like an entirely accurate appraisal now—there was that shadow she’d seen once or twice now in his eyes, as if he’d seen hard things. And of course he would have, in the war. Still, he seemed to have put it all behind