Linda Needham by My Wicked Earl Page A

I’ll be taking our meals together with his lordship in the hall.”
    The boy smiled. “Good, Hollie! We’ll pretend that you’re my mama!”
    Doomed, indeed.

Chapter 8
    C harles spent the rest of the early afternoon with his estate agent, an autumn ritual that he’d once detested for the way it tied him to the inscrutable harvest accounts, to the bushels per acre, the rents and tithes and the leaseholds. He’d feared the accounting most of all for the disorienting array of facts and figures that flew through his head before he could capture them.
    But he’d long since mastered his dread as well as the complexities of the accounting, and in recent years he’d come to enjoy the process, looked forward to the scents of the estate and the textures of the changing seasons.
    He’d even started making excuses to spend more time at Everingham Hall and less in London.
    What he dreaded now were the cartons and crates from Miss Finch’s shop, stacked everywhere in his library. Each one was filled with an indiscriminate collection of bottles and banners and scraps of fabric and stacks of paper. The work table looked just as daunting, with neatly indecipherable piles of placards and letters and newspapers that would finally and forever bring Spindleshanks to his knees.
    With some help from the man’s uncompromising wife.
    Blazing hell, what was he going to do with it all?
    And with the woman standing in the midst of it like a defeated but dangerously determined general, surveying the scattered remains of her beloved army.
    At least she was now more fully dressed in a gown of her own, stockinged and slippered, and wearing a nearly shapeless, ink-stained muslin apron that went from her shoulders to her ankles. The color was high in her cheeks, a dazzling light in her eye. The effect made her look as though she were halfway through an exceptionally healthy pregnancy.
    The astounding fantasy that she was with child and that he’d planted it there made his heart skip and roll.
    “My husband isn’t going to like this intrusion into his business, my lord.”
    He couldn’t have asked for a stronger dose of reality. She wasn’t his; she never would be.
    “Your husband isn’t meant to like anything about our transaction, madam.” He touched his fingers to the blocky printing on one of the placards on the table and tried to shrug off the uneasiness that settled over his shoulders.
    The trick would be gaining her cooperation in a way that she would never think to guard against. He was plenty practiced at it; with any luck Miss Finch would be too engaged in her own trickery to notice his own.
    Too caught up in her defense to notice that he couldn’t read a word.
    “Your men picked up everything willy-nilly and just dropped it into boxes.”
    Sedition, high treason, and all, Miss Finch. He took a breath and cleared his head. “Nothing damaged, I assume.”
    “It’s too soon to tell.”
    “I wouldn’t want the evidence ruined. The path to your husband’s whereabouts is in this room somewhere. Make no mistake, I’ll find him.”
    She snatched a leaflet off the table and wagged it at him as though it meant something to him. “Well, then, my lord, here’s something that will certainly help you locate his hideout. ‘Putney’s Cheltenham Salts. By appointment to His Majesty King George, for the relief of bilious livers and dropsical dispositions.’”
    Charles kept his silence as the woman flicked her way through the stacks on the table, ticking off titles as she went, sniffing at him as she found another to read.
    “Ah, now this might be just the evidence you’ve been looking for: ‘Stove grate radiators—for ornamental comfort and everlasting heat. Fenders, fire-irons, and patent baths.’” She tapped at the engraving. “That’s it, my lord. Find this stove grate radiator and you’ve found Captain Spindleshanks.
    “Oh, and let’s not dismiss this blasphemous page from The Handbook of Song Birds . Note the