Trenton Lord of Loss (Lonely Lords) Read Online Free PDF Page A

or quote Shakespeare with the best of them. By comparison, he’s feeble now. If the Crossbridge steward hadn’t run off with the housekeeper, Trent might still be drifting around the town house, skinny as a wraith and twice as pale.”
    Run off, and taken a good sum of household money with them, so lax had Trent’s supervision become. 
    “Five years ago, your brother hadn’t capitulated to your father’s choice regarding the succession.” 
    Lady Warne had the elderly ability to ignore tender sentiments, and she was right: Paula—or her fat settlements—had been the Earl of Wilton’s choice, and Trent, ever dutiful, had graciously recited the appropriate vows. 
    “Trent has been through a rough patch, but he’s stubborn, when he has a reason to be.” 
    “Unlike others.” Lady Warne’s smile was devilish. “Others are stubborn for the sheer fun of it.” 
    “Is Emily proving stubborn?” Darius set his empty plate down, as if his little sister might be lurking behind the curtains, watching him eat a ridiculous number of fresh, warm ginger biscuits. 
    “She is sweet but sensible,” Lady Warne said. “Particularly now that she’s out from under your father’s boot heel. If she doesn’t present herself shortly, though, I will wonder if she hasn’t perfected the art of the feminine dawdle.” 
    “Wasted on a brother who wants only to take her for a ride in the park.” And to make sure she was behaving herself. 
    “Let me fetch her.” Lady Warne rose gracefully, leaving Darius to sip cold cider and wander the room. He’d been reasonably honest with Lady Warne, for she was old, and as sharp as the rest of her clan. Trent was sleeping, some . He was eating, a little . He was riding short distances , but only because a man without a land steward could either tramp all over his acres or ride a horse, and Trent wasn’t up to the tramping. 
    Those glasses of wine at dinner—three or four of them—were consumed with desperate relish, too. Darius had longed to hover, longed to order the servants to empty every bottle of spirits, to put Trent on a schedule of riding and walking and a diet of good summer fare. 
    But barging into another man’s life, destroying his dignity, and deciding his fate was the province of the Earl of Wilton, not his grown children. Darius had done what he could for Trent, then withdrawn to tend to other responsibilities. 
    He owed Trent the kind of faith Trent had shown him. Trent claimed Darius had saved his life by hauling him bodily down to Crossbridge, but in Darius’s mind, that was simply the return of a favor owed. 
    ***
     
    Arthur, being six feet tall at the withers and gelded, stood biologically and physically above much of what made life trying. This made him an adequate conversationalist for Trent’s return through the woods.
    “And there I was,” Trent muttered, “trying to make small talk with a widow, for the love of flowers.” A papa of small children developed strange epithets. “A woman not three months past the loss of her spouse, and what do I do? Damned near put her in a faint, poor thing. She ought to burn my handkerchief and bury the ashes at a crossroads, mark me on this.” 
    Arthur took a nibble of a passing branch. 
    “She’s pretty,” Trent went on, ducking to avoid the same branch. “Prettier the longer you look at her, and believe me, horse, I looked. Sat up and took notice.” That had been the strangest sensation, like dreaming he was waking up. The longer Trent had listened to Elegy Hampton’s voice and watched her hands and face, the more alert he’d become, but slowly, like shaking off a drug or a hard knock to the noggin. 
    He hadn’t had the same peculiar sense when he’d seen her in her shift singing to the fishes. That had been a different pleasure altogether, though equally unexpected. 
    “And God help me, she’ll be on the property tomorrow morning expecting me to converse civilly and offer hospitality.” 
    A