Devil in Disguise (The Ravenels #7) by Lisa Kleypas

He blinked in surprise. “Aye, that’s his name. I told you about him?”

“Yes, over dinner. Wallace likes to attack your broom when you’re sweeping. And he can retrieve a penny-piece from a field of standing corn.”

His prickly annoyance melted away, and Keir felt a smile spread across his face as he stared down at her.

“Poor lass,” he said huskily. “I must have jabbered your wee ear off that night.”

Merritt smiled faintly. The surface of her lips was plush and fine, like the velvet skin of orchid petals. “I did my share of the talking.”

“I wish I could remember.”

She laughed, a pretty sound with a fractured crystal edge. “I’m glad you can’t.”

BEFORE KEIR COULD ask what she’d meant, Merritt coaxed him to leave the breakfast room and change his shoes for the walk to the cove.

She returned to the table and sat beside Phoebe, who wordlessly reached out to take her hand. The tight clasp was nothing less than a lifeline.

Merritt was the one to finally break the silence. “You’re about to tell me it’s too soon to be sure how I feel,” she said huskily, “and after I spend some time apart from him, my perspective will change, and I’ll stop hurting. I’ll find someone else.”

Phoebe nodded, her gaze soft with concern.

“All that would be the right thing to say.” Merritt squeezed her friend’s hand before letting go. Her cheeks felt stiff and resisting as she tried to smile. “But ten years from now, Phoebe, I’ll still say it was love. It was love from the beginning.”

WHEN KEIR MET Kingston at the back of the house, he was glad to discover the family dog, Ajax, was going to join them on the excursion. The boisterous black and tan retriever helped to ease the tension as they walked along the holloway, a narrow sunken lane that had once been an ancient cart path. Slender trees bracketed the high banks on either side, forming a delicate canopy overhead.

Casually Kingston said, “You mentioned you have a dog. What breed?”

“A drop-eared Skye terrier. A good rabbiter.”

Ajax bounded ahead of them and emerged onto the beach, where high tide had turned the shallows into a froth of white and brown. Farther out, the water thickened into bands of green and blue, darkening to blue-black where the distant shape of a steamer inched across the horizon. The cold, salted morning breeze winnowed its way through tussocks of marram grass and bindweed on the dunes.

Barking in excitement, Ajax dashed off to chase foraging birds on the shore. Kingston shook his head and smiled as he watched the happy retriever cavorting. “Witless animal,” he said fondly, and went to a painted storage shed near a bank of dunes. After taking out a few supplies, he gestured for Keir to follow him to a pit that had been dug in the sand and rimmed with large stones.

Realizing Kingston intended to build a fire, Keir asked, “Should I collect some driftwood?”

“Only a few knots for kindling. For the rest of it, I prefer birch—there’s a rick on the other side of the shed.”

They spent a few minutes making a proper fire, starting with dried grass and seaweed, adding a layer of driftwood knots, then a stack of split birch logs. The familiar process, something Keir often did with friends on the island, eased the tension in his neck and back. He lit the fire with a Lucifer match, watching in satisfaction as flames rushed through the kindling, and caught at the driftwood with flashes of blue and purple.

Kingston seemed in no hurry to talk. He removed his shoes and stockings, rolled his trouser legs to his ankles, and lounged on one of the wool blankets he’d brought from the shed. Keir followed suit, sitting on his own blanket, and extended his bare feet toward the fire’s radiant heat. In a few minutes, Ajax came padding up to the duke, wet and sandy, holding what looked like a round stone in his mouth.

“God, what is that?” Kingston asked ruefully, extending his hand.

Gently the retriever dropped the object into his palm. It turned out to be a disgruntled hermit crab, withdrawn tightly in its shell. In a moment, a set of tiny legs and a pair of eye stalks emerged as the crab investigated its new terrain.

A faint smile touched the duke’s lips. He stood in a limber movement and went to set the hermit crab at the edge of a nearby tide pool. Carefully he positioned it close to a rock crevice where it could easily duck for cover.

As Kingston returned to settle by the fire, he said wryly, “Stay, Ajax. You’ve harassed the local wildlife enough for now.”

The retriever plopped down beside him, and Kingston stroked the dog’s head as it rested on his thigh, his long fingers playing idly with the floppy ears.

Keir had watched him with growing interest, having assumed Kingston would toss the unlucky crab aside, maybe fling it toward the sea. Any of Keir’s friends would have thought nothing of chucking it into the path of a foraging herring gull. But to show consideration for an insignificant beastie … take the trouble to carry it to a safe place … it revealed something wholly unexpected about the man’s character. A regard for the fragile, the vulnerable.

Now Keir wasn’t sure what to make of Kingston. An aristocrat of staggering wealth and position, notorious for his decadent past … a devoted father and faithful husband … there seemed no way to reconcile those two versions of him. And here was yet another version, a man lounging casually next to a fire on the beach with his dog, his bare feet dusted with sand, as if he were an ordinary human.