“What’s a cripple like you going to do in the mud?” “I thought that fancy, expensive school was supposed to make you less of an idiot, Duck.” Mortimer’s heavy brows barely separated on a good day and met to create one thick line when he adopted the expression of disdainful scorn he reserved solely for her. “He’s alive!” Lorelai exclaimed, pawing at the door handle. “Blimey! There’s a bleedin’ corpse by the road.” Three powerful strikes on the roof of the coach prompted the driver to stop. “What’s bunched your garters, then?” Sneering across from her, Mortimer, her elder brother, brushed aside the drapes at his window. “Stop,” she wheezed, overtaken by tremors. “A corp-” Oh no, had he just moved, or had she imagined it? Squinting through the downpour, she pressed her face to the window in time to see battered knuckles clenching the grass, and straining arms pulling the heavy body forward. In this case, however, it was Lord Southbourne’s words, more than his accent, that caused her to flinch.Īs cruel as the girls could be at Braithwaite’s Boarding School, none of their taunts had made her feel quite so hollow as the one her own family bestowed upon her. Lorelai had not missed the dialect while at school in Mayfair, and it had been the first thing she’d rid herself of in favor of a more proper London inflection. “What is it, duck?” Her father may have been an earl, but the Weatherstokes were gentry of reduced circumstances, and didn’t spend enough time in London to escape the Essex accent. She’d learned that by kissing her mother’s forehead before they closed her casket forever. The poor man must be cold, she worried, then castigated herself for such an absurd thought. Her heart squeezed, and she fought to find her voice as the carriage trundled past. He was all mounds and cords, his long body different from hers in every way a person could be. Ghastly dark bruises covered what little flesh was visible beneath the blood. He lay facedown, strong arms reached over his head as though he’d been trying to swim through the shallow grass lining the road. In all her fourteen years, she’d never seen a naked man, let alone a deceased one. “ Father, look!” She seized Lord Southbourne’s thin wrist, but a barrage of visual stimuli overwhelmed her, paralyzing her tongue. If Lorelai Weatherstoke hadn’t been appreciating the storm out the carriage window, she’d have missed the naked corpse beneath the ancient ash tree.

Duke with the dragon tattoo