Читать книгу In Want of a Wife? - Кэтти Уильямс, CATHY WILLIAMS, Cathy Williams - Страница 6

LOUIS CHRISTOPHE JUMEAU slammed the door of the Range Rover and favoured it with a look of pure loathing. Really, he should have known better than to trust in a car-rental agency which proudly proclaimed that it was the only one around for fifty miles. Lack of healthy competition invariably equalled a third-rate service; he had been proved right. He should have arranged his own private transport. He could easily have used his helicopter and had one of his own top-of-the-range cars on standby to collect him from the airfield.

But he had wanted to check out the transport links for himself. Over-indulged, wealthy patrons would expect efficient links to Crossfeld House, should they decide to get there by train, as he had. And onwards by car—as he, unfortunately, had chosen to do.

He cursed fluently under his breath, flicked open his mobile and was rewarded with a robust ‘no signal’ sign.

Around him, in the darkening winter light, the countryside was desolate and unwelcoming. There was also the threat of snow in the air. It seemed to be an ongoing threat for the inhabitants of Scotland and one he would have taken more seriously had he been in possession of a crystal ball and predicted that his rental car—none finer than this, sonny!—would have taken its last breath on a desolate road in the Highlands some forty minutes away from his destination.

He rescued his coat from the back seat of the old Range Rover and decided there and then that the one and only carrental agency for fifty miles around would soon be facing stiff competition, or he would pull out of this particular investment fast enough to make the heads of its five desperate sellers spin.

Crossfeld House—an addition to his already bulging portfolio of boutique hotels around the world and country-house hotels across the UK—would be pleasing but was hardly essential. Its unique selling point as far as he was concerned was its golf course. It had been enthusiastically lauded for its ‘challenging qualities’, which he cynically interpreted as ‘unkempt to the point of unplayable’.

But he would see for himself. If he ever made it to the place on foot.

He would also be in a position to conclusively sort that other little problem out.

He slung on his coat against the bitter December winds and began walking in the direction of the manor house, his mind moving along from the problem he could not currently solve—namely his lack of car—to the problem ahead of him which he most definitely intended to solve. To be precise, his friend’s sudden infatuation with a girl who, from all descriptions, fitted neatly into the category of gold-digger. Even never having met her, Louis could recognise the type: too pretty, too poor and with a mother hell-bent on getting rid of her five offspring to the highest bidders.

His mouth curled into a smile of grim satisfaction at the prospect of showing up on the doorstep of the Sharp family. Nicholas might be rich and successful but he was also naive and way too trusting for his own good. Mother Sharp might be able to shuffle her pretty little daughter up for inspection and Nicholas—whose visits to Crossfeld House on the pretext of checking out the edifice had become ever more frequent—might well have ended up as compliant bait at the end of the hook. But he, Louis, wasn’t born yesterday.

And Nicholas was nothing if not a lifelong friend whose honour and bank balance Louis had every intention of protecting.

Fully absorbed by his train of thought, he was only aware of the roar of a motorcycle when it was virtually on top of him. It pelted past him in a whirl of gravel, ripping apart the eerie silence of the countryside like a shriek within the hallowed walls of a cathedral and then spun around, decelerating so that the rider, dressed entirely in black with a matching shiny black helmet, could inspect him.

More than anything else, Louis was enraged by what he considered wildly reckless driving.

‘Very clever,’ he said with biting sarcasm, bearing down on the rider and standing intimidatingly close. ‘Get your kicks that way, do you? Or do you think that this is your private racetrack and you can ride this thing however fast you want?’

In the middle of reaching up to remove her helmet, Lizzy’s hands stilled and then dropped to her sides.

Up close and personal, this guy was bigger, taller and looked a lot meaner than she had expected. Whilst she knew this part of the countryside like the back of her hand, along with everyone in it, she was still sharp enough to realise that she was in the company of a stranger and there was nothing within screaming distance to disturb the isolation of the landscape.

She couldn’t make out the guy’s face but his voice was like a whiplash, raising the hackles on her back and making her want to meet his attack head-on.

‘I didn’t have to stop for you.’

‘Are you going to take that helmet off so that I can see who I’m dealing with?’

Alone on a dark road, surrounded by acres of barren isolation and staring down a man who looked as though he could snap her in half if he put his mind to it: the helmet was staying on. Let him think that he was dealing with another man. One with a high voice.

‘Was that your car back there?’

‘Very good, Sherlock.’

‘I don’t need to stay here and listen to this.’ She gave a few warning revs of her engine and waited for his apology, which was not forthcoming.

Instead he stood back, folded his arms and gave her a long, speculative look. The rising moon caught the angle of his face and she drew her breath in sharply.

The man might be aristocratic, arrogant and high-handed, but he was beautiful. Black hair was blown back to reveal the harsh, arresting contours of a face that was shockingly perfect. His mouth was drawn in a tight, displeased line but it didn’t take much imagination to realise that under different circumstances, it would be curving and sensuous.

‘How old are you?’ Louis asked suddenly. The question caught Lizzy unawares and for a few seconds she was silent, wondering where he was going with it.

‘Why? What business is it of yours?’

‘You’re a kid, aren’t you? That why you don’t want to take the helmet off? Do your parents know that you’re riding that thing like a bat out of hell, putting other people’s lives in danger?’

‘There’s no one else out here except for you! Trust a tourist to break down,’ she muttered. Prickles of angry, nervous perspiration shot through her. ‘If you’re going to tackle this part of the world, then you should know to do it in a more reliable vehicle.’

‘You should try telling that to the crook who owns the car-rental company by the station.’

‘Ah.’ Fergus McGinty could, she admitted to herself, be a bit shifty when it came to outsiders renting his cars. And anyone opting for the one and only Range Rover would have been cheerfully taken for the proverbial ride. She doubted the thing had been serviced since the start of the century.

‘Friend of yours, is he?’ Increasingly ill tempered, Louis allowed a short pause to elapse. ‘So he’s bound to know the teenager on the big bike when I decide to report you to your parents … Which makes me think that you have no choice here but to graciously give me a ride to wherever it is I happen to be going. Either that, or you’ll find yourself answering to the police for getting on that thing when you’re under age.’

Lizzy was tempted to burst out laughing. Yes, she could see that the high tones of her voice might have led him crashing into the wrong impression, and it was pretty funny when you thought about it. But somehow she didn’t think that this was the kind of man who would take very kindly to being laughed at. Something about the way he held himself made her think that, when there was any laughing to be done, he would be the one doing it at someone else’s expense.

‘You can’t just leave that car there,’ she objected, purely to be difficult.

Louis made an exaggerated show of looking around him before his glinting black eyes settled back on her, his reflection bouncing off the helmet. ‘Why? Do you think there are people lurking behind the heather, waiting to steal it? Frankly, if anyone is stupid enough to break in and able to drive it away, then they’re more than welcome. They would be doing the world at large a service.’

Lizzy shrugged. ‘Where are you headed?’

‘Climb off that machine and you’ll find out.’

‘Climb off? What are you talking about? I thought you said that I would be giving you a ride.’

‘Did I say that? Must have been a crazy slip of the tongue. Why would I endanger my life by getting on the back of a motorcycle ridden by a kid who should be at home doing his homework?’

‘I could leave you right here.’

‘I really wouldn’t consider that option if I were you.’

Lizzy recognised a threat when she heard one. ‘Where are you going?’ she repeated reluctantly. ‘If it’s out of my way, then you’re going to have to wait here and I’ll send someone out to fetch you.’

Louis almost laughed out loud at that. Send someone out to fetch him? For starters, he had had enough of the great Scottish countryside when seen at night from the perspective of a stranded driver. For another, he wouldn’t put money on the odds of the boy doing his civic duty when it would be a lot easier to bike off into the night and get his own back for being taken down a peg or two by an outsider.

‘Really? Well, we’ll have to differ on that one. I’m going to Crossfeld House and you’re coming with me.’

Crossfeld House! Lizzy froze.

‘You know where that is, don’t you?’ Louis said impatiently. ‘I can’t imagine there are too many manor houses with golf courses in this part of the world.’

‘I know where it is. Why are you going there?’

‘Come again?’

‘I just wondered why you were going there, because you can’t stay there … It’s, um, up for sale. I don’t think they’re renting out rooms any more. And if you’ve come to play golf then the course isn’t that great. In fact, it’s wrecked.’

‘Is that a fact, now?’ Louis looked narrowly at the slight figure dismounting the bike, standing back to let him get on. ‘So I should leave my clubs in the car?’

‘Definitely. Do you even know how to ride this?’

‘You’ll find out soon enough. Let’s put it this way—I prefer to risk my neck at my own hands than at the hands of someone else.’ He revved the engine and enjoyed the full-bodied sound of the throttle. It had been a long time since he had been on the seat of a motor bike. He had forgotten how free and powerful they could make you feel. It was going to be an enjoyable ride, especially when he intended to make full use of it by squeezing as much information out of his passenger as he possibly could. Communications with Nicholas had been frustratingly restricted to his friend singing the praises of the Sharp girl, interspersed with one or two essential facts and figures about the estate. But this lad obviously knew the area, was almost certain to know the Sharp family and who wasn’t up for a bit of gossip? In a place like this, it was probably the mainstay of their existence!

‘So,’ Louis shouted encouragingly over the roar of the motorbike. ‘If you know Crossfeld House, then you might know the chartered surveyor there … Nicholas Talbot?’

‘Sort of …’ Lizzy clung to him. He wasn’t kitted out for riding a motorbike, but he had managed to hitch his coat up, and through it she could feel the muscularity of his body. He had clearly ridden a motorbike before; it was apparent from the ease with which he manoeuvred it. ‘Why?’

‘I’m here to supervise what he’s been up to. He should have sent reports back about the state of the place, but his communications have been erratic.’

‘Really? So, you’re his boss?’

‘In a manner of speaking.’

‘You’re checking up on him?’ Lizzy demanded angrily. ‘That’s awful—Nicholas has been working really hard, actually!’

‘So you know him?’

‘I don’t know him, but he’s … It’s a small town, put it that way, and Nicholas has become a very popular member of the community.’

‘Has he, now? Made friends …?’

‘I think he might be interested in one of the girls here, yes …’ Lizzy said in a guarded voice, although she had to shout that information over the noise of the engine. She realised that she had yet to discover the name of the guy to whom she was clinging for dear life but, that said, at least she knew that he wasn’t dangerous—at least, to her. But as for Nicholas, would he lose his job just because he hadn’t filed daily reports to someone who was obviously a control freak?

‘He did mention something of the sort.’ Louis’s voice was non-judgemental, encouraging, persuasive.

Lizzy grasped that and thought that she would make her excuses for Nicholas’s absent-mindedness in reporting back to his master, because she knew that Nicholas would never make excuses for himself. He was too non-confrontational, too mild-mannered. He would probably stammer and stutter and thereby secure his own sacking, because the motorbike rider was just the sort of guy who sacked people. Or maybe he wasn’t even responsible for actually doing the sacking. Far more likely was that he was an errand boy of sorts, someone sent to check out the situation.

‘What did he say?’ Lizzy asked tentatively. She noticed that she was no longer having to shout, which meant that he wasn’t driving quite so fast now. The roads were slippery, unlit and treacherous unless you knew them.

‘He fancies himself in love,’ Louis said with a dry, cynical laugh; Lizzy was suffused with a wave of rampant hostility. Not that she saw love and marriage as the be all and end all of everything, but her sister did. Her sister was head over heels in love with Nicholas Talbot and she bristled at the notion that this perfect stranger saw fit to be contemptuous of a situation about which he clearly knew absolutely nothing.

‘Oh yes?’ she managed to say coldly.

‘In love with someone who’s after him for his money, I gather from reading between the lines.’ No point beating around the bush. If the boy knew anything about what was happening in the town or village, even if he was too young to be really interested one way or another, then he would report back—and the warning would be sent out that Nicholas wasn’t up for grabs.

Louis had had his fill of gold-diggers. He had been targeted at the age of nineteen, when he’d been too young to have known better, by a woman of twenty-five with whom he had fancied himself in love. Of course, the love had come to nothing, and neither had the memories.

When he thought back to Amber Newsome, her big blue eyes, her tears and the way she had convinced him that she was pregnant so that she could worm her way into an inheritance that was fast closing to her, he could feel every instinct for self-preservation ram into place inside him. She had captivated him with her self-assurance at a time when all the other girls at university had been playing games, and for a while he had enjoyed every second of what she had had to offer.

But then the time had come for moving on. He hadn’t banked on the fact that she would not be prepared to let him go. He had not yet learnt that his vast inherited wealth was something that should be kept under wraps. He had paid the price: three months of stress, thinking that he would have to marry a woman he no longer loved for a child he thought she had conceived, only to accidentally discover that he had been duped by an expert.

And then, when he thought of his younger sister Giselle—and the way she had almost been conned by someone who had been close enough to the family to know better—every inclination in him to listen to garbage about love and romance shut down with the finality of a vault door slamming closed on the crown jewels.

Nicholas was less sceptical, and therefore all the more susceptible to anyone after him for his money.

‘How do you know that?’ Lizzy asked, her heart beating fast.

‘I’m an expert when it comes to interpreting the sub-text,’ Louis informed her. ‘Ageing actress with five daughters who desperately wants them married off; it could almost be a cliché.’ It went against the grain to confide in anyone, but in this instance it suited his purpose; he could feel from her silence that she knew the family in question, had views on them.

‘You must have heard of them?’ He invited coaxingly. ‘The Sharp family?’

‘It’s a small town,’ Lizzy muttered non-committally. In front of her, Louis allowed himself a little smile of success. ‘Has … Has Nicholas—Mr, um, Talbot—told you all of this?’

‘Like I said, I’m good at the sub-text.’

‘And at prejudging other people as well, from the sounds of it,’ she threw back without hesitation. ‘You’ve never even met this Sharp family, but you’ve already made your mind up about them.’ Up ahead she could see the first straggling houses that signified the outskirts of the town. In these parts land was not at a premium, and acres of fields could lie between the houses, but everyone still knew each other and the town was really quite vibrant, considering its size. Beyond the town lay the still, dark waters of one of the smaller lochs and to the left of the town, commanding a hill top, lay Crossfeld House.

Lizzy had never known it to be anything other than verging on derelict, although half-hearted attempts had been made over the years to try and bring it back to life. The current owners, however, were not locals. They were wealthy businessmen from Glasgow, all ardent golfers who had, so the rumour went, bought it on the spur of the moment and then promptly relegated it to the back burner because they hadn’t reckoned on the time that would be required to fix it up. And so it had malingered, until three months ago when a buyer had been found.

‘You need to take the next left.’ Her voice was forced as she directed him on to Crossfeld House. ‘And you’ll have to go very slowly. The roads aren’t in the finest condition.’

‘And how far away do you live from the place?’

‘There’s no need to worry about me. I’m more than capable of finding my way home.’

Zooming around on a bike twice his size, Louis was in no doubt of that. For the first time since he had mounted the motorbike, he became fully aware of his surroundings. There was peace, he thought, and then there was the silence of pure solitude. This place definitely fell in the latter category. Personally, he could think of nothing worse than a prolonged stay in a town where finding a mobile-phone signal could be a challenge. But he was confident that there were a lot of people for whom this sort of thing would be just what the doctor ordered, people who found it relaxing to escape the daily grind of city life.

Golf had never been a sport that Louis found attractive; he preferred something that actually increased the heart rate. But, that said, there were vast numbers of golfers out there and he could begin to see that Crossfeld House might just turn into a gold mine. Had the ageing actress thought the same thing, and therefore set poor Nicholas within her sights for that reason? Was she aware that he wasn’t the outright buyer of the property?

There were just one or two things that Louis felt would be advantageous to make clear before his unwitting passenger headed back with tales of the outsider.

‘What do the people in the town think about the buy out of Crossfeld House?’ He initiated the conversation via a circuitous route. He was genuinely curious, anyway.

‘That it would be nice for the place to be renovated,’ Lizzy told him coolly. ‘It’s been a bit of an eyesore for a long time. Course, there’s nothing to say that it won’t go the same way as it did before.’

‘Meaning …?’

‘Meaning that because someone has money doesn’t mean that they’re going to make a success of it.’

‘Someone like Nicholas, you mean?’

‘I don’t know where you’re going with this.’

‘Nicholas isn’t the buyer, as it happens,’ Louis said casually. ‘Although he does come from money. Which is doubtless why he’s been targeted as a catch. The fact is, Nicholas is the chartered surveyor up here to give the place a once-over—make sure it’s not going to collapse into a pile of rubble the second the cheque’s signed.’

‘Who are you?’

‘I’m astounded you haven’t got round to asking me that sooner.’

Lizzy thought that she hadn’t got round to asking him that sooner because she had been too busy disliking him.

‘My name’s Louis Jumeau, and I’m the guy bankrolling this little venture.’

Wrapped round his muscular body, her hands balled into little fists and her heartbeat quickened.

‘Nicholas happens to be a very good friend of mine,’ Louis said mildly. ‘We virtually grew up together. We may not be alike, but anyone who knows us would tell you that I’m very protective of him. I’m also much more clued up on gold-diggers than he is.’

Just in time, the manor house was approaching; it was a majestic sight. In the light of the moon, it dominated the horizon—even if the cold light of day would unearth all its woeful inadequacies. Around them, the golf course stretched, swelling and dipping, a rolling sea of frozen black open landscape. That, too, would be revealed in all its glory come the morning light, of that Louis had little doubt.

He was vastly experienced in the ways of property development, even though it was only one of the many strings to his bow, and a recently acquired interest at that. With an inherited fortune behind him, he had nevertheless succeeded in making his own mark on the world of finance, and at the age of barely thirty had reached the enviable point from which he could pick and choose where he decided to invest his money.

Which wasn’t to say that he ever made the mistake of investing unwisely.

‘Impressive building,’ he murmured, slowing the motorbike to a halt and spinning it gracefully to a complete stop.

‘Yes. It is.’ By her reckoning, she would be seeing Louis Jumeau far too soon for her liking. In the spirit of encouraging the blossoming romance between Rose and Nicholas, their mother—the dreaded Mrs Sharp, whom Louis would discover soon enough was her mother—had organised a dance at the town hall for all the local big wigs and some from further afield. Furthermore, Nicholas had imported his sisters, a small additional down side which Louis would discover soon enough.

Lizzy cringed at what had all the promise of being a nightmare evening. Her mother might not be a gold-digger but she was very upbeat about Rose getting married to someone who was financially secure. In fact, it was a pleasant fate she often wished for all her daughters. Lizzy’s runaway imagination instantly foresaw all manner of tricky conversations should the man now dismounting her motorcycle catch even the slightest whiff of that.

Oh Lord! She had made the effort to return home all the way from London—had taken a whole week away from school so that she could meet the fabulous Nicholas, about whom she had heard everything there possibly was to know—and it was just her luck that her arrival coincided with a six-foot-two avenging angel on some mission of mercy to protect his gullible best friend from the claws of an unsuitable woman.

And he still had no idea who she was! Not that that was a situation that could continue for ever. The second he let it be known that an unknown motorbike rider had rescued him from the perils of a frozen Scottish countryside, her secret would be out. She had told positively everyone in her family that she couldn’t wait to get back on her motorbike and enjoy the wide open spaces and the beautiful, never-ending silence so wildly different from the crowded streets of London.

Lizzy felt the urge to groan out loud.

‘How long will it take you to get back to your house?’

He turned to face her and she had that suffocating feeling again as she peered at the stunning angles of his face from behind the safety of her helmet.

For once the feisty spirit, the never-back-down attitude, deserted her, leaving her dry-mouthed and strangely unable to think clearly.

With a sigh of resignation, she reached up and began unbuckling the helmet.

‘So you’ve finally decided to show yourself?’ Louis said with biting sarcasm. ‘Wise move. I would have found out who you were sooner or later anyway, but don’t bother; I won’t report you back to your parents for reckless speeding on that bike which is way too …’ With his mind caught halfway between wondering how he was going to retrieve his possessions from the rented car several miles back, and speculating on the condition of what he would find inside the rambling manor house, he was one-hundred percent not prepared for the tumble of long dark hair that fell out of the helmet as it was finally unclasped and pulled off.

For once in his life Louis Christophe Jumeau was rendered utterly speechless. He had expected a teenage lad. Instead, standing in front of him, her head defiantly thrown back and her dark eyes glittering with unconcealed hostility, he found himself looking at a woman with fine, stubborn features, a full mouth, which at the moment was pursed in blatant disapproval, and the graceful, slender body of a dancer.

‘You’re not a boy.’ He heard himself state the obvious.

‘No.’

‘You’re a girl on a motorbike.’

‘Yes. I happen to like motorbikes.’

‘Why didn’t you tell me sooner?’ His tone was accusatory.

‘Why should I? What difference would it have made?’ A brisk gust of icy air made her shiver. ‘Besides,’ Lizzy continued, stoking the flames of her anger as she remembered the arrogance and contempt in his voice as he had made his sweeping generalisations about her family, ‘I was interested to hear everything you had to say about your friend.’

For a fleeting second, Louis wondered whether this was the object of Nicholas’s infatuation, but it was an idea he dismissed before it had time even to take root. Nicholas had waxed lyrical about a beautiful blonde, sweet tempered and gentle. On all counts, the woman standing in front of him failed to meet the bill.

‘You know the woman, do you?’

Lizzy decided to evade that question for the moment. ‘I know that you’re the most arrogant, high-handed, unbearable person I have ever met in my whole life!’ Her mother would kill her for saying that. Grace Sharp had been eagerly looking forward to the arrival of this man. She had heard a lot about him and—Lizzy was ashamed to admit even to herself—a lot about his fabulous wealth and legendary status. Alongside Nicholas, he was to be the glittering highlight of the carefully arranged dance—and the reason why so many people were coming, Lizzy suspected darkly.

‘I don’t believe I’m hearing this.’

‘You’ve never met any of the people from here and yet you think it’s okay to make lots of assumptions about them. You’re a snob, Mr Jumeau, and I can’t bear snobs! ‘

‘Mr Jumeau? Surely we should be on first names at least, considering the circumstances? And maybe we should go inside to carry on this conversation. It’s bitter out here.’ Another frozen gust tossed her hair around her face, and he watched in some fascination as she pulled it back and twisted it into a long coil to hang over her shoulder.

He had never considered himself a judgemental sort, but he had to admit that preconceptions he’d been unaware of were being trampled underfoot. Why shouldn’t a woman be on a motorbike—a reasonably powerful one, at that? Why shouldn’t she enjoy the same feeling of freedom that he himself could remember enjoying years ago when he’d still been a university student? And why shouldn’t she be able to speak her mind? Although, granted, this did afford him a slightly bigger problem.

‘I don’t think so,’ Lizzy said tartly, momentarily sidetracked by his sudden change of tone. She folded her arms and glared at him.

‘Fair enough.’ He shrugged, and in the shadowy darkness she was aware of a shiver of apprehension racing like cold water down her spine at the menacing glitter in his dark eyes. ‘You’ve just accused me of being a snob.’

‘Which you are! ‘

‘And I’m not sure that I appreciate that.’ His eyes drifted to that full, defiant mouth. Under the leather jacket, the jeans and the mid-calf hiking boots, he couldn’t make out her figure; it was no wonder that he had mistaken her for a boy. He wondered what she looked like out of the masculine garb, then he impatiently snapped back to the point at hand. He wasn’t here to win a popularity contest. He was here to size up Crossfeld House, to see how much money it would cost to bring it up to scratch, and to put any aspiring fortune-hunters in their place. Whether the girl in front of him considered him a snob because of that was entirely beside the point.

Lizzy wanted to jeer at him, to make some disparaging remark about how men like him, born into wealth and privilege, weren’t entitled to ride roughshod over people they considered their social inferiors. But she was mesmerised by the stark, angular beauty of his face. It kept making her lose her train of thought, which she hated. Out of all the girls in her family, she had always prided herself on being the level-headed one, the one who was least likely to pander to a man.

‘That’s not my problem,’ she managed to tell him in a lofty voice.

‘No, I don’t suppose it is,’ Louis countered smoothly. ‘But, while we’re on the subject of prejudices, maybe you might want to stop and think about your own.’

Lizzy’s mouth fell open. ‘Me, prejudiced? I’m the least prejudiced person on the face of the earth!’

‘You’ve just accused me of being a snob. Yet you don’t know me.’

Bright colour flamed her cheeks and she scrambled for something to say. ‘You’re right. It’s bitter cold out here and I have to be getting home,’ she eventually muttered in a stiff voice. ‘You can find the local garage in the Yellow Pages and call them to get the car, or bring your stuff to the house or whatever. Do you have any idea how long you’ll be staying here?’

A spark of hope ignited at the thought that his hideous experience at the hands of his broken-down car might spur him on to make a faster than anticipated return to city life; in which case, there would be no risk of her bumping into him again. But any such hope was squashed when he shot her a half-smile, leaving her in little doubt that he had read her mind and knew exactly what had been going through it.

‘No idea.’ He glanced over his shoulder to the brooding enormity of Crossfeld House. ‘Who knows how long it’ll take to go through every room in that place?’

‘But … but surely you’ll need to head back down to London? And Nicholas, isn’t he the surveyor who would have already checked out all that stuff?’

‘One can’t be too careful.’ He looked at her narrowly. ‘Why? Are you scared that you might accidentally run into me again? It’s a small place, as you’ve pointed out; steel yourself for the prospect. And, by the way, spread the news that I’m in town and I’ll be keeping a sharp eye out for the Sharp woman and her brood of grasping harpies.’ Louis had no idea what had propelled him to tack that on. He wasn’t a believer in being overtly threatening; there was usually far more to be gained by being subtle.

‘You can always tell them yourself when you see them at the dance you’ve been invited to,’ Lizzy returned, head flung back. ‘And, as for the brood of grasping harpies, you’ve already made yourself perfectly clear to one of them!’

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘Let me introduce myself.’ Although her hand remained firmly where it was. ‘My name’s Elizabeth Sharp and Rose is my sister.’