Читать книгу Housemaid Heiress - Elizabeth Beacon - Страница 9

Wishing he could be as serenely indifferent to the little wretch as she appeared to be to him, Marcus ran upstairs and tried to reorder his world again. It had cost him weeks of turmoil to forget the hurt in a pair of unique turquoise eyes, and harden himself to this task. He would not let the mere sight of her throw him off course now. Three months spent turning this way and that like an animal in a trap, and he was held as fast as he had been when he began. Still, now he knew he had no alternative but to marry the money he needed to drag his estates out of River Tick.

Despite the immaculate attire that made Thea itch to muss and muddy his splendour, he stripped off and shaved himself once more, before donning pristine breeches and a spotless linen shirt. He was absently tying his neckcloth when he reminded himself of Nick’s cynical advice.

‘Look like a ragtag without sixpence, Marco, and you will be taken for the desperate man that you are. Dress like a top o’the trees and you will be fighting off the rich little darlings in droves.’

A smile fleetingly softened his austere mouth. Few believed Nick had a kindly bone in his body, but gain his loyalty and he was steadfast as granite.

Nick had come to town to consult the doctors about his arm, and ordered his own tailor to outfit his cousin. ‘And if he don’t pay you out of his ill-gotten gains, send the bill to me and I’ll dun him instead.’

He had gone on to countermand the modest wardrobe Marcus had ordered, and thus he stood here, dressing in fine feathers to charm the gold out of the heiresses’ dower chests. He probably deserved Miss Rashton he decided, and at least her iron determination to wed a title would work to his advantage. He could make her a viscountess and she could save his bankrupt estates. They might have been made for one another.

He shrugged himself into the elegant waistcoat and beautifully tailored coat Nick insisted no self-respecting fortune hunter should be seen without, and wondered what his lordly ancestors would have made of their latest descendant. Not much, he determined grimly. The Ashfields had been a shrewd race, until his father gambled, drank and caroused his way through every penny he could lay his hands on, and a good many that should have been safely out of his reach.

Hastily running a brush through his thick dark hair, Marcus knew he looked as elegant as a gentleman could without the services of a skilled valet, and decided it was high time he wrote to his lawyer again. Surely something must have escaped his father’s headlong pursuit of pleasure? After all, his grandfather had outlived his only son by ten days, so it wasn’t as if the Honourable Julius Ashfield had ever inherited the title and estates. He had been borrowing against expectations, so how had he managed to beggar his heirs?

Preoccupied with this dilemma, Marcus forgot his promise to join the ladies in the drawing room and marched downstairs with a determination his former brigade would have recognised, even if the light-hearted Major Ashfield they knew off-duty had vanished along with his dark green uniform. He was halfway down the room in search of a decent pen and hot pressed paper when he finally took in the picture before him.

The humblest female in the entire household was taking her ease in Ned’s favourite chair. Marcus blinked and wondered if too many sleepless nights and occasionally drinking too deep to escape harsh reality, had caught up with him. No, his eyesight was sharp and his senses stubbornly unclouded, so the troublesome wench really was sitting reading some solemn tome with such intense concentration she hadn’t noticed him come in.

‘And what the devil are you up to now?’ he barked, and watched her start violently with an unworthy sense of satisfaction.

A faint feeling of shame made his expression all the more forbidding as he stood in judgement over the female he had fought so hard to forget. How could the annoying little witch be so wrapped up in her studies, when he had been so ridiculously conscious of her every move the instant he stepped over the threshold?

Thea glowered back at him, Lord Strensham was a fortune hunter of the worst sort—a man who could easily earn his own wealth if he could be bothered to do a day’s work now and again. To prove that he meant nothing to her, she had slipped away from the furore his coming had caused and taken this ridiculous risk. Ten minutes of forgetfulness were needed to erase the image of dashing, self-sufficient Major Ashfield from her mind, and set foppish, useless Lord Strensham in his place.

‘Improving my mind,’ she snapped as he continued to wait for her explanation like examining counsel. ‘An example you might follow, if only you could spare the time.’

‘And you obviously spend yours avoiding the job you’re paid to do. I should never have told Lyddie you needed work, for you quite obviously don’t value her kindness in taking you without a reference.’

Maybe he was right. If he had let her slip into the woods that day, she would never have suffered the hurt and humiliation of being rejected by this handsome idiot. Of course she might also have starved to death or been caught by the Winfordes by now, but sometimes even that seemed better than yearning for a man who did not want her. It was his fault of course—if he had stayed away just a little bit longer she would have forgotten him. Anyway, he was changed, if the trappings of a fashionable fortune hunter and the indolent, impudent manner he affected were anything to go by.

‘Her ladyship knows we’re run ragged by that virago of yours.’

He looked conscious, and so he should. If he was really planning to wed the confounded female for the sake of her bulging coffers, he was selling himself short. After all, if a fortune was all he wanted, he could have married her. By reminding herself that she would have been storing up a lifetime of heartache, she forced her numb legs into supporting her and prepared to make a dignified exit.

She watched as his grey gaze ran lazily over her rather crumpled uniform and found her lacking. How she wished she dared to slap the suggestion of a smile from his handsome face. Spoilt and silly Miss Alethea Hardy would have fallen headlong for such a dangerous, damn-your-eyes rogue, but prosaic Hetty Smith was surely immune to his dubious charm.

‘Tiresome heavy these great books, ain’t they, your lordship?’

‘So you sat down and waited for that one to jump back onto the shelf?’ he asked quietly, a hint of laughter vanished from his grey eyes as if it had never been and she shivered, despite the growing heat of the day.

His deep voice sounded as if he had permanently rasped it barking orders on the battlefield, she mused, feeling for one shocking moment as if his baritone rumble had found an echo in her very bones. She caught herself remembering how seductive it was when he pitched it low and lover-like and rapidly slammed the door on such idiotic memories.

‘No, my lord, and now I must be about my work again,’ she said, meeting his sceptical gaze with a blankness she hoped would signal her indifference.

Too well acquainted with her own features to find them in any way remarkable, she could make nothing of his frozen stillness as his grey eyes met hers. Yet a whisper of that forbidden longing brushed down her tingling spine like a lover’s touch once again. He turned to gaze at the Wiltshire countryside through the long windows. His grey eyes were so wintry when he fixed them on her again that she had to control an urge to shrink away.

‘I need to get on,’ she said truthfully.

‘Then stop treating me like a flat and tell me what you’re up to.’

Heaven forbid! ‘Her ladyship will need me any minute,’ she told him with a perplexed expression that should have told him she was innocent.

Lord Strensham’s reflexes were so good that her wrist was caught in an iron grip before she had time to take evasive action. She held as still as a statue and refused to struggle with him like a country maid in a bad play. Yet the touch of his warm fingers on her bare flesh sent an insidious streak of warmth jagging up her arm to earth itself in the most unwelcome places, and she shivered with superstitious dread before bravely meeting his eyes again. If only she was as indifferent to his touch as she had been to Nick Prestbury’s, she thought hazily, but it seemed there was no point wishing for the moon.

‘I don’t think my cousins will be downstairs betimes if the lady you refer to has been running the household round as you say. Since you don’t look like any ladies’ maid I ever came across, I rather doubt Lyddie will need you either,’ he said silkily as he ran his mocking gaze over the housemaid’s uniform no self-respecting dresser would be seen dead in.

Feeling the hot colour stain her cheeks, Thea could not govern her reaction to his touch. Lately she had shrunk from any contact with the male sex, managing to avoid the roving eyes of both visiting masters and their servants by keeping her head down and disappearing into her ill-fitting, hand-me-down clothes. Lord Strensham’s less than lover-like grasp on her wrist sent her wayward heartbeat dancing as if performing a waltz at Almack’s.

It was perfectly ridiculous, this terrible need to have him kiss her again, she told herself. Secretly longing for him to draw her nearer and satisfy this feral desire was folly. She controlled a warm shiver as his strong hand gentled on her slender wrist and sparked those ridiculous curls of heat into life. They were worse than strangers and must remain so. There was an unbridgeable gulf between them, and she ordered herself brusquely to stop staring up at him like a mooncalf.

‘And to think I was warned about gentlemen like you,’ she snapped.

He dropped her hand as if it burnt him and jerked backwards so violently he was in danger of being overset for a moment. His dark brows snapped together, his eyes fierce as a hawk’s and his firm mouth set in a hard line. At least he was himself again; the drawling fop banished by the raw reality of what lay between them, however he tried to deny it, and she tried not to exult at the transformation.

No, she was ruined in the eyes of the world and he didn’t want her even as Hetty Smith, foundling! Thea gasped at the bitter memory of that day at the crossroads and almost shrank away from him, shocked at her own stupidity in laying herself open to such hurt a second time. She stood and faced him, raising her chin to spark dumb defiance at him; set on defying him even if it cost her the place she needed so badly.

‘You know I don’t trifle with innocents,’ he ground out, as if the very idea outraged his peculiar notions of honour. ‘But if you trap any more unwary gentlemen in otherwise empty rooms you won’t be one of those for very much longer, you foolish child.’

Child—how dare he? Thea gritted her teeth and managed to remember why she had to stay here undetected for at least two more months. By dint of promising herself that she would seek him out the moment she came of age—and give him her unvarnished opinion of his dubious morals and scurvy manners—she somehow mastered her fury. Unfortunately a mental picture of him, faced with a vaguely familiar female haranguing him over the breakfast table, presented itself to her inner eye, and an appreciative chuckle escaped her before she could check it.

For a second his remote façade seemed about to crack and his chilly grey eyes warmed, as if he too realised how ridiculous they must look, facing one another across Sir Edward Darraine’s library like duellists. Then his expression became bleak and unreadable again, even as all manner of forbidden questions trembled on her unruly tongue. She blinked to rid her mind of a ridiculous image of those grey eyes hot with passion, a smile of infinite promise on a firm mouth that had suddenly become sensual rather than hard and angry, as he moved ever nearer to her own waiting one and…and nothing!

‘I ain’t got all day to waste gossiping, even if you have, m’lord.’

‘No, I dare say you have work to catch up on.’

‘Most likely I have at that.’

‘Just make sure you don’t get caught next time, Hetty.’

‘There won’t be a next time,’ she assured him emphatically, and swore privately that it was true.

Some risks were not worth taking twice, and my Lord Strensham was one of them.

‘If I catch you out in one more misdeed, your mistress will hear of it,’ he warned and his mistrust hurt.

‘Maybe she’ll wonder why you care,’ she was stung into replying pertly, wondering why that threat tormented her so much she had to blink back tears.

They could never be more than master and housemaid after all, the Winfordes had seen to that.

‘Try that tack and you’ll soon find out your mistake, my enterprising little doxy, and maybe I was mistaken about that innocence after all,’ he ground out harshly, and she was helpless in his powerful embrace before she had even registered the fact that he had moved closer.

Lost for words and even breath as the potent reality of being locked in his arms once more hit her, she forced air into her protesting lungs. Breathing in the scent of clean linen, warm male and fine broadcloth, she forgot all else. Strength so certain it knew nothing about force wrapped her round and she had the most absurd desire to nuzzle deeper into his arms and forget all her troubles, even as common sense was vainly ordering her to drag herself out of them by whatever means needed, fair or foul.

His touch was gentle and sure, and she felt as if she alone knew the breadth and depths that made up Marcus Ashfield, the person under the lordly cynicism. Even that foolish notion flew out of her head as he stroked down her cheek to her chin in a caress that had her obediently raising her head before her brain managed to inform her she was making life too easy for a practised seducer.

Even as her wiser self was ordering her to struggle, to kick or bite if that was what it took to get him to let go, the fool in charge angled her mouth to meet his descending one and determinedly shut her eyes to reality. His lips were gentle on hers and her eyelids fluttered open again so her dazzled eyes could meet stormy grey ones. She gasped in a breath that carried his unique scent and an echo of his latent power right to the heart of her. Then, as the blue faded from her turquoise eyes and they became green under such extreme emotion, his own need burnt hotter, and his kiss seemed about to draw the very essence of her into his powerful protection.

‘Sea-witch,’ he murmured, his lips so reluctant to leave hers that she felt his words as much as heard them.

Then he ran his tongue along the softening gap between her lips and they parted for him on a sigh, as if she spent her entire life waiting around for his kisses. Sensible Thea was screaming at the willing and needy creature who seemed to have been born fully formed and defiantly wanton in his arms that morning in the woods, but the thunder of his heartbeat where her wondering fingers rested against his powerful chest all but drowned her out.

She was putting the few dreams she had left at risk, for a few moments of enchantment in the arms of a philanderer. Yet his mouth firmed and demanded on hers, and he explored her lips with a wholehearted pleasure that was a seduction all on its own. Despite everything, she longed to explore this heady passion with this unique man. Stern Thea snapped something very rude at melting, desiring Thea, who just murmured something foolish and felt Marcus’s tongue explore her all-too-willing mouth with irrepressible delight as he asked more than her pride should grant him. A request she unhesitatingly allowed as her mouth opened under his, and the feel of him dipping between her lips and flirting with her tongue sent shivers of longing down her spine.

‘No,’ sensible Thea murmured a protest that she knew was half at losing his warmth as he raised his head.

She saw a blaze of emotion light his grey gaze to silver, and knew all that heated desire was for her. Then he put his hands on her upper arms and set her at a distance as she realised just what she had done.

‘Oh, no!’ she whispered and it sounded like a parade-ground bellow in the sunny room she had previously found so peaceful.

‘Oh, no, indeed,’ he murmured softly.

Wasn’t it just like him to act as if he had just discovered her committing some trifling misdeed? Especially when she felt as if caught by such wonder she was surprised the world had not changed by more than seconds since he shook the foundations of it again. It had never occurred to her that he might be as amazed by that tumultuous kiss as she was herself, so she took his light tone for mockery and her temper lashed the hurt aside to blaze at him.

‘I hope you marry the high-nosed bitch who runs us all ragged from dawn to dusk with her demands and her megrims!’ she raged, what had to be hot fury stinging her eyes. ‘You richly deserve one another, and at least then you won’t inflict yourselves on better people,’ she finished triumphantly and stamped a sensibly shod foot so there could be no mistake about her outrage.

‘Indeed,’ he replied blandly, all expression vanishing from his face as he stepped back from her, looking as if he had just encountered a flying artillery shell and was unsure where it might explode.

‘Oh, get out of the way, you, you…man, you,’ she demanded in reply to such blatant provocation and could have kicked him when he obligingly did so. ‘Somehow I’ll make you pay, my lord, if it’s the last thing I do,’ she threatened, once she was so far out of his reach that even he had no hope of catching her.

Thea marched out of the library with a seething mass of confused emotions powering her about her neglected duties so effectively that she had finished them in record time, despite that shocking interlude in Sir Edward Darraine’s well-stocked library.

‘No doubt you will, you little shrew,’ the rueful gentleman she left behind her murmured as the echoes of the door slamming still resounded.

Marcus had never intended to touch the girl again, let alone kiss her. Now he was half-willing to sell his soul to the devil for a night of insanity in her arms. It could not happen, he informed himself sternly. It must not happen. He hadn’t spent so long battling his inner demons to succumb within minutes of setting eyes on her again. Even such fiery passion faded, he reassured himself, and she would hate him for ruining her if he gave in to it.

So why did he constantly have this uneasy feeling that he was wilfully turning his back on something unique? Because he was an idiot, and, even if love existed, he still had nothing. Nothing to offer Hetty Smith, housemaid and enigma at any rate. Miss Rashton, heiress, wanted his title and a well-bred son and heir, so at least he had something to give her in return, even if the thought of bedding her left him cold. He shivered as he contrasted his molten feelings for Hetty with his indifference to the strident heiress.

Yet the lovely Mrs Fall would want affection at the very least. Timid little Sophronia Willet would sooner be locked in a cage with a hungry bear than marry him, so Miss Rashton it must be, and at least there would be no nonsense about love. No nonsense at all and the thought of carrying out his marital duties under his bride’s stern gaze made his toes curl.

A few minutes alone with Lyddie’s humblest housemaid was all it took for passion to make a fool of him. His loins quickened at the thought of her lips under his and the delicious friction of her curves fitting themselves to his angles. It always felt as if they had been formed to meld with such rightness, when the time inevitably came to do so. Not so, Major Ashfield sternly informed his traitorous body. He had to marry money, or let his dependants starve and reduce his brother to penury along with himself. No impulse to forget the world in a runaway wench’s arms could stand in his way.

Years of military discipline made him sit at Ned’s desk to write his letter, fighting the inclination to lounge there and muse over a stolen kiss, as well as Virgil’s Aeneid in the original Latin Hetty had left there. It was on that renegade thought that the peculiar nature of her reading sank in.

Marcus put aside the letter he couldn’t give half his attention to stare intently at the book, trying to make sense out of Hetty Smith. A female of birth and education who read Virgil’s Aeneid in the original Latin would be an eccentric, so surely a maidservant could not con such a text? Although this particular maid might pretend she was no more capable of reading it than she was of rowing to the Antipodes, he was far from convinced.

The wench was hiding something, besides sea-changing eyes a man might happily drown in and the softest, most tempting mouth he had ever kissed. Perhaps she had been waiting for her lover in that shack in the woods that night? The very thought made his long fingers tighten into fists and his mouth hard. She felt like the most innocent female he had ever kissed when she took fire in his arms, but was she acting a part?

If she could play the housemaid to Lady Lydia’s satisfaction, she might as easily fool an ex-soldier who had spent years fighting for his country rather than dealing with duplicitous females. Disillusion set another layer of ice about what he assured himself was a cold and indifferent heart, and he tried to consider the Darraines’ third housemaid dispassionately.

The cunning minx could earn a fortune on her back if that naiveté was an act. Marcus was well aware of the dangers of taking liars at face value, even if a less disillusioned man might forget discretion and common sense under Hetty Smith’s potent spell. It was clearly his duty to find out if she presented a threat to his cousin’s household after introducing her to it so blindly. Passion was a snare that could bring down the best of men, let alone a fortune hunter with nothing a year to support his obligations on, but he didn’t have to give in to it.

Picking up the calf-bound volume, he shook it and, when nothing fell out, assumed she had been looking in the wrong place. Yet Ned was a respectable country gentleman nowadays—and what fool would risk hiding anything in here, when his cousin was commonly known to be bookish? Maybe he had read too many improbable tales for his own good.

Of course the wench could have been taking a wistful look at the mysteries of the written word and not know English or Latin from Double Dutch. Despite this comfortable notion, he was left with a lingering impression of her remarkable eyes, full of native wit and wary as a cat’s. Someone must keep an eye on her, and, if a gang of felons were targeting the house, he would frustrate them, short of putting the under-housemaid’s slender neck in the hangman’s noose.

An icy shudder ran down his spine at the thought of such an outcome, but the idea of any woman suffering such an untimely end would disturb him, he hastily reassured himself. Yet never before had Marcus experienced such an insane compulsion to seduce one of the servants, and how he wished he had only ever known her as such.

To compound his sins by continuing her downfall would be despicable, and he prided himself on carrying on his amours with women who knew the rules. Somehow he had managed to convince himself she was an innocent after all and, picturing her looking as confused and confounded as he had felt just now, he could not believe her the hard-eyed seductress he half wanted her to be. If only she were that siren, he could take her and be damned, but somehow he must slam the door on that heady notion if he was to be fit for company any time soon.

Could the wench’s eyes be best described as sea-green, aquamarine or turquoise? he mused. Without the abundant life behind them, they could be any of those fanciful colours. With it they were extraordinarily her own and then there was her mouth, so soft and yielding under his that he felt the rogue she thought him as his body clenched with need. He shook his head in an effort to gain control over his baser self. No sooner had he resolved to forget all idea of succumbing to Hetty’s artless charm that the memory of her tripped him up once more.

Well, it had to stop—the little witch was quite right to wish him on Miss Rashton. He lacked the funds to keep his vagrant waif in anything but penury, if he ruined her for the sake of his pleasure and made it impossible for her to stay under his cousin’s roof. Anyway, it would inevitably be more than that—once he lost the self-control he had once prided himself on, he knew he could never stop his obsession ruining her in more ways than one.

Hetty Smith was an ingenue with hard edges who could not possibly understand Virgil, he reassured himself, and marched from the room as if he was back on parade. He even managed to look delighted at the sight of the heiresses gathered in the drawing room, despite what fate and Miss Rashton had in store for him. At least he could not dwell on the third housemaid’s hidden depths in their presence, for fear of saying or doing something so idiotic even Miss Rashton gave him up as a lost cause.