Читать книгу The Black Sheep's Return - Elizabeth Beacon - Страница 10

Orlando let his eyes rest on Freya’s smooth white shoulders and the swell of her breasts under the tightly knotted cotton, then the hint of a bare calf under her awkwardly shuffled-up draperies and she flushed. If he was one or two of the gentlemen she had met in society, or the two greedy-eyed villains of yesterday, she would shrink from his open masculine scrutiny, but this was Orlando. Part of her she didn’t dare to examine too closely was flattered if he thought her desirable and, given the banked-down heat in his eyes, she rather thought he did—whether or not he welcomed the fact was perhaps more open to question.

‘It will be no trouble,’ he assured her softly.

Freya had no idea if he meant he wanted her covered up so he didn’t have to watch her with too many possibilities in his eyes, or because he knew she was uncomfortable with her bare shoulders and arms so blatantly on show. ‘Then I must thank you in advance for your trouble,’ she said and let her eyes meet his properly for the first time since he had seen all she was this morning.

‘You are welcome, lady,’ he said with a version of his son’s courtly bow that made her realise where young Henry got his grace and some of his swagger.

It was a bow that said here is a gentleman of power and leisure who only bends his knee to anyone because he chooses to. She could imagine him an immaculately dressed beau strutting up St James’s long after noon, to meet one of his select band of cronies for whatever elegant dissipation they had planned for the day. Frowning at the idea he might be even more of a mystery than she’d thought, she used the staff to get up and made certain no more of her showed than was inevitable in her state of semi-nakedness. If she had met him in a London drawing room when she first came out, might he have saved her all the petty humiliations of the last few years? He must have been wed and done with the stifling elegance of the London Season by the time she came out, if he’d ever been tame enough for that in the first place, so it was just as well he hadn’t been there to confuse her even more.

‘Where are the children?’ she asked to distract herself from such silly daydreams.

‘About somewhere. They usually obey me in their own unique fashion and at least Atlas is with them,’ he said as he stood aside for her to precede him.

‘Would it not be better if you went ahead? I’m very slow, despite the staff you kindly found for me.’

‘Who knows what you might get up to if I leave you to make your own way, Perdita? You might even find a bear to chase you.’

She chuckled at the reference to the most unlikely stage direction in the whole of Shakespeare’s mighty canon—‘exit, pursued by a bear’—and decided to occupy herself by reading A Winter’s Tale from the volumes of the great playwright’s work from the shelf slotted in next to her box-bed, as he clearly had to use every inch of the small space the cottage allowed.

Rich fought the husky and totally unselfconscious appeal of the right sort of feminine laughter. He vividly recalled the high-pitched titter of the débutantes and their older, freer sisters as they did their best to charm elusive Richard Seaborne, grandson of a Duke and close relative and friend to the wild and deliciously elusive Jack, Duke of Dettingham. Now the difference between those brittle, affected lovelies and his lost princess was so similar to the gulf between his Annabelle and the rest of her kind it should make him wary.