Читать книгу The Regency Season Collection: Part Two - Кэрол Мортимер, Кэрол Мортимер - Страница 35
ОглавлениеPolly was glad to be alone as the very idea made her clamp her legs together against a hot rush of wanton excitement at her feminine core that felt sinful and delicious in equal measure. ‘Oh, heavens,’ she husked on a long, expelled breath that felt as if it had come on a very long journey all the way from her boots.
The most appalling images of a naked, sweat-streaked and vital Lord Mantaigne were cavorting about in her head like seductively potent demons now. He was disgusting, she told herself, and in more ways than one. He was certainly physically filthy, and she ought not to find that the least bit appealing in the man. There had even been a streak of ancient grey dust right across the front of his disgracefully open shirt and, come to think of it, that garment had clung to him as if it loved him as well. She could recall exactly how the dust darkened across the bare torso visible under that once-pristine linen and the powdery stuff had clung to the sweat on his tanned and glistening skin like a fond lover.
If she had dared let even a hint of her fascination with his work-mussed person show, he would have played on it as shamelessly as an actor in a melodrama, but even willpower couldn’t control the physical response of her body to his now he’d gone and her wicked imagination had taken over. Of course it was folly to wonder how it would feel to be his equal in sophistication and passion and flirt right back at him, to risk the shame and scandal of being a fallen woman for the absolute pleasure of being such a devastatingly masculine yet civilised and urbane man’s lover. He was an accomplished breaker of women’s hearts and it was good that she was nothing like the females such finicky men of the world chose as their paramours.
She brushed a hesitant, wondering hand tentatively over her breeches and up to her slender waist with the feeling she was leaving stardust in its wake, then she gasped as she realised where her too-vivid imagination was taking her again. So horribly conscious of her own body that she suddenly felt as if it had a life and demands independent of the rest of her, she slammed a door on the image of lordly Lord Mantaigne luxuriating in the makeshift bathing room they’d made in one of the laundries. It would be steamy, the air warm from the fire Dotty would have lit for the comfort of the weary labourers as they got rid of all their dirt, because Dotty had a soft heart under her gruff manner and she openly admitted making men comfortable had been the mission of her youth.
Thank goodness the self-appointed castle laundress was middle-aged and didn’t continue with her life’s work in quite the same way nowadays. The image of his lordship in his tub with a very willing and gleeful female seemed utterly disgusting somehow, as the one of him in it with the likes of her that hesitated on the edge of her thoughts never could be, even though her everyday self wished it was.
‘Oh, no, the valise!’ she yelped and ran out of the room to find Sam Barker before there was the slightest risk of the marquis carrying out his implied threat to parade about the castle naked if someone didn’t produce his clothes in time. ‘Useless dandy,’ she grumbled as soon as she’d run Sam to earth in the kitchen and met his amused gaze as he reassured her the master of the house had already been safely reunited with his clothes and there was nothing for her to panic about.
‘That’s what he thinks,’ she mumbled to herself as she went back upstairs to put out a few of their precious store of wax candles in honour of their unwanted guest.
* * *
‘So, what do you think?’ Tom asked his supposed secretary-cum-agent-cum-lawyer half an hour later.
‘Nobody would think you even knew what a broom looked like now, let alone how to use one,’ Peters told him distractedly as he did his best to shave by the light of a flickering candle.
‘That’s not what I meant,’ Tom told him grumpily, wondering why the world thought him such a peacock. ‘I was asking your ideas about the self-appointed keepers of my castle.’
‘From what I’ve seen so far, they seem a very mixed bag.’
‘True, but I’m ready to defer to your superior knowledge of the criminal classes. Do you think any are active law-breakers?’
Peters seemed to consider that question more seriously as he wiped the last of his whiskers from the blade of his razor and was himself again, whoever that might be. ‘I doubt it,’ he said, as if the fact surprised him as well.
‘So do I,’ Tom said with a preoccupied frown as he used the square of mirror his confederate had vacated to brush his hair back into gleaming order. ‘I suspect Lady Wakebourne would have them marched out of here faster than the cat could lick her ear if she had the slightest suspicion any had gone back to their old ways.’
‘It’s not just that. They respect her and Miss Trethayne. Even that battered old rogue in the gatehouse seemed more concerned about them than his own doubtful claim to employment and a roof over his head.’
‘So why are two ladies living in what should be an abandoned barrack with a pack of reformed rogues and criminals?’ Tom mused as he decided he was ready to face the world outside the castle laundry once again.
‘Some don’t seem the type to have ever been out-and-out rogues, so maybe they were all victims of an unlucky fate.’
‘Maybe, but what sort of circumstances would set two ladies so far apart from their kind? They must have been dire to leave them squatting in such a bleak old barn of a place, scratching a living from whatever they have managed to find here to sustain some sort of life on.’
‘Dire ones indeed,’ Peters said starkly, confirming Tom’s own conclusions.
He frowned at his now-immaculate reflection and came to terms with the idea he couldn’t simply come here, take a look round and walk away again as he had half-hoped when he was given Virginia’s letter ordering him to come here, find out what was amiss, then make up his mind if he wanted to demolish the castle or accept the duties and responsibilities that went with being born the heir of Dayspring Castle.
‘Dire indeed if I meant to bring in a full staff and live here, since they would then have to leave the place.’
‘And you don’t?’
‘Of course not, man. Would I have avoided it like the plague all these years if I had the slightest desire to settle in and play lord of all I survey here?’
‘I really couldn’t say, my lord,’ the supposedly quiet and unassuming Mr Peters said, as if he had his own opinion about Tom’s feelings for the place but was keeping it to himself.
‘Good,’ Tom drawled, squaring his shoulders at the suspicion the man might be right.
* * *
‘Is Lord Mantaigne’s bedchamber ready yet?’ Lady Wakebourne asked Polly from the doorway of the great parlour.
‘It would take an army to make that echoing barrack room ready for him,’ Polly snapped back and felt the new tension in the air now the rightful owner was back in his castle. ‘They can both sleep in the South Tower with the rest of the men,’ she added, knowing all the same that nothing here was ever going to be the same again. ‘We can’t get them into the staterooms fast enough for my taste, but lodging the man in a musty and bat-ridden chamber in the empty part of the house won’t endear us to him in any way.’
‘And we don’t want him to feel more uncomfortable than he has to here.’
‘No, indeed,’ Polly agreed with a weary sigh.
‘Nor should we allow him the chance to form any wrong ideas about a lady residing under his roof, my dear. You must resume your petticoats in the daytime as well as at nights now, Paulina, whether you like them or not.’
‘I don’t. They’re confoundedly restricting and make it well-nigh impossible to for me to do any work,’ Polly complained, knowing her ladyship was right.
Casting a last glance round the comfortable room at the odd family they had made out of a pack of rootless strangers used of an evening, she wondered how many would stay in their own quarters tonight to avoid the puzzle of how the sweepings of the King’s Highway dined with a marquis. Biting back a wistful sigh for yesterday, when they had no idea the impossible was about to happen, she nodded her agreement and bit her lip against a furious protest against the darker whims of fate.
‘Never mind, my dear, it won’t be for long. The boy must loathe the place, given the terrible things the locals whisper about what he endured here as a boy, and this is the first time he’s been near Dayspring in twenty years. He probably won’t be back for another twenty, once he’s done whatever it is he came here to do.’
‘And whatever that might be, he certainly didn’t expect to find us here,’ Polly answered glumly. ‘I can’t imagine why you wrote to his godmother about whatever is going on here. You must have done that months ago, since the old lady has been dead three months,’ she said sharply, as all those nights when she had lain awake worrying about whoever was making incursions into the castle at night reminded her Lady Wakebourne was a devious woman.
‘He is the only person who can tell them to go, my dear. I wasn’t going to risk you losing your temper one day and confronting them, then maybe leaving those boys of yours even more alone in the world than they are already.’
‘Oh, then I suppose I can see your point,’ Polly conceded reluctantly, knowing she had a tendency to act first and think later, although of course a measured risk was perfectly acceptable and she had weighed that one up already and decided she needed more information before taking it.
‘And I am very fond of you, my dear. I want you to be safe and happy as much as any of us.’
‘Thank you, I am very fond of you to,’ Polly admitted.
‘Then there is no harm done between us?’ The lady actually sounded anxious about that and Polly had to nod and admit it.
‘No, but I now know you are a splendid actress and will be very wary of you in future.’
‘I don’t think I’ll take to the stage to repair my fortunes even so. Now run along upstairs and put some petticoats on, my dear, if only for my sake.’
‘Very well, but I still hate them.’
Going back across the courtyard to the women’s quarters, she climbed the stairs to her lofty room and washed hastily. Trying not to give herself time to think too much, she bundled herself into the patched and fraying quilted petticoat, wide overskirt and unfashionably long bodice she wore when she absolutely had to. It felt ancient and impractical, and she hated the corsets she had to wear to make the bodice fit and the curb the heavy skirt put on her long stride so she must mince along or hold them so high they were indecent and defeated the purpose of wearing them in the first place. Without the hoops and panniers the gown was designed for, it hung limply about her long legs, but it was the only gown she’d found that wasn’t so short on her it was more revealing than her breeches, so what couldn’t be cured must be endured.
Until she had come here and discovered the liberty of breeches and boots she must have spent her waking life enduring the wretched things, she supposed with a sigh. As she lifted her skirts to descend the stairs without tumbling down them, she wondered how she’d borne it for so long. She minced impatiently into the housekeeper’s kitchen they used instead of the vast castle kitchens and tried hard not to knock anything over now she felt several feet wider than usual.
‘Oh, for goodness’ sake, girl, you’d look a fright even without the sad state of your hair,’ Lady Wakebourne exclaimed as she turned from stirring a saucepan for Prue with a look of despair at Polly’s unfashionable array.
‘What’s wrong with me now?’ Polly replied defensively.
‘It looks as if you last ran a comb through it about six months ago.’
Polly raised a hand to feel if she was right and realised the hasty plait she’d twisted it into first thing this morning had gone sadly awry and she might as well be wearing a bird’s nest on her head. She felt herself blush at the spectacle she must have made when Lord Mantaigne first laid eyes on her. She wasn’t surprised he’d let his gaze linger on her long legs and what curves she had to her name so impudently now. No, she was, she had to be. His preoccupation with her long limbs proved to her that any reasonably formed female body would do for him to bed a woman, she reminded herself militantly.
‘I’m not primping and preening for any man, let alone him,’ she said, even as the idea of sharing a meal with that finicky, arrogant aristocrat looking as if she had been left out in a tempest for a day made something deep inside her cringe.
‘Don’t worry, I think we would know that, even if you did the rest of us the courtesy of taking a brush and comb to that wild mess now and again.’
‘I’m not going all the way back to my room to try and turn myself into a sweet and docile lady for the marquis’s benefit.’
‘Not much risk of you ever being one of those, Miss Polly.’ The girl stooping over the fire to turn the spit for her sister Prue straightened up as far as she could to eye Polly critically. ‘If you wouldn’t mind watching this for me, your ladyship, I could take Miss Polly along to my room and tame that tangle into something closer to how it ought to look.’
‘Of course, Jane dear. Far be it from me to stand in the way of such a noble undertaking,’ Lady Wakebourne said cheerfully and took over the task with an ease her former friends might find a little distasteful if they could see her. Since they had turned their backs when she found out her husband had gambled away his fortune, Lady Wakebourne’s dowry and a whole lot more before he shot himself, Polly was very glad to have missed out on knowing them.
* * *
‘You have such beautiful hair, Miss Polly,’ Jane said when she finally persuaded Polly to sit still on a three-legged stool in her bedchamber on the other side of their makeshift kitchen from the men’s sleeping quarters, where the heat of the fires at least warded off the chill from the southwest winds and ancient walls left too long without enough fires powerful enough to warm them.
‘It gets in a mess as soon as I’ve finish tying it back every morning.’
‘That’s because it needs thinning here and there and if you’ll let me take a few inches off the ends, I’m sure you won’t find it so hard to manage,’ Jane said shyly as she undid the heavy mass, then brushed and combed it into a crackling and vital cloak about Polly shoulders.
Even her hair seemed imbued with some of her impatience with being primped until suitable for the lord of Dayspring to set his noble eyes on so he wouldn’t be put off his dinner. Polly wondered how long Jane had wanted to be a lady’s maid and it was a hope unlikely to ever come true, given society’s prejudices, so if playing one for a night made her feel better, Polly found she could keep still after all.
‘Do what you like with it then,’ she said with a restless shrug.
‘Only if you promise to sit quiet,’ Jane chided, then produced a pair of sharp scissors and began snipping at Polly’s hair as if shaping it was a work of art. ‘Sit there while I fetch a branch of candles. I can’t see well enough to do this properly,’ Jane said just as Polly was beginning to hope she’d finished.
So Polly had time to sit and wonder why she was doing this. Surely she didn’t want that popinjay to admire her as he might have if their eyes met across a crowded ballroom? She squirmed at the idea of being sized up as the other party in a wild and fleeting affair by a society rake and told herself it was because her seat was too low and rather hard, not because the very thought of Lord Mantaigne made her feel as if a crucial part of her insides might be melting. She despised unprincipled dandies and who could doubt he was one of those when he wore that ridiculously elegant get up as if he was about to take a stroll across Mayfair instead of camp out in a dusty and crumbling castle?
If she’d first seen him sauntering down Bond Street in that exquisitely cut coat, tightly fitting pantaloons and gleaming Hessians she would have shot him a scornful look, then forgotten him as a man of straw. If he’d raised his perfect top hat from his gleaming golden curls and bowed as if he knew her, she would have given him the cold stare of a lady dealing with an overfamiliar gentleman and moved on with a dismissive nod. How she wished she had seen him like that, in his natural orbit and revealed for what he was under the cool light of a London Season.
Except she had only ever heard about such beings in Lady Wakebourne’s tales of former glory. Miss Paulina Trethayne had no youthful rites of passage to look back on; she had never stood on the verge of womanhood, waiting nervously to meet a hopeful youth who might marry her and make her and her children secure for the rest of her life, or might gamble and whore his way through every penny of his fortune and her dowry. She never would now and, since she was already a woman who knew the best way to feel secure in life was to rely on herself; that was just as well. If she came across the Marquis of Mantaigne outside the castle walls it would be as his unequal in every way and she refused to regret it.
So why did a part of her she didn’t like to admit existed long to dance with him at grand society balls and drift about the dance floor of Almack’s Club during a dazzlingly intimate evening of gossip and dancing? The flighty Paulina Trethayne she might have been, if things had been very different, stopped twiddling her thumbs in boredom with the mundane life she had been forced to live beyond the playgrounds of the haut ton and livened up at the idea of dancing with such a man, intimately or not.
Polly wondered how much of the wilful and contrary young girl she had once been was left in her soul, breathlessly green and curious as ever. It felt as if she was on the edge of something life changing and potentially wonderful and nothing could be further from the truth. She looked sideways into the square of mirror Jane and her sister had rescued from somewhere and saw a beanpole dressed in a jumble of hand-me-down clothes with a rough cloth draped over her shoulders to collect stray hairs. What was worse, the lanky creature was staring back from that pane of silvered glass all soft-eyed and dreamy with a silly smile on her face.
Idiot, she condemned her inner fool. You know exactly what happens to such romantic dreamers. With impatient revulsion she turned her head sharply away and was about to get up and ruin Jane’s day when the girl came bustling back into the room as rapidly as her twisted limbs allowed.
‘Sit down and have a bit of patience for once in your life, Miss Polly,’ she ordered, and Polly folded her long legs back on to her perch and meekly did as she was bid. Just because dreams stopped being rosy when reality broke in, it didn’t mean Jane’s secret ambition deserved to be pushed aside as if it didn’t matter.
‘There’s so much to do,’ she protested half-heartedly, but Jane frowned with the air of an expert interrupted in a vital task. ‘And that mincing fop wouldn’t care if I sat down to dinner wearing a sack.’
‘But you should,’ Jane reproved her gently, and Polly felt ashamed for not caring she had straight limbs and an acceptable, if lanky, female form when Jane must long for such luxury every time her legs refused to obey her.
‘It’s been years since I needed to,’ Polly admitted softly and they were both silent for a while, Jane busy with her self-appointed task and Polly wondering how her life might have been, if Papa hadn’t been so feckless and the boys so very young and dependent on her when he died.
* * *
‘There, I’ve finished,’ her companion said at last. Polly sighed with relief and got ready to get up and go about her interrupted evening without another thought for her reflection in that unforgiving mirror. ‘No, you don’t. You have to at least take a look at yourself now I’ve done all I can at short notice,’ Jane protested.
‘I’m still me,’ she argued, snatching a glance in the mirror to pacify Jane. ‘It looks a little wild for my tastes,’ she said, eyeing her newly barbered and carefully arranged hair dubiously.
‘Not wild; cut and dressed to frame your face properly. You have beautiful hair, Miss Polly. It’s a crime to bundle it up as best you can and hack bits off it when you get impatient with the weight of it like you do. Come to me whenever it gets in your way and I’ll soon have it looking lovely again.’
‘You can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear, Jane, but since you enjoy cutting hair you might as well practise on me as anyone else.’
‘You’re a fine-looking lady, Miss Polly, and it’s high time you realised it,’ Jane said with a militant nod. ‘His lordship won’t be able to take his eyes off you tonight.’
‘Flatterer. You know perfectly well I’m a quiz at my last prayers and I don’t care a jot what that lordly fribble thinks of me,’ Polly said as she left the room and walked straight into a wall.
Blinking at the odd fact it was a warm and very well-dressed wall that smelt of Lady Wakebourne’s best herbal soap and clean linen, she groaned very quietly as she replayed her own words in her head.
‘Forgive me,’ Lord Mantaigne said with meticulous politeness as he set her at arm’s length and stood back. ‘I seem to have got sadly lost in my own castle.’
‘I’m sorry too, Lord Mantaigne,’ she said stiffly as she pulled back from the impact he had on her senses as if he’d stung her. ‘I didn’t see you out here.’
‘Little wonder, you’d have a job to see a shooting star in all this gloom,’ he grumbled rather dourly.
‘What did you expect after so many years of doing your best to let this poor old place fall down, a diorama put on in your honour?’
‘Even I am not that unreasonable or deluded. No, I expected a great deal worse than this and should thank you all rather than complaining about shortcomings I caused in the first place,’ he admitted. She refused to find the sight of him running a distracted hand through his now wildly curling golden locks endearing. ‘I expected we would have to camp out in an outhouse or sleep in one of the barns. Hence all those wagons and so many provisions for the horses until we could buy more.’
‘I’m relieved to know the space was not entirely taken up by your clothes,’ she said before good manners could catch up with her tongue.
‘What a very high opinion of me you do have, Miss Trethayne,’ he said so smoothly she wondered if anything touched the real man under the gloss and glamour. She must have imagined her scathing opinion of him had hurt, for there was nothing in his eyes but mockery of them both for standing here trading insults whilst their dinner was waiting and they were sharp set.
‘This is a fine and noble heritage, my lord, and I don’t approve of your wilful destruction of it,’ she said dourly. There seemed little point trying to be sweet and polite when he was about to put her family out of the only home they had.
‘Some things are better left to rot,’ she thought she heard him mutter.
‘People harm other people. Buildings merely endure our faults and caprices, as this one testifies all too well, but they have no feelings about us.’
‘Thus speaks the voice of experience?’ he asked with too much perception for the empty-headed Bond Street Beau she so badly wanted him to be.
‘Of course, none of us would be here if we had anywhere else to go,’ she replied with a shrug meant to deflect more questions.
‘And I suspect you think I have no right to ask,’ he said with a look in his deceptive blue eyes that promised he would find out anyway.
‘Since you’re sure to turn us all out now you have turned up, you have no right to know anything about us.’
‘And if I don’t?’
‘You will, once you are properly settled here you won’t be able to help it. What could Lord Mantaigne have in common with a ragtag band of beggars?’
‘I’m surprised you haven’t listened to the tales of my childhood that must be raked up when someone wonders why I don’t cherish it as my forefathers did.’
‘For some strange reason I admit I can’t fathom, your people are loyal to you. We were told you disliked your guardian and he went mad, but they don’t give out details to newcomers, and you must know we’d still be those if we’d been here decades.’
Polly caught a flash of emotion in his watchful gaze, then it was gone as if he didn’t allow himself such luxuries. He was touched his people felt something for him; she could have sworn it in the brief moment he left himself unguarded. It shouldn’t matter to her if he felt endless sonnets of overblown emotions or none at all, but if she wasn’t careful she could find this contrary and deeply irritating man fascinating and that would lead her to places Polly Trethayne could not afford to go.
‘Such loyalty is beyond me,’ he admitted with a rueful shrug.
‘Indeed?’ she made herself say as if it was a puzzle she didn’t care to enquire any further into. ‘It must have been as long a day for you and Mr Peters as for the rest of us, my lord. Perhaps we should agree to eat and sleep before we resume arguing how your arrival will change Dayspring Castle in the morning.’
‘We might as well, but tonight I can say thank-you for saving my house from dereliction and my staff from an uncomfortable night in an abandoned wreck and a cold supper, Miss Trethayne. I’m sure you would say that was all I deserve, but you must admit Peters and my servants are not to blame for my misdeeds.’
‘They are welcome to share what little we have and I didn’t do it on my own,’ she said, but could tell from the twitch of a smile at the corner of his mouth that he’d noticed her side-step his share of their hospitality.
‘Then let’s agree there will be time enough for a report on all you and your friends have managed to save from my neglect another day,’ he allowed, but there was a steely purpose under the limpid blue of his eyes now that ought not to surprise her. He’d already proved a very different marquis from the one she’d despised for the past six and a half years, so it was little wonder he kept surprising her.
* * *
Managing a half-hearted smile of greeting for her friends and Mr Peters when they finally reached the Great Parlour together, Polly did her best to fade into the background when Lady Wakebourne greeted his lordship like the Prodigal Son. Even those who ought to know better seemed dazzled by the presence and glamour of a real live lord in their midst. She tried to tell herself he was really a wolf in very handsome camouflage, but even to her the fact of him outdid the image.
If only she could have held on to her first impression of him as a man of fashion; spoilt, idle and self-obsessed as the Regent himself was reputed to be. Hating him would be so much simpler if that cliché was nearer the truth than this complicated rogue. She slanted a glance at him being polite to his guests as if they were the noblest gathering in Europe and frowned at him for not being high enough in the instep to put her off feeling this unwanted connection between them.
And she couldn’t fool herself into thinking he was a soft and dandified gentleman who loafed about Mayfair raking, gambling and doing whatever else idle young lords did to relieve their boredom any longer either. She was in a very good position to affirm there wasn’t a spare ounce of fat on Lord Mantaigne’s lean but powerful frame and he didn’t get like that by going to bed with the dawn and rising too late to see more than a glimpse of daylight. This afternoon his grey-silk waistcoat had clung so lovingly to his muscular torso and narrow waist she suspected many otherwise respectable women would be eager to examine the fit and quality of it for themselves if he gave them the chance.
Luckily she had already given herself a stern lecture on the differences between such women and Polly Trethayne and she trampled down any lingering spell her first sight of him had cast and told herself she would now be immune. There had been a sharp moment of Ah, here he is before she felt the heat of those bluest of blue eyes linger on her long limbs and remind her she had given up all hope of respectable marriage the day her father died and left nothing but a mountain of debt behind him.
She had dared all she had in her to keep the boys with her, but that was dare enough for one lifetime. She couldn’t consider the dishonourable intentions of a rake, or dream of might have been if things were different. The boys were not yet grown and she wasn’t free to meet any rash promises those hot blue eyes of his had made her, even if she wanted to and of course she didn’t want anything of the sort.
Yet still his magnificent physical presence was still emphasised by the long-tailed dark coat of a fashionable gentleman dining with friends, and she was still a sentient female with the use of her eyes. How could she not look at him and be reluctantly impressed, despite all her resolutions not to be? Clearly no Cumberland corset was necessary to give him a nipped-in waist and even the idea of his tailor having added buckram to pad out those muscular shoulders was laughable. She wondered what the fine ladies and gentlemen of the ton would make of the Marquis of Mantaigne sweeping his own stables, then spreading straw for his horses and waiting until they were fed and tended before taking himself off for a much-needed bath in the castle laundry.
The gentlemen might laugh up their sleeves while they secretly envied him his fitness and cheerful good humour as he got very dirty indeed, but the ladies would be too busy with less straightforward thoughts and impulses to listen to jokes at his expense. Polly knew that because she’d experienced a terrible urge to watch him at his labours this afternoon and had almost peeped through a knot hole in a shutter at the back of the building in an effort to do so. Somehow she found the strength to turn away, but considering he’d found her in his sweat-and-dust-covered glory afterwards anyway she might just as well have indulged herself to the full.
Now she squirmed in her seat as she waited for the men to sit once the women were in their accustomed places at the table, despite the marquis being a lord and most of them of far lower rank than any ladies he was accustomed to dining with. The heat that ran through her at her shameful thoughts of him sweaty and dishevelled and naked before jumping into his bath told her she found this particular lord far too desirable for her own good. She was suddenly very glad their precious beeswax candles were placed sparsely and flickered now and again in the draught from an ancient window. At least nobody would know she was blushing at such a scandalous idea in this mellow and uncertain light.
