Читать книгу The Regency Season Collection: Part Two - Кэрол Мортимер, Кэрол Мортимер - Страница 44

Chapter Thirteen

‘Got them at last,’ Peters murmured as soon as he caught the sound of a latch snick very softly into place somewhere on the other side of the wide hall he might have admitted finding echoing and ghostly in the last dying rays of daylight under threat of torture.

‘Quiet,’ Tom cautioned him and went back to waiting for whoever was haunting his dusty mansion to walk into his trap. ‘What the devil?’ he muttered a few moments later when unexpectedly light footsteps walked down the hallway as if they had no great need to hide their presence and a right to be here.

‘Who goes there?’ Peters allowed himself to challenge them as some boyhood part of him must have longed to all his life.

‘We do,’ Josh Trethayne’s voice sang happily back at them, ‘and what are you doing sitting here in the dark all alone like Polly was until we went and got her, Mr Peters?’ he asked as brightly as if they’d met at a summer picnic.

‘Confound it,’ Tom cursed quietly to Peters because it was either that or bellow at them like a choleric squire. ‘Why the devil must they choose tonight to roam about my house in the dark?’ he added and opened up the shutter on his dark lantern to light up the three young Trethaynes nearest to them, then raised it to inspect their sister by directing the beam of candle on her unconventional breeches and spencer jacket.

‘Lost something?’ he drawled as if he had the right, but how could she simply stroll in here with her little brothers in tow as if that fiasco his first night here had never happened?

‘No, have you?’ she asked with a dignified lift of her chin Peters seemed to admire rather more than he did just at the moment.

‘My patience,’ Tom muttered under his breath, racking his brains for a way of getting them back into the older and safer part of the castle without giving away the fact he and Peters were here for a purpose. ‘But it’s getting darker by the minute and surely those two urchins of yours ought to be in bed by now?’ he made himself say as lightly as if they had met in the everyday rooms as a matter of course. He’d never thought himself much of an actor until that moment and was even quite proud of his unexpected skill, until she sniffed as if to inform him she wasn’t a fool and anyway, she was the one who decided when and where her brothers went and not him.

‘We’ve come to show Polly the secret room to cheer her up,’ Josh said happily.

‘What secret room?’ Tom made himself ask casually.

‘Unfair, my lord,’ Polly Trethayne rebuked him, ‘Josh is seven years old and not yet up to playing your games.’

‘Yes, I am, Poll, and anyway I’m nearly eight.’

‘Do you think you could postpone this particular argument until another day or take it somewhere else?’ Peters asked wearily, nodding at the uncovered window of the lantern to remind Tom they were lying in wait for villains, not four people they already knew were at Dayspring and probably knew it better than either of them.

‘Aye, will you please return to your part of the castle if I promise to tell you exactly what happens here afterwards?’ he heard himself plead and wondered where the occasionally haughty Marquis of Mantaigne had disappeared to for a fleeting moment, then found he didn’t much regret him.

‘No,’ all four Trethaynes replied at the same time.

‘Then we must abandon the hunt, Peters,’ he said, straightening up and scowling at Peters as if it was his fault, since he could hardly take his fury out on three boys and a militantly oblivious female, however richly they deserved it.

‘That you must not,’ Polly said with an offended glare he ought to have learnt to expect by now. ‘Hal will make sure Josh keeps quiet and Toby and I can mind our own tongues, thank you very much,’ she told him and folded her arms across her chest to make it doubly clear to him she wasn’t going anywhere.

Tom bit back a full-blooded curse for the benefit of her brothers rather than Polly Trethayne and let himself admit he admired her daring nearly as much as he wanted to curse her for putting so much as a hair on her head in danger. How the devil had that happened? He eyed her through the gloom and ran a series of images of her through his head, from the moment he first looked up to see her looming in the stable-doorway to the delicious, delirious experience of kissing her with every inch of him one long agonised scream of frustrated arousal this afternoon.

Was it even possible Thomas Banburgh had fallen in love? And with possibly the least suitable potential marchioness he could find in the entire kingdom while he was about it? Clearly it was impossible, yet somehow or another there it still was, as real and alive as if he’d written it all over the walls of his own castle and advertised it in the Strand.

Stunned by the certainty that if he never set eyes on her again after today his life would be lived in twilight, he felt as if he was floundering in the face of the storm of powerful emotions running through him like a natural disaster. He loved her? Yes, he did love her. Tom Banburgh, who didn’t want to either love or be loved, loved Polly Trethayne with all the hope and joy he hadn’t dared feel so fully since he was a boy surging through him like a spring tide.

What was more, he loved a magnificent, delightful, grumpy and unconventional female who would never bore him or make him wish for his clubs or the sophisticated lovers he’d enjoyed before he met her. She was glaring back at him now; daring him to treat her like some delicate little gently bred female and send her back to her bed to cower there in safety. It would be a wild ride, loving her for the rest of his life, he decided with a hot look for her at the thought of starting it.

Meeting it seemed to make her forget her impression of an angry goddess confronted by a human she intended turning into a toad. Seeing puzzlement and a fine seasoning of curiosity in her gaze, he felt even more tempted to kiss that lush, doubtful mouth of hers. He’d better provoke her back into a fury before he lost all credibility with her and her brothers and Peters for life by kissing her in front of them and blurting out his shocked feelings.

‘There’s no excuse for putting your brothers in danger, even if you’re reckless enough to forget how much they depend on you for love and support, and put yourself in danger,’ he said in the hope she might be persuaded to worry about her brothers’ safety as she didn’t seem ready to about her own.

It occurred to Tom that one of the hardest parts of loving this woman might be enduring fear for her when she didn’t seem to have any for herself.

‘You were right, then, Hal, there really are pirates looking for our treasure here at night?’ Josh asked wide-eyed and ready to believe almost anything. Tom could almost feel his sister being torn between a need to take her littlest brother out of here and a belief he would immediately find a way back, or make such a noise the intruders might be scared into shooting someone out of sheer shock.

‘This isn’t the Spanish Main, Josh, and I think we’d best get you to bed after all,’ she said softly, then froze in her tracks as that soft thud she had puzzled over before silenced them all.

As if Tom had said what he was thinking, that she should give up trying to find out who was breaking in herself, she shook her head emphatically at him and glared as if he’d told her to go and drown some kittens. He supposed she knew her brothers a lot better than he did and waved a resigned hand as if to concede they probably had a right to know who was coming in and out of here at will as well. He resolved to put a stop to the whole business if there was even the sniff of real danger, but for now he’d just have to trust his own judgement that Grably’s nephew and his partner in crime were neither habitual criminals nor natural murderers.

‘You four can have the cupboard over there and Peters and I will watch the door from the basement, then,’ he told her with what he hoped was steely enough purpose to tell her she had others to care about her even if she was thinking of rushing headfirst into action. ‘It’s not too late for us to make so much noise they will run off and never come back,’ he added as the only threat he could think of to make them agree to stay out of the line of fire.

‘Josh, are you sure you can keep quiet and not get hurt if the men have to fight?’ Polly asked as if her littlest brother was at least ten years older.

‘I’m very good at not getting hurt when the others fight,’ he said matter-of-factly, and his sister nodded an admissions he was right.

‘You are that, so pray continue to be so and promise me you’ll run and get help if it looks as if we’re going to be outnumbered?’

‘I promise,’ Josh said and crossed his heart for good measure.

Tom felt as proud of the boy as if he’d been his own little brother, or even his son, and the very thought of the tribe of potential giants he and Polly Trethayne might make one day threatened to turn his brain to a mush of besotted daydreams.

‘You’re all as mad as each other,’ Peters muttered as if he thought Tom the worst lunatic of all for not abandoning their attempt to trap the intruders on the spot, or somehow make the rackety Trethayne family leave them to spring it alone. He clearly didn’t know any of them as well as Tom did, then, or he wouldn’t even consider it a real possibility.

‘Maybe, but at least in there they’ll be relatively safe,’ Tom whispered so low so that the intrepid quartet now piling into the broom cupboard as if it was the only place they would dream of being on a June night wouldn’t hear him.

He wanted to laugh at the same time as he felt oddly proud of them for being who they were. He also longed to get Polly alone so he could persuade her to trust herself and them to him for as long as they might need him. There was no question of him ever not needing her now, but one day her brothers would want to live their own lives. Until then they would be his as truly as if they really did carry Banburgh blood in their veins instead of the unique Trethayne kind he was longing to see zing through his own children mingled with his.

He half-believed they’d made enough noise and fuss to warn anyone within half a mile, but a mechanism behind the panelling in the room that had once been used as a butler’s pantry clicked and opened even as he drew breath to call the whole thing off. He scented something he remembered from long ago on the air with a real sense of dread and wished too late he’d managed to send them away. Of course they would then lay in wait farther away from him and be at even more risk, so he stopped cursing himself for a dozen different sorts of a fool and listened for what came next with a fast beating heart instead.

‘I told you we shouldn’t come back here no more,’ a half-familiar voice whispered as he followed a dimly lit and burlier figure into the hall.

‘Stow your rattle,’ the one he recalled a little too well from that first night here ordered impatiently, and Tom heard the smoothed-out tones of an educated man and raised his eyebrows in the darkness of their hiding place.

‘If we can’t find it after all these months, it ain’t here to be found, Ollie.’

‘Hold your tongue, you fool, of course it is.’

So what the devil was Grably’s nephew doing back at Dayspring? Searching for something his lunatic uncle left behind when he was carted off to the private asylum by his embarrassed brother-in-law all those years ago, Tom supposed, hearing the two men argue about where they had left to look. Was this the moment to let them know they’d been discovered and it was time this wild goose chase came to an end? Probably, but the fools were between him and the Trethaynes’ hiding place and he didn’t trust Polly or her little brothers not to leap out and put themselves in danger just because it was there.

‘He said there was a priceless treasure hidden between the moon and the earth and in the same part of the castle as he lived in when he ruled it and that idiot of a boy was kept in his proper place,’ the nephew said with the same fixed stubbornness Tom recalled hearing in his guardian’s voice all those years ago and only just managed to suppress a shudder.

He ran over their clue to the hiding place of whatever it was again in his head and this time had to bite back a laugh. There was an ancient carving of the moon and the sun orbiting the earth in a mantelpiece in one of the bedchambers Tom decided now had been reused from one of the older parts of the castle when the new wing was built. It must have seemed a shame to waste even such a quaint old masterpiece on a servant and so the fireplace had been moved. The fools had probably walked past it dozens of times and not even realised what they sought was right under their noses, but why they would be looking for it in the first place was beyond him.

Still, he heard a muffled grunt from the cupboard and shrugged in the darkness as he resigned himself to springing his trap a little before time. He hadn’t much stomach for hearing more and at least they’d given any accomplices time to crawl out of whatever worm-hole they used to enter the castle without being seen. These two were alone and he doubted very much they would put up much of a fight.

‘You’ve been deceived,’ he drawled as he stood upright.

Two more dark lanterns were hastily added to the total as the intruders felt the need to find out who was challenging them. Tom hoped the Trethaynes would realise the Mantons in his and Peters’s hands were primed and loaded and have the sense to stay where they were.

‘Mantaigne, what the hell are you doing here?’ the taller of the two asked as if he was the one with every right to ask questions.

‘Funnily enough, I thought I owned the place,’ Tom said lightly, circling the petrified figures to put himself between them and Polly, who saw what he was about and emerged from her hiding place to startle the intruders into stunned silence.

‘He does,’ she said with an emphatic nod that defied anyone to argue.

‘I heard about a giant doxy in breeches who lived here behind Mantaigne’s back, but I never thought you’d stay and warm his bed for him now he’s found courage to come back after all these years of cowering away in town.’

‘You take that back, she’s my sister and she’s not a doxy,’ Henry Trethayne ordered, in a fine brotherly fury Tom hadn’t thought the scholarly boy had in him.

‘Ladies don’t wear breeches or carry pistols,’ the nephew pointed out with a sneer, and Tom wondered if he had found some courage over the past two decades, until he reminded himself the fool probably didn’t believe she would actually shoot him, his mistake.

‘Yet still I have the pistol and you have a great deal of explaining to do,’ she said as coolly as most ladies of Tom’s acquaintance might if they were wielding a teapot and asking if an unwanted visitor would like more tea rather than brandishing a pistol he hadn’t even known she possessed.

‘I suggest you start now before one of us decides to shoot you for the hell of it,’ he said coolly, despite this mad impulse to grin like a fool because he’d suddenly realised exactly how complex and how simple his life was going to be from now on.

Arrogant of him to believe he would win her when Polly was about as predictable as the north wind, but something told him the chance was right here, ready to be seized and gloated over, and he really didn’t intend to waste it.

‘I, for one, am getting very bored,’ Peters said laconically and Tom had never liked the fellow better.

‘And I just wish someone would let me have a go,’ Hal said with an aggrieved look at his sister, who narrowed her incredible eyes and straightened her arm as if getting ready to pick which bit of villain to shoot first.

‘All right,’ the smaller of the two men said with a look of terror on his face. ‘I’ll tell you everything if you all promise not to shoot.’

‘I’m not set on it, at least not in your case,’ Tom said reasonably enough to his way of thinking.

‘I really don’t like the idea of them invading your house whenever they feel like it,’ Polly said calmly, and Peters just grinned and cocked his pistol as if he didn’t have to dislike a man to take a potshot at him.

‘Our house,’ Tom corrected as patiently as he could manage.

It was possibly the oddest proposal ever made, but she read it for what it was and let her gun arm waver for a breath-stealing moment. It was as well Peters seemed so deadly calm neither man moved an inch as he watched them with chilling indifference, since Tom was more interested in her response than their unwanted visitors.

‘Do you remember all those seaman’s knots Sam Barker has been teaching you to tie, Hal?’ Peters asked casually.

‘Of course I do. I’m not dexterous like Toby, but once I learn something I don’t forget it.’

‘Then tie one or two in these and make sure neither can get free. There’s a good chap.’

‘I can help,’ Josh said crossly, for being seven was clearly no excuse for missing out on anything interesting for the Trethayne clan.

‘You can keep your sister’s gun steady on the fat one, my friend,’ Peters said as if he didn’t think so either. ‘And I truly hope the sight of Josh Trethayne with a gun terrifies you as deeply as it does me, whoever you are,’ Peters said as he held his own aim rock steady and made sure neither man had any thoughts about seizing Hal and using him as a hostage against their own escape.

Luckily it seemed to do so and they kept still as statues. Tom and Polly were far too preoccupied with not looking at each other to be much use, although Tom always swore afterwards if he hadn’t had such an able pack of helpers he might have taken a much more active role in subduing the prisoners himself.

‘Deal with them, would you, Peters?’ he said absently as he took his eyes off Polly long enough to nod sagely at the others and let them leave without him.

‘Will they be all right?’ Polly asked as if she only had half her mind on the supposed business of the night as well.

‘I should imagine so. I know your pistol wasn’t loaded, even if Josh and that poor man he’s driving along like a cow to market have no idea,’ Tom replied.

‘What do you mean “ours”?’ she demanded in the semi-darkness from the single lantern the others had left them to light up a whole cavernous hallway and half an empty house.

‘I mean marry me, live with me, love me,’ Tom said a little desperately, for suddenly it didn’t seem quite so certain she would believe him after that ridiculous scene this morning when he made it very plain he wasn’t going to ask her to be anything in his life.

‘Why?’

‘Because I want you to?’

‘Not enough.’

‘Then do it because I think you the most extraordinary woman I ever met, because I can’t imagine how tedious my life would be without you and your brothers and your oddly assorted band of friends and because I love you more than I thought I had it in me to love anyone. Be everything to me that I always thought I couldn’t have, Paulina Trethayne. Please? Before I beg and embarrass us both.’

‘I can’t be meek and conventional and there’s no point trying to make me into a proper marchioness. I’m more suited to be your mistress, but I can’t do it. I can’t abandon my family.’

‘And if anything happened to me you would fight the devil himself back into hell to see that our whelps were safe. If I’m ever to have a wife and gamble on making children with her, she will just have to be you. I couldn’t dare the fates and risk making them with anyone else, Polly. No other woman on God’s earth has your courage and loyalty and that lioness’s heart of yours and at last I’ve had the good sense to realise I don’t want to live without you.’

So far they had faced each other like adversaries, but now he moved closer. She eyed him sceptically and he could sense her going through his list of reasons with a fine-toothed comb, but they had been enchanted on a more sensual level from the very first moment they set eyes on each other and he intended to take advantage of the fact right now.

‘And you’re sure you love me? It seems to have come upon you suddenly, considering you rejected me earlier today.’

‘It crept up on me inch by inch from the first day on, but having the sense to know it did ambush me tonight. Now I wonder it took me so long to realise why I felt as if I was living in the wrong skin, why I lay awake in the middle of a howling gale, in the barest and most draughty room I’ve slept in since I was eight years old, night after night and longed for you to be lying in that bed next to me, even if you were fast asleep. If you’ll promise to lie by my side for the rest of our lives, I’ll put up with living in this old wreck while it’s made fit for a marchioness to live in once again. If you tell me you can’t endure the idea, I don’t think I shall even be able to come back to Dayspring again, however, for I truly couldn’t endure it without you now, Polly. I can’t stand the thought of anything much about my life without you in it now I’ve come to see sense at last.’

‘Put like that, I almost believe you mean it,’ she allowed, and neither of them took much notice when the pallid light suddenly went out, as if the candle had been snuffed by some mischievous ghost.

‘Believe it, my darling Amazon,’ he whispered and the darkness seemed to unleash everything they felt together this morning and something more as well.

‘Convince me,’ she breathed as his eager hands reached for her and found no resistance at all, so he did so as thoroughly and emphatically as he could at such short notice.

* * *

Hours later Polly lay at her lover’s side in that draughty bedchamber he’d complained about earlier and watched the moon set as he slept. She treasured every snuffle and snort as he lay there prone and deeply asleep, without any of the barriers my Lord Mantaigne usually put between himself and the rest of the world. Speaking for herself, she felt too energised, too loved and needed to sleep. A smile of remembered satisfaction curled her lips in a smile that felt as if it might never leave her lips, and she rolled over onto her front so she could watch him even more closely.

She had no doubt Tom was a peerless lover of beautiful women and part of her might thank some of them for teaching him how to rouse and then satisfy a woman until every inch and sense she had sang; on the other hand she might not, since they were so beautiful and had been so satisfied.

With awe and wonder and a residual heat she should probably be ashamed of, she recalled how it felt to be taken over by love, washed under by it, carried along yet robustly active in the timeless dance of lovers she had only just learned so it itched against her fingertips to start up all over again. She couldn’t resist smoothing a hand down her bare thigh in a sensuous line of pleasures beyond her wildest dreams until today, couldn’t repress a wriggle of delight against the fine linen sheets his finicky valet insisted my lord had on his bed, even if everything else about his makeshift chamber was beneath the dignity of a marquis and lowered the consequence of his personal servant.

‘It’s like sleeping with an eel,’ Tom murmured a sleepy protest, and she reached out and traced his smile with an exploring finger, because she couldn’t resist knowing she had the right, or almost had it until they were wed and she was sure of it. Here was everything she had never thought to have with any man, let alone this one, and how terrible it would have been never to feel even a shadow of such glory.

‘You will have to get used to it then, my lord,’ she murmured as another of those delight-soaked quivers shot through her body, but this time a little less lazy appreciation and a lot more eagerness for more shot through her in its wake.

‘I dare say I might, although it’s obviously going to be a sacrifice,’ he said and promptly went from sleepy to demanding between one breath and the next.

‘I admire a man willing to make those for the sake of the woman he loves,’ she joked, still hardly able to believe it could be her.

‘You are worth it, my Polly, worth every last long, elegant inch of sacrifice I’m making by sharing this very hard and narrow bed with you. You do know that you’re perfectly designed to fulfil a man’s wildest fantasies, don’t you? I don’t think I ever saw such long and lovely legs or felt the way I feel about you, here, and here and especially...here,’ he whispered into the sensitised curve of her kiss-swollen lower lip and played with it between his own. ‘Then there’s all the way down here,’ he husked as he ran kisses down her throat in a long and lovely line of hot licks that made her pulse race and her insides hot and wet and ready for him all over again.

She writhed under him as he reared up to appreciate that curve fully, then track even more intimately down and cup her waiting breast for them both to marvel at. She looked down and saw what she already knew. Fire stirred ever hotter in her belly as she craned her neck back to watch him nuzzle at the frantic nub of one of her tightly needy nipples, then seize it in his mouth to drive her nigh mad with clenched need. Even after he’d taken her so gently earlier tonight that they soared into an awesome new world she hadn’t let herself believe in even in her wildest dreams until then, she couldn’t quite believe even he could satiate the heavy need burning and demanding at her most intimate core right now.

He raised his head and sucked in a deep breath, seemed to draw in gentlemanly good manners along with the cool pre-dawn air, and tried to shift her so he could give her almost heaven with his gentle yet wickedly knowing touch alone.

‘No, you or nothing,’ she argued boldly.

‘You will be sore, love, and I might get you with child,’ he murmured a protest back. How could she not love him when he looked by the tight expression on his dear face in the last glance of moonlight as if his good manners were costing him dearer than even she knew?

‘Since you might have done that already, and even you have to admit it takes two people to make one of those, you had best marry me out of hand then, my lord,’ she told him, smoothing one of her unsteady hands over his set mouth to make him loosen the hold he had himself under so determinedly it was eating her up inside.

‘It will take three days, according to Peters, who seems to know more than most about hasty marriages. I’m not risking a long courtship or a seven-month child with you, love, since you’d never let me hear the last of it if we happen to set the world by the ears in nine months’ time.’

‘I wouldn’t dare reproach you, since it would be half my fault, but I want to be your wife, Tom, more than I’ve wanted anything in my life until today.’

‘As far as I’m concerned you already are, but we’d best get the formalities out of the way as soon as can be,’ he said and since he had been caressing her so intimately she had to pinch herself to realise this was really happening to her, Polly Trethayne of nowhere, then she writhed under his inflammatory touch, demand in every inch of her body as she wound as much of it as she could against as much of him as she could reach.

‘Love me all the way through, then,’ she whispered and ran a fingertip down his supple backbone and felt him quiver like a greyhound with sensual excitement. ‘I need you far too much,’ she added huskily.

‘No,’ he argued fiercely with her, ‘you need me just enough. Enough to meet the desperation I have for you, the ache in my gut I’ve lived with since the first time I set eyes on you and wanted you so badly it felt as if I was being ripped apart by it at times. I thought I could never have you lie like this, feel you take me inside you like this...’ He paused, and she opened to him, felt him drive within the slick, hot tightness of her most intimate core and shivered with sheer joy and exultation. ‘I thought I could never rock and ride with you all the way to the heart of the sun,’ he gasped as he took up the race again, and now she had the measure of it she felt the drive into something wonderful as well, as he rode hard and high inside her, and she wrapped her long and slender legs about his neat buttocks and rode with him.

She felt hot and greedy for everything he had to give her and deep and generous with all she had to offer in return. She wound her ankles together over his striving thighs and felt his whole body gasp at the feel of her wholly with him, completely engaged in the lovely flight into somewhere nobody else could ever go but them, together. Now the race was frantic and even more intense than it had been last time. She felt almost as if the full force of Mother Nature herself flowed through her as she threw back her head and felt the life of it shoot through her until even her toes and fingertips seemed to glow with it. ‘Oh, my love,’ she gasped as she writhed against him, and his thrusts deepened and seemed to take her even further away from her day-to-day self. There was that forlorn moment of wondering if the journey was all there was and their destination just tantalisingly out of reach and then they were there and how could she have doubted they would be?

‘I love, love, love you,’ she murmured on a keening whisper that turned into a satiated sigh that deferred to the fact her brothers were asleep only a floor below with the windows open.

Still their bodies soared together and the climax of that frantic ride seemed to promise eternity as they lay locked and mindless and yet so deeply mindful of each other all at the same time. Polly felt quivers of ecstasy rock her all the way down to her toes and wondered how rapidly he’d made her proud of her lanky inches instead of always half-ashamed to be so tall and supposedly unfeminine.

‘Aren’t you glad you came?’ she asked innocently as the fire finally sank to a dearly remembered spark and the odd magical shiver of ecstasy still shook her.

To her surprise he seemed to find that comment irresistibly amusing and buried a bark of male laughter against her hair, where it spilled in a wild silky cloud against the down pillows of my lord’s makeshift bed.

‘What?’ she demanded, almost managing to feel cross with the great puzzle of a man as he groaned with suppressed laughter, then finally made himself disengage from her sated body as reluctantly as she made herself admit it was near dawn and about time she resorted to her own part of the castle.

‘I’m delighted I came back to my own and to you this spring, my love. Even more delighted that the next fool on my beloved godmother’s list can now take over his part in her Machiavellian schemes and deliriously happy that I’ll very shortly be marrying a marchioness after all my protests that I never would. Will that do?’

‘Possibly, but why were you laughing at me so hard you nearly gave us both away just now?’

‘I will tell you another time.’

‘Will you now?’ she asked as if she had the least intention of staying out of his bed anytime it could be avoided for the next forty or fifty years.

‘It will give you something to look forward to,’ he teased her with a wicked glint in his eyes and since she was beginning to be able to see the colour of them as the sun thought hard about rising on a fine June morning, she shot him a challenging look before she sprang out of bed and began to resume her scandalous breeches and best coat.

‘Maybe, but today I’m looking forward to the boys showing us this phantom treasure that sounds like the little details of your mother’s life nobody seemed to recall seeing for the past two decades. Then you should probably show me the lord and lady’s private quarters of your soon-to-be-refurbished mansion, my lord,’ she said with a jaunty smile and saw shadows steal into his gaze as he contemplated whether he could live with her in that part of the house after all.

She held her breath even as she pretended to be serenely convinced there was nothing out of the way in her plans for their morning and reached for my lord’s fine set of hair brushes to smooth the tumbling mass of her hair into her usual plait to at least start the day halfway to being tame. ‘My valet will be as shocked as a maiden lady if he comes in and catches you sitting on the end of my bed combing out your witchy hair for my very personal delight,’ he warned her lazily.

‘He’d better learn to live with me or find another job, because I’m not going to spend any more nights in my room across the courtyard to save his blushes or anyone else’s,’ she warned.