Читать книгу Regency Rogues: Unlacing The Forbidden - Louise Allen - Страница 16

The hotel, when they reached it, was large, but half seemed in ruin with windows boarded up. There was even a small tree sprouting in the gutters.

‘This looks a wreck,’ Rhys said to le Brun.

‘It is too big these days, too expensive to keep it all in repair. Before the Revolution it belonged to…a family. They no longer needed it, so part was taken over by a citoyen, a citizen of the Revolution, you understand? The same has happened all over the town.’ He shrugged. ‘All over France.’

‘No longer needed it? You mean they were guillotined?’ A citizen. Citoyen, one of the people. Had the landlord been part of the mob who bayed for the death of aristocrats? Thea shivered.

‘Madame, such an unpleasant subject.’ He pursed his lips as though she had made a remark in bad taste. Perhaps she had.

‘The half that is in use seems decent enough,’ Thea said to placate him as he ushered them inside.

He exchanged a flurry of rapid French with the short man who came out to greet them and two maids were despatched upstairs, arms full of linens. ‘They prepare another bedchamber for madame,’ le Brun explained. ‘I show you now to the salon of the suite.’ The landlord was swept aside. ‘There is a chef, a proper man cook,’ le Brun announced with a gesture towards a door at the rear. ‘Not a female cook as so often is the case in England, I understand.’

They followed him upstairs, leaving the porters and Hodge in energetic dispute over how much extra it would cost to have the luggage carried up.

‘Voilà!’ Le Brun flung open a door with a flourish.

They were on the principal floor of the house, in a chamber that had once been an elegant reception room. It was whitewashed now and worn rugs were scattered over a floor of soft red brick, but the fireplace was magnificent and marble. The walls were hung with huge mirrors, damp spotted, their ornate frames bearing faint traces of their original gilding, and the assortment of furniture had once seen far better days.

‘Monsieur le comte, your chamber is here.’ Le Brun opened a door on the far side. ‘Madame, they prepare yours there.’

On the far side, thank goodness. ‘I trust the beds are aired.’ Thea had practised the sentence in French in her head all the way up the stairs.

Le Brun shot her a look of deep reproach. ‘But of course!’

‘We will need hot baths immediately, and then breakfast.’ She threw back her veil and produced a smile. ‘If you please.’

The effect on the Frenchman was curious. He smiled back at her with more genuine warmth than he had shown before, then he glanced at Rhys with a faint smirk. ‘I see to it at once, madame.’

Thea snorted as he closed the door behind himself. ‘He has realised that I am not, after all, your mistress. He will treat me with slightly more respect and he feels rather less for you now.’

‘How did you work that out?’ Rhys turned from the window and his contemplation of the street outside.

‘He saw me unveiled. I told you, I am not mistress material. So he decides I am respectable and you are to be pitied for having the chore of escorting me.’

‘Oh, for goodness’ sake! As if the suitability of a woman for that role has anything to do with looks.’ Rhys’s brain appeared to catch up with his mouth and he shut it with a snap.

‘What does it have to do with?’ Thea asked, overcome with curiosity.

‘Never mind! Will you please stop talking about mistresses?’

‘Certainly! Perhaps, while you are lecturing me, you can tell me what it is we have to discuss in private?’

‘Lecturing?’ Rhys narrowed his eyes at her. ‘Please sit down, Thea.’ This was not the just-awakened man who had made her smile with his precipitous exit from the chaise. It was certainly not the inebriated old friend, sprawled in a chair and harassed by the kitchen cat. This was every inch the adult half stranger she had caught unsettling glimpses of on their journey.

‘Very well.’ She swept cloak and skirts around her with a flourish and sat in a chair that had probably once graced the town house of some now-executed aristocrat. The idea made her shiver.

‘You are cold.’ From his frown, that appeared to be a fault on her part.

‘No, I am…unsettled. Please say what it is you wish to say and then I will go and change.’

‘You should never have come to me and I should never have brought you with me,’ Rhys stated without preamble.

‘I was obviously mistaken in thinking I could rely on an old friend to help me.’

‘You should have been able to rely on an old friend to do the right thing. If I had been halfway sober, I would never have brought you. But it is done now and there is no going back from it. I will get you to Godmama safely.’

‘Thank—’

‘I have not finished. Your position is open to misinterpretation from everyone we meet, servants or otherwise. I will not have a lady under my protection insulted or embarrassed, and I would therefore be grateful if you would do nothing to draw attention to yourself, or our journey is likely to be a turbulent one.’

‘Indeed?’ Thea got to her feet with a swirl of skirts that would have been considerably more effective if they had not been overwashed old wool. ‘Other than being female, I do not believe I have done anything that might be said to draw attention to my person. I regret that I am not able to rectify that grievous fault—unless you wish me to dress as a boy? I still have the clothes.’

‘You make an appalling boy—you do not have the figure for it.’ Rhys appeared to find the carved overmantel fascinating.

‘I could bind my—’

‘It is not your… Not the parts that need binding that are the problem. No youth has hips like that, and those can’t be bound.’

‘Hips? Are you saying that I have a fat posterior?’

‘No! Thea, this is a highly improper conversation.’ Rhys glared at her. ‘You have curves, that is all I am saying.’

‘So I should hope.’

‘You never had them before.’ Rhys’s lips twitched into a reluctant smile. ‘You used to be all skin and bone and angles. You still have the elbows. I have the bruises from last night.’

‘I was sixteen the last time we met face-to-face, for goodness’ sake! I was a late developer,’ she added mutinously.

‘Well, you’ve developed now, and that’s a problem.’

‘Not according to Stepmama. She considers that I finally have an adequate figure.’ Rhys appeared to be grinding his teeth. ‘Anyway, I have no intention of flaunting anything, or of flirting with passing rakes, leaning over the balcony en negligée or otherwise drawing attention to myself. Does that reassure you?’

‘It does. Thank you, Thea.’ They watched each other in wary silence for a minute, then Rhys said, ‘I am not used to having to look after an unmarried girl.’

‘I am not a girl.’ His words might have been intended as a small flag of truce, but her precarious hold on her temper was slipping again. ‘If I am old enough to be married, and to inherit my own money, I think that makes me a woman, don’t you?’ Even to her own ears she sounded remarkably tart. What was the matter with her? She never lost her temper—she was known for cheerful common sense, everyone said so.

‘No doubt it does. And that is the problem. At least we understand each other now.’

We do? She opened her mouth to ask that very question as Polly bustled in.

‘The room’s all ready for you, my lady, and the bath’s being filled, although I had a bit of a problem with the servants here to start with. Cobwebs like you wouldn’t believe and no proper pillows, just nasty, hard bolster things.’ She picked up Thea’s discarded bonnet. ‘Amazing how they understand if you speak nice and loud and slow, isn’t it?’

‘French servants or Englishmen?’ Thea murmured as she followed the maid out. From the corner of her eye she saw Rhys’s mouth quirk up at the corner. So he had heard her. Ah well, so long as that half smile meant they were back on their old footing and he stopped that nonsense about drawing attention to herself. And wanting to fight anyone who insulted her.

It was rather charming, she decided as she rolled down her stockings. Gallant. Up to now gentlemen had not seemed to consider that she might need helping down gangplanks or rescuing from embarrassment. Even when Anthony was making his pretence of courting her so ardently he had never tried the ‘fragile flower’ treatment.

Not that she did need assistance, of course. She would hate to be a helpless female, but it was pleasant to be looked after once in a while. The memory of just how safe Rhys’s body had made her feel sent a shiver shimmering across her skin. Odd, she must be tired, or perhaps she was coming down with a chill.

And perhaps safe was not the right word, not when she remembered the shocking pressure of his arousal against her buttocks, or the heat of his body. But that was just a male reflex, nothing to be worried about. Everything would be fine, provided Rhys stopped lecturing her. Even discovery and ruin hardly mattered. Nothing did, provided she was not forced back home into a grey nothingness of an existence. She shivered again. That would be so bad she might even agree to marriage and find herself tied to someone like Anthony.

Polly lifted her gown over her head and Thea shed shift and petticoats before stepping into the bath. ‘Heaven.’ This would stop the shivers. ‘A hot soak and a soft bed that doesn’t move. It is soft, I hope?’

‘The sort that swallows you,’ Polly said cheerfully, and passed the soap. ‘They’ve put me in there.’ She pointed at a door. ‘Great big room. And Mr Hodge is on the other side next to his lordship. Not exactly cosy, though, is it?’

‘Not at all. I think it was a quite grand town house once and this was the main reception floor. These are not really bedchambers.’

‘And the owner’s come down in the world? He doesn’t look much like a gentleman.’ Polly began to shake out Thea’s clothes. The corset had reappeared, she noticed.

‘I suspect the real owner and his family went to the guillotine,’ Thea said, repressing another shiver.

‘Ooh! I was forgetting that.’ Polly’s eyes were huge. ‘Murdering Frenchies. Why, they’re probably eyeing up his lordship and sharpening the blade even now….’

‘We are at peace with France,’ Thea soothed. ‘There is a king on the throne again and Bonaparte is safely banished to Elba in the middle of the Mediterranean.’

‘And quite right, too,’ Polly muttered. ‘Now, I suppose it will have to be the blue gown tonight.’ She prodded the limp garment with disfavour while Thea made herself focus on the immediate crisis of her inadequate wardrobe and pushed other, more disturbing, thoughts back into the shadows.

Rhys folded his long legs into the bath and bent his head for Hodge to pour over a jug of hot water. Thea and that tongue of hers, as sharp as ever. But she never used it to wound. Only to tease, to create laughter, to press home a point.

He’d missed that laughter and teasing from a woman. There was laughter enough with his male friends, but his mistresses were always more intent on being seductive than on amusing him, which he supposed was fair enough, that was what he wanted from them—beauty, sensual expertise in bed and sophisticated conversation beforehand.

They were an expensive luxury, but Rhys was prepared to pay for quality. But some things could not be bought from a woman: friendship, laughter, loyalty. For a few weeks he would have those with Thea, he supposed, and felt the smile curve his mouth.

‘More hot water, my lord?’

‘Hmm?’ He must have fallen into a trance. ‘Yes. More hot water, more soap.’ Thea. Just as long as you remember that she’s an innocent. A bright, clever, independent innocent. It is a good thing she’s been stubborn enough to turn down those marriage offers—she isn’t cut out for matrimony and they’d only make her miserable, forcing her into the mould of a perfect wife.

Hodge passed him a back brush and Rhys began to scrub, shifting his shoulders under the pleasurable rasp of the bristles.

But she’d have to be careful, he realised as he considered it further. Life as a single woman would be made smoother with wealth, but it would be all too easy to slip into eccentricity, or worse, if she failed to find a manner of living that met with the approval of society. He would have to talk to her about it, make certain she made the right decisions, just as he had.

‘So what are you planning to do with all this money when you have control of it?’ Rhys asked.

The wind on the cliff top was blowing her veil in all directions and he could not see her face. With an irritated ‘Tsk’, Thea gave up wrestling with her veil and threw it back over her bonnet. ‘There is no one up here to see,’ she said, as though expecting him to demand that she lower it again. ‘What am I planning? Why, to be independent.’

‘I know that, but independently doing what, exactly?’ Rhys hitched one hip onto a tumbledown stone wall and half turned as though watching the town and harbour below. Out of the corner of his eye he studied Thea as she paced back and forth over the rabbit-cropped turf.

‘Living, of course! What a ridiculous question.’

‘Where? With whom? Who will be managing your investments? What will you be spending your money on?’ He swivelled to face her and she stopped, a furrow between her brows as she frowned at him. ‘What will be your purpose in life?’

‘To enjoy myself. To be free.’

‘Selfish,’ Rhys commented, with the intent of provoking her. Down in the harbour, fishing boats were running out on the tide, and he pretended to watch them. ‘That’s not like you.’ Or perhaps it was. Six years was a long time. He had changed, she must have, too.

‘I don’t mean mindless frivolity,’ Thea protested. ‘I mean doing things that I consider worthwhile. Something that will tell me I am alive,’ she added so softly he thought he must have misheard her. Surely life in her father’s house was not so stifling? ‘I will set up a charity—that would be satisfying….’

‘To be Lady Bountiful to the grateful poor?’ He let the corner of his mouth curl into a sneer. As it had in the past, his goading worked. Thea glared at him, but he had loosened her tongue.

‘No, certainly not. People do not need to be patronised, to be done good to. I will find something worthwhile and invest in it. Perhaps set some enterprising women up in small businesses, or provide apprenticeships for bright boys. I have a brain with some ideas in it, Rhys. I will suffocate if I don’t use it, if I am not free.’

He hid both his approval and his unease at her vehemence. ‘It does not sound as though you have planned it out.’

‘Of course I have not.’ Thea marched round to stand in front of him, cutting off his view of the harbour. ‘I need to find out exactly what my income is, learn how to manage it and, I hope, increase it. I have to find a suitable companion and somewhere to live. I need to work out all those things and then I can see where I am.

‘Anyway,’ she demanded, ‘what is so important about planning? You used to do things on the spur of the moment. Improvise.’

‘I do not any longer.’ He stood up, rather too close for her comfort, it seemed. Thea cast a harried glance over her shoulder, apparently decided that the cliff edge was a safe distance from her heels and took a long step backwards. ‘These days I plan—the estate, my investments, my political life, the way I live.’

‘Predictable,’ Thea retorted. ‘Boring. Do you schedule your mistresses according to a timetable?’

‘Responsible,’ he flung back, ignoring that last jibe. Rhys planned so that nothing, nobody would have the chance to let him down again, but he saw no reason to justify himself. He caught at the ragged edge of his temper and said coolly, ‘Grow up, Thea.’

‘I have.’ Annoyance was bringing out the colour to her cheeks. ‘But I do not understand why being a responsible adult involves losing spontaneity, joy, surprise. Adventure.’ The look she shot him held reproach. ‘Have you any concept what it would be like to have to dwindle into an old maid or be married off to a man whom you cannot like, let alone respect?’

No, he could not, and it made him damnably uncomfortable that Thea of all people feared those things. His conscience nudged him. She had been his friend and he had all but forgotten her as he had rebuilt his life. But what did he know about respectable women and their emotional needs? Perhaps some practical common sense would help—it was all he had to offer. ‘This is not about me. It is about you, Thea. You have two assets that must last you your lifetime, if you are not to marry.’

She tipped her head to one side, instantly curious. She had never been able to hold on to a bad mood for long. The only time he had seen her stay angry was two hours after the fiasco of his wedding ceremony when he had found her wringing the neck of Serena’s bouquet. And even then, when she had seen him, she had smiled ruefully. ‘Poor flowers, it isn’t their fault.’

‘I have my inheritance, that is all,’ she said now.

‘You have that, and you will need to choose your financial and legal advisers with great care, for those funds must last to finance your independence.’

‘So what is the other asset?’ Intelligent hazel eyes fringed with dark lashes narrowed in thought.

‘Your reputation. Respectable single women with wealth and breeding and a certain interesting eccentricity will be accepted anywhere—look at Godmama. But get a shady reputation, just the hint of loose behaviour, and you will find doors close in your face.’

‘Loose behaviour? Me?’ Thea gave an unladylike snort of derision.

‘Like gadding about the Continent unchaperoned with a man to whom you are not related, for example?’

The charming blush faded. ‘Nonsense. No one is going to find out. Godmama and I will concoct a suitable story involving a courier and a suitable female companion, you’ll see.’ There it was again, just that flash of emotion behind the confidence. Surely it could not be fear of what would await her if she had to return home?

‘I hope so. It is getting cold—let’s go down and see what there is for dinner.’ He stood and offered his arm and she slipped her hand under his elbow. He was apparently forgiven. But then, Thea always did forgive. Rhys felt another twinge of guilt, this time for goading her and, at the same time, for entertaining Gothic imaginings about her father. The earl might not be the best parent in the world, but he would not mistreat Thea, surely?

‘Scallops, I hope. Dieppe is famous for them, I believe.’

‘That sounds good,’ Rhys agreed. ‘I was thinking of a fat lobster, personally.’

He waited until they had left the slippery cliff-top turf for the worn path before he asked, ‘Would it not be better to find a husband after all? Someone to take care of you—and your inheritance?’

‘His inheritance, you mean. Once I marry, I lose all control of my money.’

‘Is that why you are so set against marriage?’ A group of soldiers lounged by a checkpoint on the road out of town. They glanced over at them, then went back to their game of dice. There was something she was not telling him, and he was going to winkle it out of her, however hard she resisted.