The Marquis's Awakening. Elizabeth Beacon

Чтение книги онлайн.

       Chapter Four

      Polly 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 СКАЧАТЬ