The Regency Season Collection: Part Two. Кэрол Мортимер

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       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.

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