The Regency Season Collection: Part Two. Кэрол Мортимер

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СКАЧАТЬ Turkey carpet. ‘Whoever she is, she is a wonderful cook if the delicious smells coming from her kitchen are anything to go by.’

      ‘She is, and they are,’ Polly agreed lamely.

      ‘She has invited me to eat with you all, once I’ve dislodged the dust of ages from my person and can sit down to it like a civilised human being.’

      ‘That sounds like her,’ she said, still trying to enmesh her image of the wicked and sophisticated aristocrat she’d hated for so long with this rueful, sweaty and filthy man who seemed very ready to admit the joke was on him.

      ‘I offered to marry her, but she says she’s already spoken for,’ he added, and she refused to like him—yes, that was it, she simply refused to be charmed. He wasn’t going to subvert Paulina Trethayne with his easy, intimate smiles, or the glitter of mischief in those intensely blue eyes that invited her to laugh with him and bid goodbye to the wary distrust she wanted to keep between them like a shield.

      ‘It will take you until midnight to get yourself clean enough for that,’ she blurted out, and he laughed as if at a brilliant witticism. She felt it as if he’d reached inside her and jarred her whole being with that one rumble of masculine enjoyment. ‘And I refuse to wait here like a waxwork while you preen and primp and peacock yourself back into a state of suitable splendour and the rest of us go hungry, so you’d best hurry up.’

      ‘You thought me splendid before I acquired all this dirt then, Miss Trethayne?’ he asked with an ironic bow that lost some of its effect when a twig from some ancient bird’s nest fell on the carpet at his dusty feet and he had to stoop down even further to pick it up.

      It would be silly to find it admirable in him to consider whoever had to keep this place clean. Of course she didn’t think he was anything of the kind and reinforced her disapproval with a glower that might be a little overdone. The sight of it certainly seemed to cheer the contrary man for some reason, and he clicked his heels in a mock-military salute, then stood as upright as a soldier on parade.

      ‘I can quite see why your brothers are terrified of your wrath, Miss Trethayne. You must set very high standards of cleanliness and good behaviour.’

      ‘They are not terrified of me,’ she told him with the feeling of having been caught kicking puppies, making her meet those blue, blue eyes of his with shock and reproach in her own before she remembered he was a master of manipulating those about him and glared full at him, since he was so determined to get her attention.

      ‘No? And they seem such well-behaved and sensible lads,’ he lied with a straight face.

      Dote on them though she might, she had no illusions about any of her lively and headstrong brothers and nobody had ever accused them of being less than a handful, even when they were on their best behaviour.

      ‘You know very well they’re nothing of the sort,’ she said dourly.

      How had he tricked her into saying any such thing within such a short time of his arrival? She would have sworn to any other outsider that her brothers were the best boys she had ever come across if they even tried to tell her the Trethayne brothers were a touch wild and ought to be confined to the care of a strict schoolmaster until they learned some manners. Now she was admitting they were a trio of noisy and argumentative urchins to her worst enemy and he was her worst enemy, wasn’t he?

      ‘I like them,’ he claimed, and that was just plain unfair of him.

      ‘So do I,’ she replied repressively and stared pointedly at the spider about to drop off his elbow onto Lady Wakebourne’s favourite chair. ‘If you don’t go away and take your livestock with you, there won’t be any dinner left for you to devour when you get back from restoring yourself to your usual state of dandified magnificence in an hour or two,’ she told him nastily, but this man brought out the worst in her and that was that.

      ‘Scared of spiders, Miss Trethayne?’

      ‘No, only marquises, my lord.’

      ‘Very sensible, you really wouldn’t want one of us in your hair,’ he said as lightly as if she hadn’t just shot a dart past his armour, but somehow she knew she had and felt a twinge of shame twist in her belly that she refused to consider more closely until he’d gone. She wasn’t scared of him so much as her own reactions to him and neither of them needed to know that just now.

      ‘Go away,’ she said dourly, and the wretch did with one last, thoughtful look back at her that said he wondered exactly why she wanted him gone so badly. ‘Why were you looking for me?’ she called after him, feeling as if he’d taken some of the air and all the excitement out of the room with him and contrarily wanting it back.

      I bet lots of women can’t help themselves whenever he’s around, a bleak, repressive inner voice whispered, but she ignored it as best she could.

      ‘Because Lady Wakebourne thought you would know where my valise has gone. If you will excuse me, poor Peters is very likely shivering himself into an early grave out in the laundry room right now, since he refuses to enter the castle in a state of nature after his much-needed ablutions. I, of course, have no such gentlemanly scruples and will be perfectly happy to run about the place stark naked as soon as I’ve washed the dust and dirt of the last century or so away and feel restored to my rude self again.’

      ‘Sam Barker took it up to the South Tower. That’s where all the men sleep,’ she said in a strangled voice she hardly recognised as her own.

      ‘I must remember to thank him for such a kindness, but I don’t think he’d want me searching the place from top to toe and getting dust everywhere right now, do you?’

      ‘I’ll find him and ask him to bring it out to you,’ she said in a loud voice she told herself wasn’t in the least bit squeaky with panic as the idea of this particular man appearing in the hall of his ancestors and naked as the day he was born sent a shudder through her that had nothing at all to do with her being cold.

      ‘My thanks, Miss Trethayne,’ he said as smoothly as if they’d been discussing the weather, then he sauntered away to join poor Mr Peters in the laundry as if he would never dream of wondering how it would feel if they happened to be naked at the same time.

       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 СКАЧАТЬ