The Regency Season Collection: Part Two. Кэрол Мортимер

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СКАЧАТЬ she said as if she had to give the devil his due, even when she didn’t want to.

      ‘A misspent youth,’ he replied as lightly as he could. In truth, he used to creep down in the dead of night to sneak food, hoping his guardian’s lackeys were too drunk to drag him upstairs for a beating.

      ‘I heard you were just a boy when you left, so you hardly had time to indulge in one here,’ she argued softly.

      He really didn’t want to talk about this when he already felt so vulnerable to her, as if he’d had a layer of skin peeled off him and had let her too close after that unwary kiss to fend off her questions as he’d like to.

      ‘I was eight,’ he admitted flatly.

      ‘Poor little boy,’ she murmured.

      ‘Not as poor as Lady Wakebourne’s waifs or even your own brothers would be without their fierce protectors. Do they know how lucky they are?’

      ‘When we march them to their lessons every day and they have to do without the ponies they want to pay for them? What do you think?’ she whispered.

      It seemed education came before riding for boys lucky enough to live under this roof nowadays and yet he didn’t hear a hint of self-pity in her tone. Tom felt something heavy threaten to move in his chest and remake him. Simply being here had threatened to un-dam a torrent of feelings he’d kept to himself since leaving twenty years ago and now this.

      Appalled by the idea this woman might come to mean far too much if he let her, he did his best to wall that wild notion up behind my lord’s facade of careless man about town, for her benefit as much as his. She was the oddest sort of lady he’d ever come across, but didn’t deserve to be shackled to a fool like him if they were discovered lurking in the dark. He scrambled to his feet, brushing down his once-fashionable attire and wrinkling his nose at the feel and smell of dust and dirt under his touch once again.

      ‘Dashed midden,’ he muttered grumpily, then tensed as stealthy footsteps sounded on the stairs from the other side of the building. Grabbing Polly’s hand out of sheer instinct and a worrying urge to protect her at any cost, he dragged her behind one of the great pillars that held the weight of the cantilevered stairs above and whispered to her to keep quiet. He felt her fury at his presumption and squeezed her hand in what he hoped felt like an apology as well as a plea to do as he asked for once. His pulse raced at the contact of her skin against his once more, even as he wondered at himself for not feeling on edge with apprehension instead of frustrated desire.

      ‘I tell thee I heard a noise down here,’ a strongly accented voice echoed down to them. Tom wondered how many felons were infesting a place no self-respecting burglar would walk half-a-dozen steps out of his way to break into.

      ‘It’s only rats,’ a more-educated voice informed him, and Tom shivered at a register in it he couldn’t quite place and didn’t like one little bit, then felt her fingers tighten about his as if she was trying to reassure him and that pulse of wanting turned into something far more dangerous.

      ‘They’re the biggest rats I ever did hear then, Guv’nor,’ the first man muttered as if not sure why he bothered arguing.

      ‘This whole place is an infernal rat-hole; what else would it be?’

      ‘One of them band of gypsies as lives here. I’m sure they heard us last time we was here, but still you keep coming back. They’ll inform on us if you ain’t careful.’

      ‘Not they—if they do they’ll be out of here faster than the cat can lick her ear. No magistrate will listen to a pack of vagrants.’

      ‘You’re lucky they’re only squatting here, then. I’d sooner be on the streets than live here myself, what with all them ghosts and witches they whispers about in the taproom of the Raven late at night.’

      ‘They’re nothing but a pack of smugglers, you superstitious fool, of course they tell tall stories to keep strangers away from the coast on dark nights so they can carry out their trade undisturbed,’ the other man said contemptuously.

      Tom hesitated between a need to challenge him and a deeper one to keep Polly as far from this dark business as he could get her. From the tension in her fingers it felt as if she might be able to read his mind and that was a danger he really didn’t want to think about, so he worried about his castle instead. Reminding himself he didn’t care what happened to the place didn’t ring quite true now he was actually here. Perhaps he cared more than he wanted to, but if it wasn’t for this idiot he wouldn’t have had to come here and find out Dayspring meant something after all.

      ‘Tall tales or no, I can’t abide the place.’

      ‘Fool,’ the leader said with contempt that set Tom’s teeth on edge.

      ‘I ain’t the one spending every night you think the gentleman ain’t at work searching this old ruin for a pot of fairy gold, though, am I?’

      ‘It’s real, I tell you. The old fool raved about his treasury, insisted I get him in here so he could die with his riches around him.’

      ‘Shame he stuck his spoon in the wall before you did then, weren’t it?’

      Tom stiffened as their whispered conversation sank in and he decided they were fools to discuss their mission where they could be overheard. His one-time guardian was put in a lunatic asylum once Virgil challenged his fitness to be anyone’s mentor. The man had ruled Dayspring for three years, though, and could have done what he liked here for all the trustees cared. Tom listed his larger assets in his head, but there was nothing important missing, so what had Grably convinced the more educated idiot was hidden in a house stripped of valuables when Virgil closed it?

      ‘Mind your tongue,’ the man said, and suddenly Tom knew why he’d shivered at the sound of his voice. Snapping orders like that, he sounded so like Tom’s guardian they must be related in some way.

      ‘Can you see aught?’ his reluctant companion asked, as if he sensed them in the shadows or thought some ghost the locals had scared him with was waiting to haunt him if he came closer.

      ‘No, there’s naught to see. You’re nervous as a spinster.’

      Tom felt Miss Trethayne’s hand tighten involuntarily, as if it was a personal insult. He supposed she was unlikely to marry, penniless and responsible for her three brothers as she was. She might be at her last prayers by the time the last one flew the nest, but any woman less like the proverbial spinster he found hard to imagine. He was touched by her plight and wished he could see a way to offer her a respectable way out of it.

      If he tried to settle a competence on her, she might find a suitor besotted enough to take on her three brothers, of course, but she wouldn’t accept it and they were not related so he couldn’t even suggest it. Paying a man like Peters to wed her stuck in his craw, even if he agreed to do it. Then there was this fierce desire he’d been struggling with since he set eyes on her in those outrageous, disreputable breeches of hers. Tom reminded himself his biggest ally in his fight to keep his hands off her was the lady herself, then remembered to listen to these housebreakers instead of worrying about things he couldn’t change just in time to catch their next bad-tempered exchange.

      ‘We’ve tramped up and down too often to see if anyone else has been down here,’ the second housebreaker was saying resentfully.

      ‘If I’d known we’d need to check this filth for footprints, I’d have СКАЧАТЬ