The Regency Season Collection: Part Two. Кэрол Мортимер

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СКАЧАТЬ a severe nod at the beautiful garment lying there like a false promise. How did he expect Miss Paulina Trethayne to force herself into the cramping styles of a proper lady when she hadn’t a penny to her name she hadn’t earned through working his land when his back was turned? Surely he didn’t think local society would blink at such an unlikely spectacle and make space for her?

      The very idea of the derision that would greet her if she tried to cramp her long limbs and unladylike lope into the mincing gait and quiet littleness of a spinster’s day-to-day life made her cringe. He was setting her up to be a mockery, and she felt the sting of it, even as she slammed the door of her bedchamber and ran back down the stairs to find the wretched man and berate him for taking this latest chip out of her self-confidence.

      He didn’t need her to accompany him about the estate while he was visiting folk who only a few weeks ago had turned to her for help and advice. They had little choice but to ask her for what little help she could give them after years of neglect by their lord, but now they’d forgotten how long he’d left them leaderless and bewildered and she might not even exist for all the need they had of her now. She hoped they never came to regret relying on a man who might easily forget them for another decade.

      Fighting her hurt at being forgotten in the dazzling presence of the latest Marquis of Mantaigne, Polly felt weariness pinch after her latest day of hard physical labour. She was driving herself and the men who worked the smallholding they’d made in the castle’s vast kitchen garden too hard, but fear of being left with nothing again goaded her on. This was their last chance of a good harvest and it ought to be the best one they’d ever had. If they could make enough money from their crops this year, maybe they could sell the surplus and set up a small farm elsewhere. It wouldn’t be Dayspring, of course—nothing could equal the noble old stronghold by the sea she had come to love so much—but they’d work hard to make it a different home.

      As she strode across the inner bailey and looked for my Lord of Mantaigne instead of avoiding him, Polly wondered why nobody else worried about the future. The marquis was with a stranger when she tracked him down to the little parlour he had appropriated as a study-cum-estate office and the surprised-looking visitor, trying so hard not to look at her legs, made her more uncomfortable than if he had leered like an uncouth lout. She hung back impatiently while Lord Mantaigne escorted the man outside and bade him a cheery farewell without ever managing to say who he was and why he was here in the first place.

      Anyone would think the lord was the land steward he had still not appointed, despite his fine promises, and not a noble fashion plate, Polly told herself scornfully. Yet even she had to admit he looked like a hero from Ancient Greece in the mellow evening light, the long shadows from the setting sun lending his features such stern definition even she couldn’t accuse him of being a soft dandy. She saw him laugh at something the man said and once more felt the pull of attraction even as a frown pleated her brows and she shook her head impatiently.

      At this distance he looked like a gilded lord out of a legend—a modern King Arthur about to unite his ravaged kingdom with daring deeds and the circle of charm such beings cast on their friends as well as their subjects. Except he was real. And here. Every female impulse in her felt the siren call of such a compelling and deeply masculine man, even when he didn’t know he was making it.

      She drew a picture for herself of the woman he would happily pull close to kiss and caress in the fading May twilight as their visitor rode away. She would stand no higher than his heart. His true mate would be an intensely feminine beauty with hair of a paler gold than his own, eyes as compellingly blue, but softer and a great deal more demure. There would be a special grace to her slender limbs that not even her detractors could deny and, as one of those detractors, Polly was quite sure she would try very hard to do so.

      His ideal woman’s voice would be soft and low, and Polly was horribly certain she would sing like an angel. She added a low-cut, narrow gown of gossamer and fairy-dust and knew the wretched female would have sensual curves and a lovely line to her slender limbs to hold him to her for life. Already she hated the smug creature and waved a hand in front of her eyes as if she could erase the differences between such a paragon and herself just by wishing.

      She glanced down at the mud and dust-stained work boots she’d once seen as a necessity of life and now regarded as a mark of how little she had in common with the ladies she should have grown up with. Then came her ridiculously overgrown legs, encased in ancient breeches she had found in an attic, discarded by their original owner decades ago in the belief they were too shabby and threadbare to wear even for rough jobs about the castle and the poor probably weren’t poor enough to want them.

      When she was growing up she often felt a freak, her overlong limbs tangling in her skirts and tripping her up at the most awkward moments. Now she knew she was a female others would mark out as extraordinary for all the wrong reasons and why on earth should it matter to her if the marquis watched her every move or kept his distance as sternly as she’d told herself she wanted him to ever since that first day and night at Dayspring?

      She remembered the titters of some other girls when she fell on her nose in church one Sunday not long after her sixteenth birthday. She had crushed the brim of the new bonnet she had longed for so passionately. The pretty delicacy of it hadn’t suited her, as one of them unkindly pointed out when humiliated tears streamed down Polly’s sore face and bloody nose. Her stepmother had loyally informed them such cattish remarks were neither pretty nor delicate and said more about them than they did about her daughter. Even so Polly had seen the worry in Claire’s dark eyes when she hugged as much of her strapping stepchild as she could still reach and whispered one day she would grow into herself and be magnificent, but those commonplace little girls would just be little and commonplace for the rest of their lives.

      Loss twisted in her gut as painfully as the day Claire had died when Josh was born. Something in Polly’s father seemed to die with her and grief for both of them fought its way past the anger Papa’s ruin and reckless death brought with it and she let herself see how deeply he’d loved Claire and how impossible he had found life without her at last. It didn’t make the things he’d done to forget his terrible grief right, but suddenly they were more understandable.

      The possibility of loving so passionately might trip her up as well, but maybe she had inherited too much sense from the first wife Papa had wed with his head for such a headlong risk of everything she was for love. Idiotic woman, she chided herself, haven’t you just congratulated yourself on being a prosaic female and now you’re longing to be the exact opposite?

      ‘He has me in such a spin that I don’t know what I do want any more,’ she said out loud this time and heard the soft murmur of her own voice sound round the little room with horror.

      What if someone was close by when she gave away so much she wanted to keep to herself? Sneaking a look to see if she really had given herself away, she saw nobody and heard only the cool silence of a place with history in every shadow. Fanciful nonsense, of course, Polly decided with a wry smile for her sudden outbreak of lunacy. She touched one of the cool old pieces of glass in the leaded window that overlooked the yard where the marquis and his visitor were still talking earnestly. If she closed her eyes and pretended hard enough, the image she saw through that glass might be him. In another dimension she might reach through and touch the man’s very soul instead of the far-off untouchable reality.

      There now, at last the marquis had said his farewells and the stranger was riding away. No time like the present, she told herself, and braced her shoulders for the argument she’d been promising herself as she did her best to recall why she was so angry with him in the first place.

      ‘Miss Trethayne, you must have found the habit your friends have worked on so diligently from the stern expression on your face,’ he said genially, as if he’d been expecting the flare of temper in her eyes and was finding it a little too amusing.

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