Savage Courtship. Susan Napier
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Название: Savage Courtship
Автор: Susan Napier
Издательство: HarperCollins
Жанр: Современные любовные романы
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Good! It would serve him right to wonder how much she knew or might guess. She hoped he would relive his discomfort every time he saw her for some time to come. Why shouldn’t he suffer at least a modicum of the helpless self-consciousness that she felt in his presence?
She watched him cross the cobbled courtyard that led to the stables with a smooth, lean-hipped stride, keenly aware of a unique feeling of alienation within her own body and fiercely resenting it. Suddenly she wished that she hadn’t been too embarrassed to inspect the body she had briskly scrubbed under the shower an hour ago. Whatever had happened in his bed might have left marks, evidence that might have relieved her fears—or confirmed them—instead of leaving her in this limbo of...
Evidence?
Give that fearsomely logical brain physical evidence to work on and she wouldn’t stand a chance!
She stiffened, her heart fluttering in her chest. A fresh surge of panic galvanised her into action. She darted over to the French doors and turned the key in the lock before racing out into the hallway and up the stairs, taking them three at a time, her long legs comfortably stretching the distance.
The door to her employer’s bedroom was firmly shut but Vanessa ignored any qualms she had about invading his privacy and skidded inside.
The bed was in exactly the state that she had fervently hoped it would be—abandoned and very much unmade. Vanessa blessed the fact that Benedict Savage’s parents had raised him in a rich and rarefied environment that rendered him ignorant of the kind of basic domestic chores that ordinary mortals like Vanessa grew up performing for themselves.
She quickly ripped the top sheet off the bed, rolling it into a loose ball before dumping it on the floor and attacking the pillows, cursing their ungainly size as she struggled to remove the custom-made pillowcases. Her heart pounded as she spotted the long strands on hair that straggled across one of them. She had never realised that she moulted so much at night...or had it been because this time her head had been thrashing to and fro on the pillow in the throes of unremembered ecstasy?
Her mouth went dry at the insidious image of herself writhing beneath a sleekly tapered male body. Who would have thought that under the fashionably loose clothes a man in a sedentary occupation like architectural design would have a body so hard and compact? His skin had been glossy with health, rippling over lean, surprisingly well-developed muscles.
Furious with herself for letting her thoughts run riot, Vanessa wrenched anew at the stubborn pillowcases and shook them out vigorously before turning them inside out and throwing them on top of the sheet on the floor. She stretched across the bed and had just slipped her hand under the mattress to free the far corner of the sheet when the door jarred open, and a voice rattled chills down her spine.
‘What in the hell do you think you’re doing?’
She could feel one neatly manicured nail catch and tear against the mattress as she jerked upright and around, her sensible shoes skidding on the discarded linen, tangling her feet, so that with a cry of dismay she toppled helplessly backwards across the bed.
CHAPTER THREE
ANYONE else would have reflexively reached out and tried to prevent Vanessa’s fall, but Benedict Savage was a law unto himself. He didn’t lift a finger to save her.
He merely folded his arms across his chest and watched her bounce and come to rest before coldly rephrasing his question.
‘I asked you what you were doing in my room?’
The crisp pattern of his speech was slightly blurred by his rapid breathing. He had been running. What had occurred to her had obviously also belatedly occurred to him; he was here to attempt to sort fact from fantasy.
If she had felt at a disadvantage earlier in his study, it was nothing to what Vanessa felt now.
She pushed herself upright on trembling arms, drawing her knees together and tugging down the skirt over her dangling legs in a vain attempt to recover her dignity. ‘I would have thought it was obvious,’ she snapped defensively, wishing he would move out of the way so that she could stand up. ‘I’m making your bed.’
‘Why?’
She bit back the smart-mouthed reply that sprang to her lips and struggled for a respectful monotone. ‘Because it’s my job.’
‘You make my bed?’
For a moment he looked as uncomfortable as she felt. He had refused to allow her to perform the more personal services that a butler usually provided, ones that she had cheerfully carried out for the judge—waking him in the morning, running his bath, laying out his choice of clothing for the day. Benedict Savage had informed her squelchingly at that chilly initial interview that he didn’t require nannying, and that he would thank her not to invade his privacy unless invited. She had duly kept the required distance, but it wouldn’t hurt him to realise that caring for someone’s house was, in its own way, as intimate as caring for their person.
‘I often help Mrs Riley with the housekeeping,’ she said, adding pointedly, ‘As you may have noticed from the household accounts, I only employ extra housekeeping staff when you bring guests to stay. It’s not economic to have a full household complement idle for most of the year.’
His blank look confirmed a long-held suspicion. She doubted that he ever bothered even to glance at the accounts that she scrupulously presented him with every six months. She could be robbing him blind for all he cared. Once he had decided to trust her, he had given her a totally free hand and however flattering that was to her ego it irked her that it also meant the true extent of her efficiency went largely unappreciated.
Unfortunately he ignored the red herring, and pursued a point she had hoped would not occur to such a supremely undomesticated animal.
‘Have I ever given you reason to think I’m so fanatical about cleanliness that I require my sheets to be changed daily?’ he said drily. ‘This is a home, not a hotel—I’ve barely had the chance to get them warm, let alone dirty.’
‘You do have a reputation for being extremely fastidious,’ Vanessa muttered, guiltily thinking of the silky heat that she had been cuddled up to that morning. He had certainly been warming the sheets then. However, she could hardly contradict him.
‘But not to the point of being unhealthily obsessive,’ he said with controlled distaste.
No, she couldn’t picture him being obsessive about anything. That would require a degree of passion she didn’t believe he possessed.
‘You haven’t been here since the beginning of February and your bed hasn’t been properly aired because we didn’t know you were coming,’ she invented hastily. ‘I thought the sheets might have been a bit musty.’
‘Well, they weren’t.’ He looked down at the tumble of linen at their feet, his voice acquiring a strangely husky note. ‘In fact they were quite deliciously fragrant...’
Vanessa tensed with shock at the thread of remembered pleasure in his voice, finding his choice of words disturbingly sensual for someone whom she preferred to think of as a thoroughly cold fish.
Thank God the perfume she had dabbed on at the beginning of last evening was so expensive that she only СКАЧАТЬ