The Passion of an Angel. Kasey Michaels

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СКАЧАТЬ aren’t you, Miss MacAfee?” Banning asked, not really needing her to answer. “Perhaps another visit from the redoubtable Miss Prentice is in order. She is most anxious to mount an inspection of your wardrobe before we depart for London in the morning.”

      “Let her in here again and I’ll probably shoot her. Besides, I’m not going,” Prudence stated flatly, turning her back on him once more.

      Resisting the impulse to grab hold of the young woman by her shoulders and shake her until her teeth rattled, Banning retrained himself enough to utter through his own tightly clenched teeth, “Then, Miss MacAfee, may I presume we may number lying among your other vices? Or was I incorrect in assuming that when you gave me your word you would leave with me after Molly was settled, you were intending to keep true to that word?”

      She jumped up from her chair, still most distressingly, disturbingly dressed in a man’s shirt and a patched pair of breeches that clung much too closely to her hips, and rounded on him in a fury.

      “You ignorant jackanapes!” she exploded. “Do you really believe I would want to stay here? That anyone with more brains than a doorstop would want to stay here? My God, man, I detest the place! This damned pile is falling down around my ears, I haven’t a penny for repairs to either the house or the land, my grandfather is a mean, miserly, to-let-in-the-attic nincompoop who hasn’t bathed since the day I was able to lock him outside in the rain two years ago. He picks his teeth with a penknife, sleeps on a mattress stuffed with receipts from his deposits in London banks, saves the clippings from his fingers and toes for luck, and bays at full moons. My brother swore he’d get me out of here since the day we first arrived after our parents’ funeral—get us both out of here—and by damn, Daventry, I would have to be a candidate for Bedlam myself to refuse to go. But I can’t. Not yet.”

      Banning sat himself down in the chair Prudence had just vacated, pressed his elbows onto the desktop while making a steeple of his fingers, and looked out over the run-down grounds of MacAfee Farm, giving out with an occasional self-depreciating, closemouthed chuckle as he considered all that his new ward had just said.

      “It’s the foal, isn’t it, Angel?” he remarked at last, slowly swiveling on the chair to look up at Prudence, who was still standing close beside him, her fists jammed onto her hips, her wild tangle of honey-dark blond hair giving her the appearance of a lioness with her fur ruffled. “You won’t leave without Molly’s foal.”

      “Well, you can think! And here I was beginning to believe you were slow, as well as arrogant and supercilious and domineering and—”

      “Yes, yes,” Banning interrupted, “I believe we both know how you view me. But remember. I am also your brother’s choice of savior. Thinking back on that evening, I begin to see why he would have traveled to such lengths to insure your future. You and Henry might have been your grandfather’s only heirs, but the scoundrel might live for years and years yet, a prospect Henry—and in his place, I myself—could not look to with much forbearance.”

      “My brother escaped to the war,” Prudence told him, her voice soft as she spoke of Henry MacAfee. “He stole the money to buy his commission, sneaking the profit from the sale of the dining room furniture out from under Shadwell’s nose before he could ship it off to the banks. He is going to—was going to send for me once Boney was locked up again. Life here wasn’t easy for either of us, but it was especially difficult for my brother, who was a dozen years older and had known another life more so than had I, for I was still fairly steeped in the nursery when Mama and Papa died in that carriage accident.”

      Beginning once more to feel as if he was not quite so put-upon, as if he had actually been selected to do what could only be considered a very good deed, Banning decided there and then that a week—no more—spent at MacAfee Farm couldn’t be considered too great a sacrifice, especially when he thought how he had heartlessly left poor little Prudence MacAfee to suffer here for the better part of a year longer than necessary.

      He could make do on the farm for seven short days, long enough for the foal to gain strength and make arrangements for its transport to his stable in Mayfair. Why, he might even enjoy being in the Sussex countryside, as he had been confined to London since returning to England, recovering from his wounds, hovering over his ill sister—and then dancing the night away, gaming with his friends, attending the theater and other such indulgences for several months, he remembered with another fleeting pang of guilt.

      Slapping his hands down hard onto his thighs, he rose to his feet, saying, “It’s settled then. I think a week in the country would do both Rexford and Miss Prentice a world of good.”

      “I won’t let that lizard near me, you know, so you can ship her off any time it suits you,” Prudence pronounced, preceding Banning to the door. “She slithered in here earlier, to pack for me she said, and left with a flea in her ear after I listened to her going on and on about the fact that I don’t have any gowns. As if I’d be mucking stables in lace and satin! And she’s fair and far out if she thinks I’m going to put up my hair, or let her touch me with those cold white hands as she spits out something about clipping my nails and—”

      Banning stopped just inside the doorway, putting out his hands to apply the brakes to Prudence’s tirade before she could grab the bit more firmly between her teeth. “Did you say you don’t own any gowns? Not even one in which to travel to Freddie’s? You’ve nothing but breeches?”

      “Oh, close your mouth, Daventry, unless you’ve always longed to catch flies with your tongue. Of course I don’t have any gowns. I was only a child when I came here, and once Grandmother MacAfee was gone, Shadwell decided that my brother’s castoffs were more than sufficient for a growing female. And it’s not as if I go tripping off to church of a Sunday or receive visitors here at MacAfee’s Madhouse, which is what the locals have dubbed the place.”

      Banning took a long, assessing look at Prudence as she stood in front of him in the dim candlelight. He had already noticed that her honey-dark hair was thick and lustrous, even if it did look as if she’d trimmed it with a sickle and combed it with a rake. Her huge, tip-tilted eyes, also more honey gold than everyday brown, were far and away her most appealing feature, although her complexion, also golden, and without so much as a single mole or freckle, was not to be scoffed at.

      Of average height for a female, with an oval face, small skull, straight white teeth, and pleasantly even features, she might just clean up to advantage. If London held enough soap and water, he added, wishing she didn’t smell quite so much of horse and hay.

      There wasn’t much he could tell about her figure beneath the large shirt, although he had already become aware that her lower limbs were straight, her derriere nicely rounded.

      “You know something, Angel?” he announced at last, draping a companionable arm around her as they headed for the staircase, just as if she was one of his chums. “I think we’ll go easy on any efforts to coax you out of your cocoon until we’re safely in Mayfair. I wouldn’t want Shadwell to start thinking he’d be giving up an asset he could use to line his pockets.”

      “I don’t understand,” Prudence admitted, frowning up at him. “Shadwell’s always said I am worthless.”

      “Not on the marriage mart, you’re not,” Banning told her. “Now if we’ve cried friends, perhaps you could find a way to ferret out some food for me and my reluctant entourage before we all fade away, leaving you here alone to face Shadwell’s wrath on Friday when he discovers his dirt bath already occupied.”

      “Oh Christ!” Prudence exclaimed, proving yet again that it would take more than a bit of silk and lace to make her close to presentable. “Bugger me if I didn’t forget that. We’ll СКАЧАТЬ