‘So you say,’ she said sceptically.
Tom had often wished the world could see beyond the wealth and prestige he’d been born to and now he wanted an unlikely goddess to be impressed by them? Folly, he told himself, and goddesses didn’t wear an odd mix of outdated clothes that looked as if they’d belonged to a few of his ancestors before they found a new glory on her.
‘So I know,’ he managed coolly enough.
‘Prove it then.’
He laughed at the notion he needed to and at Dayspring of all places. Should he thank her for distracting him from the ordeal he’d thought this homecoming would be without her? ‘Do you expect me to produce a letter of introduction from the patronesses of Almack’s, or an invitation to Carlton House? Perhaps the record of my birth in the local parish church might do the trick—what would you advise, Peters?’
‘Any one might be a fraud,’ she argued before Peters could open his mouth.
‘And I’m not prepared to prove myself on my own property, madam,’ Tom said, deciding it was time to bring the game to an end.
‘Everyone in the neighbourhood knows the Marquis of Mantaigne never sets foot beyond the clubs of St James’s or the ballrooms of Mayfair during this season of the year and has sworn not to come here as long as he lives. You need to think your story out better if you plan to masquerade as that idle fool.’
‘You think me more useful and less vain than Lord Mantaigne? Hasn’t anyone told you appearances are deceptive?’
‘Not as badly as yours would have to be,’ she said as if it was a coup de grâce.
Stray curls of russet-brown hair had worked free from the impressive plait hanging down her back to dance about her brow and distract Tom from a subject that kept slipping away from him as he wondered why she was so irresistibly female when her dress and manner were anything but.
‘Blue,’ he mused out loud as he met the smoky mystery of her eyes under long dark lashes. Her unusually marked eyebrows made her frown seem exaggerated and her smile a delicious flight of mischief, or at least he thought it might be, if she ever smiled at him, which currently seemed unlikely. Just as well really, he supposed hazily; if she ever gave up frowning he might walk straight into the promises and secrets in her unique eyes and fall under her witchy spell for ever.
‘No, they might be grey,’ he muttered as he tried to disentangle smoke and mystery from reality. ‘Or perhaps even a little bit green.’
He saw shock in the bluey-grey marvel of her eyes, with those intriguing rays of green in their fascinating depths when she widened them, as if suddenly realising they were staring at each other. She shot Peters a questioning look, as if Tom might be a lunatic and the lawyer his unlucky keeper.
‘I am the sixth Marquis of Mantaigne and have been so for most of my life,’ Tom informed her testily, ‘but who the devil are you?’
‘None of your business,’ she snapped back.
‘How ironic that I’ve come back after all these years and nobody seems to believe I have the right to, don’t you think, Peters?’ Tom mused to play for time whilst he gathered his senses.
‘Much about life is ironic, my lord,’ Peters said unhelpfully.
‘Aye,’ Tom drawled with an emphatic look at his reluctant hostess that should make her blush and run to fetch whoever tried to lend her countenance.
Not that she had any idea of her own looks, he decided with a frown. She must be close to six feet tall to meet his eyes so easily, especially when looking down her haughty Roman nose as if he was the source of an unpleasant smell she hadn’t been able to track down until now. Most of her inches were made up of leg and he almost wished he carried a quizzing glass so he could infuriate her all the more. Not that she didn’t have a superb body to match those long and slender feminine legs of hers; dressed in form-fitting breeches, flowing shirt and a tight spencer jacket as she was, he’d be a fool not to notice she had a fine collection of feminine curves to go with them.
The wonder was she could roam round Dayspring in such a guise without a pack of wolves hunting her as such beasts usually did any unprotected female. She must be able to go about unmolested, though, since she hadn’t stopped doing it, and that made him take her more seriously than he wanted to. If ever he’d met a feminine disaster waiting to happen it was this argumentative young goddess and he hadn’t time or energy to cope with the challenge she presented just now.
‘You don’t look like any of the portraits of past Lord Mantaignes scattered about the castle,’ she informed him with the sort of infuriated glare he hadn’t been subjected to since he last annoyed Virginia.
‘I doubt if one of my father survived my former guardian’s rule here, but I’m told I take after him,’ Tom said, wondering why it mattered.
‘Don’t you know?’
‘I don’t remember either of my parents.’
‘That’s as may be, but none of the pictures look like you,’ she said accusingly.
He sighed in his best impression of a bored society beau and hoped she found it as superior and annoying as he meant her to. She took a long look at his dusty but perfectly fitted boots, then her gaze flicked dismissively over the coat Weston would no longer be quite so proud to admit was his handiwork lying nearby, but he saw the odd giveaway sign she wasn’t as confident of his nonentity as she wanted him to believe. Her breathing came a little short and there was a hint of desperation in those fine eyes, as if the truth was too much to cope with and she wanted to fend it off as long as possible.
‘I dare say you know the State Rooms better than I do. My guardian never let me explore that part of the house when I lived here,’ he admitted, trying to shrug off the feeling he’d revealed too much.
‘The villagers do say Lord Mantaigne’s guardian was a cruel man,’ she conceded, thinking about rearranging her prejudices, but not yet ready to turn them on their head.
‘How tactful of them,’ he said with a bitter smile.
Why the devil had he let Virginia bullock him into coming here? Tom wanted to be out of this intimate stable in the fresh air. With hints of fish and brine, seaweed and wide oceans on the breeze from the sea, at least that was something his guardian had never been able to take from him. How could he have forgotten that and all the other things he loved about this place, despite the neglect and cruelty he’d endured? He’d never wanted to set eyes on this place, but the scent of the sea settled a strange sort of longing in him for home that he hadn’t even known he had until he got here.
He used to risk his life creeping down the hoary old stones of the North Tower as soon as his bare feet were big enough to cling to the bumps and cracks in the rock. Grably was too much of a coward to kill the ‘spawn of the devil’, he had called Tom when no outsiders were listening, but he wouldn’t have shed a tear if Tom had fallen to his death and saved him the stain of murder on his mean and twisted soul.
‘I suppose you could be him,’ a very different keeper of Dayspring Castle admitted begrudgingly and wrenched his thoughts back to the present. ‘You’re the right age, but Maggie said his little lordship looked an angel fallen out of Heaven and you don’t look angelic to me.’
‘You know my one-time nurse then?’ he said, sounding far too eager. That reminder of the one constant in his life after his father had died, until his guardian sent her away, caught him unawares.
‘I knew Lord Mantaigne’s childhood nurse before she died,’ she said, eyeing him as if unsure his word could be trusted or not.
Not, Tom concluded, at least not if she was aware of her own allure as she stood in the shadowed gloom of the stables and stared at him as if she could read his sooty soul. Not, if she was possibly the most unlikely virgin lady he had ever met, with her mannish garments, unmanly figure and a mass of unruly hair barely held by the tail she’d plaited