Damnation take it, he shouldn’t even think of her in extremis like that. Not only was he in no state to pleasure even the most undemanding of houris, but he was also an ungrateful bastard who suddenly really wanted to at least try to drive her wild with mutual lust and see if such exquisite gratification could cure his hangover.
How could he even think of turning on the man who’d rescued him when everyone else had left him to rot in the gutter by trying to steal his woman? He’d better convince his baser self he didn’t want the confounded woman as a matter of urgency, then at least he’d be ready to conduct Kit’s business for the day instead of standing here fantasising about seducing his mistress.
‘I wasn’t planning on letting Abel or anyone else near my throat with a razor,’ he drawled in a deliberate echo of the insufferably cocky aristocrat he’d once been, ‘but to shave myself properly I need hot water and Coste is much better at lighting the range than I am.’
‘You must be atrocious at it then, since he made such a sad business out of it with all his moaning and groaning and constant “oh deary, deary me, but I don’t feel at all well,” that I found it a good deal quicker to deal with it myself,’ Miss La Rochelle told him so disapprovingly he was reminded of his sister’s steely-backboned governess in a particularly formidable frame of mind. He made the mistake of grinning over an image of his gadfly in breeches, instructing the daughters of the nobility in good manners and proper behaviour. ‘It wasn’t in the least bit funny to be expected to light your confounded fires for you as well as sober up the only help you seem to have left in the house in order to get some breakfast,’ she snapped.
She then subjected him to a hostile glare that should reduce him to abject penitence. Wise enough to know it would be counterproductive to tell her that her ire was a boon rather than a bane to his aching head, he kept a grin from his lips with a mighty effort and did his best to look crushed. In his experience, the only way to deal with a female on the rampage was to agree with whatever she said and go his own way when her back was turned.
‘Of course not,’ he agreed. ‘It’s probably a disgrace as well—did you forget to tell me that or have my aching ears left out some listening?’
‘Men have a very peculiar sense of the ridiculous,’ she informed him with regal contempt, obviously not inclined to gratify him by rising to his baiting.
‘And most women don’t have one at all,’ he let slip, then corrected himself. ‘Except for the odd honourable exception, of course,’ he told her with a would-be placating smile that must have come out as a mocking grin since she glared at him, before marching back to the domestic regions. He didn’t even have time to muse on feminine unpredictability before she was back with a steaming jug.
‘Here’s your hot water and don’t scald yourself,’ she ordered him as she thrust it into his hands. ‘I suggest you make yourself decent before you come downstairs, if that’s not too much to ask of a man with trembling hands and a brandy-addled constitution like yours,’ she told him before she rounded on her heel and strode towards the kitchen while he gazed owlishly after her.
‘Managing female,’ he muttered darkly to himself.
‘I heard that!’ she shouted back improbably and he amended her hearing up to bat-like sensitivity and resolved to tell the truth about her only when he was safely on the opposite side of London in future.
He kept trying not to smile as he shaved more deftly than he could have believed possible when he woke up this morning, and had to force a suitable blandness on to his reflected features in order not to cut himself. Usually the sight of his own face froze any inclination he might have to smile, but this morning even that didn’t seem as bitter a spectacle as expected. Last night he met a ladybird in the dark and now he was grinning to himself about her like a lunatic, despite a painful state he would prefer to deny existed that ought to be beyond a man in his condition. He reminded himself he couldn’t have her, even if she wanted him to, and poured his cooling shaving water with its unattractive bloom of shorn whiskers and used soap back into the can.
Hugh set the jug by the door to take downstairs once he was dressed for a morning in the City, spent attending to his employers’ business affairs and grimaced at the thought of the hours of checking tallies and reviewing accounts lying ahead of him. Somehow even the thorny task ahead of him couldn’t blot out the dangerous sense of anticipation he felt at tangling with the woman downstairs one last time. He even caught himself whistling, before realising she would hear him. Eyeing himself—cravat decently tied and stockings and knee-breeches unwrinkled—he shrugged into a very sober waistcoat and gave himself a mocking bow. Today he was almost unrecognisable as the renegade captain of the Jezebel and resolved to avoid the haunts of the ton on his way to the City, lest someone recognise him even got up like a respectable cit. He shrugged off the prospect of being known for someone far less worthy, decided breakfast took precedence over old sins and let the smell of Miss La Rochelle’s cooking lure him downstairs once more.
Chapter Four
‘My guess is that you’re a better cook than Coste or I will ever be,’ Hugh observed as he strolled through the propped-open kitchen door.
‘Which wouldn’t be difficult, given the state of the saucepans and skillets left in the scullery,’ the most unusual cook in England muttered irritably in reply.
‘We never claimed to be domesticated,’ he admitted with a casual shrug.
‘You’d be arrested for fraud if you did.’
‘Very likely, but where did you get all this?’ he asked with a wave of his hand at the largesse spread over the end of the long deal table nearest to the closed stove.
Her self-imposed task had put an attractive flush of colour on her cheeks and he noted the surprisingly seductive scent of warm woman and the faint suggestion of a gloss of perspiration on her fine, creamy skin. Never having been the sort of man who preyed on his servants, he’d not subjected kitchenmaids to lecherous scrutiny in the past, but the sight of his employer’s exotic mistress, dressed in her scandalous dark breeches with that absurd black shirt clinging to her all the more because of the light bloom of perspiration on her delectable body, was enough to make a monk ache with frustration, and he wasn’t a monk. Wrenching his eyes from the spectacle of all he couldn’t have, he made himself listen to her reply to his question through the thunder of his own blood in his ears and sought refuge behind the table until he had his body in a fit state not to betray him.
‘I dragged your fellow debauchee out of his chair and pushed him under the pump until he stopped screaming like a stuck pig, then told him if he didn’t find me the makings of a very hearty breakfast, I’d tell Kit what a useless excuse for a man he still is, then hope he was sent straight back to the gutter where Kit found him,’ she explained, mercifully all without turning round to turn those shrewd dark eyes of hers on yet another faulty male.
Yet Hugh doubted she’d carry out her threat against his brother-in-iniquity; her shoulders were hunched against his scrutiny, but her very defensiveness argued against her. ‘Where’s Coste hiding himself now, then?’ he asked, as he dared to come out from behind his barricade and pick up a slice of just-crisp-enough bacon from the stack keeping warm on the side of the hob.
‘He’s probably still trying to find a couple of scrubbing women willing to muck out the pigsty you two have made out of this room and the scullery, and another couple to dust and make good the rooms you haven’t yet got around to spoiling. He insisted that he wasn’t ready to eat yet,’ she said gruffly.
‘He won’t know where to start.’
‘I told him where to find a reliable domestic agency and sent a note along with him for the manageress setting out my requirements,’