He shrugged himself into the elegant waistcoat and beautifully tailored coat Nick insisted no self-respecting fortune hunter should be seen without, and wondered what his lordly ancestors would have made of their latest descendant. Not much, he determined grimly. The Ashfields had been a shrewd race, until his father gambled, drank and caroused his way through every penny he could lay his hands on, and a good many that should have been safely out of his reach.
Hastily running a brush through his thick dark hair, Marcus knew he looked as elegant as a gentleman could without the services of a skilled valet, and decided it was high time he wrote to his lawyer again. Surely something must have escaped his father’s headlong pursuit of pleasure? After all, his grandfather had outlived his only son by ten days, so it wasn’t as if the Honourable Julius Ashfield had ever inherited the title and estates. He had been borrowing against expectations, so how had he managed to beggar his heirs?
Preoccupied with this dilemma, Marcus forgot his promise to join the ladies in the drawing room and marched downstairs with a determination his former brigade would have recognised, even if the light-hearted Major Ashfield they knew off-duty had vanished along with his dark green uniform. He was halfway down the room in search of a decent pen and hot pressed paper when he finally took in the picture before him.
The humblest female in the entire household was taking her ease in Ned’s favourite chair. Marcus blinked and wondered if too many sleepless nights and occasionally drinking too deep to escape harsh reality, had caught up with him. No, his eyesight was sharp and his senses stubbornly unclouded, so the troublesome wench really was sitting reading some solemn tome with such intense concentration she hadn’t noticed him come in.
‘And what the devil are you up to now?’ he barked, and watched her start violently with an unworthy sense of satisfaction.
A faint feeling of shame made his expression all the more forbidding as he stood in judgement over the female he had fought so hard to forget. How could the annoying little witch be so wrapped up in her studies, when he had been so ridiculously conscious of her every move the instant he stepped over the threshold?
Thea glowered back at him, Lord Strensham was a fortune hunter of the worst sort—a man who could easily earn his own wealth if he could be bothered to do a day’s work now and again. To prove that he meant nothing to her, she had slipped away from the furore his coming had caused and taken this ridiculous risk. Ten minutes of forgetfulness were needed to erase the image of dashing, self-sufficient Major Ashfield from her mind, and set foppish, useless Lord Strensham in his place.
‘Improving my mind,’ she snapped as he continued to wait for her explanation like examining counsel. ‘An example you might follow, if only you could spare the time.’
‘And you obviously spend yours avoiding the job you’re paid to do. I should never have told Lyddie you needed work, for you quite obviously don’t value her kindness in taking you without a reference.’
Maybe he was right. If he had let her slip into the woods that day, she would never have suffered the hurt and humiliation of being rejected by this handsome idiot. Of course she might also have starved to death or been caught by the Winfordes by now, but sometimes even that seemed better than yearning for a man who did not want her. It was his fault of course—if he had stayed away just a little bit longer she would have forgotten him. Anyway, he was changed, if the trappings of a fashionable fortune hunter and the indolent, impudent manner he affected were anything to go by.
‘Her ladyship knows we’re run ragged by that virago of yours.’
He looked conscious, and so he should. If he was really planning to wed the confounded female for the sake of her bulging coffers, he was selling himself short. After all, if a fortune was all he wanted, he could have married her. By reminding herself that she would have been storing up a lifetime of heartache, she forced her numb legs into supporting her and prepared to make a dignified exit.
She watched as his grey gaze ran lazily over her rather crumpled uniform and found her lacking. How she wished she dared to slap the suggestion of a smile from his handsome face. Spoilt and silly Miss Alethea Hardy would have fallen headlong for such a dangerous, damn-your-eyes rogue, but prosaic Hetty Smith was surely immune to his dubious charm.
‘Tiresome heavy these great books, ain’t they, your lordship?’
‘So you sat down and waited for that one to jump back onto the shelf?’ he asked quietly, a hint of laughter vanished from his grey eyes as if it had never been and she shivered, despite the growing heat of the day.
His deep voice sounded as if he had permanently rasped it barking orders on the battlefield, she mused, feeling for one shocking moment as if his baritone rumble had found an echo in her very bones. She caught herself remembering how seductive it was when he pitched it low and lover-like and rapidly slammed the door on such idiotic memories.
‘No, my lord, and now I must be about my work again,’ she said, meeting his sceptical gaze with a blankness she hoped would signal her indifference.
Too well acquainted with her own features to find them in any way remarkable, she could make nothing of his frozen stillness as his grey eyes met hers. Yet a whisper of that forbidden longing brushed down her tingling spine like a lover’s touch once again. He turned to gaze at the Wiltshire countryside through the long windows. His grey eyes were so wintry when he fixed them on her again that she had to control an urge to shrink away.
‘I need to get on,’ she said truthfully.
‘Then stop treating me like a flat and tell me what you’re up to.’
Heaven forbid! ‘Her ladyship will need me any minute,’ she told him with a perplexed expression that should have told him she was innocent.
Lord Strensham’s reflexes were so good that her wrist was caught in an iron grip before she had time to take evasive action. She held as still as a statue and refused to struggle with him like a country maid in a bad play. Yet the touch of his warm fingers on her bare flesh sent an insidious streak of warmth jagging up her arm to earth itself in the most unwelcome places, and she shivered with superstitious dread before bravely meeting his eyes again. If only she was as indifferent to his touch as she had been to Nick Prestbury’s, she thought hazily, but it seemed there was no point wishing for the moon.
‘I don’t think my cousins will be downstairs betimes if the lady you refer to has been running the household round as you say. Since you don’t look like any ladies’ maid I ever came across, I rather doubt Lyddie will need you either,’ he said silkily as he ran his mocking gaze over the housemaid’s uniform no self-respecting dresser would be seen dead in.
Feeling the hot colour stain her cheeks, Thea could not govern her reaction to his touch. Lately she had shrunk from any contact with the male sex, managing to avoid the roving eyes of both visiting masters and their servants by keeping her head down and disappearing into her ill-fitting, hand-me-down clothes. Lord Strensham’s less than lover-like grasp on her wrist sent her wayward heartbeat dancing as if performing a waltz at Almack’s.
It was perfectly ridiculous, this terrible need to have him kiss her again, she told herself. Secretly longing for him to draw her nearer and satisfy this feral desire was folly. She controlled a warm shiver as his strong hand gentled on her slender wrist and sparked those ridiculous curls of heat into life. They were worse than strangers and must remain so. There was an unbridgeable gulf between them, and she ordered herself brusquely to stop staring up at him like a mooncalf.
‘And to think I was warned about gentlemen like you,’ she snapped.
He dropped her hand as if it burnt him and jerked backwards so violently he was in danger of being overset for a moment. His dark brows snapped together, his eyes fierce as a hawk’s and his