‘I like them,’ he claimed, and that was just plain unfair of him.
‘So do I,’ she replied repressively and stared pointedly at the spider about to drop off his elbow onto Lady Wakebourne’s favourite chair. ‘If you don’t go away and take your livestock with you, there won’t be any dinner left for you to devour when you get back from restoring yourself to your usual state of dandified magnificence in an hour or two,’ she told him nastily, but this man brought out the worst in her and that was that.
‘Scared of spiders, Miss Trethayne?’
‘No, only marquises, my lord.’
‘Very sensible, you really wouldn’t want one of us in your hair,’ he said as lightly as if she hadn’t just shot a dart past his armour, but somehow she knew she had and felt a twinge of shame twist in her belly that she refused to consider more closely until he’d gone. She wasn’t scared of him so much as her own reactions to him and neither of them needed to know that just now.
‘Go away,’ she said dourly, and the wretch did with one last, thoughtful look back at her that said he wondered exactly why she wanted him gone so badly. ‘Why were you looking for me?’ she called after him, feeling as if he’d taken some of the air and all the excitement out of the room with him and contrarily wanting it back.
I bet lots of women can’t help themselves whenever he’s around, a bleak, repressive inner voice whispered, but she ignored it as best she could.
‘Because Lady Wakebourne thought you would know where my valise has gone. If you will excuse me, poor Peters is very likely shivering himself into an early grave out in the laundry room right now, since he refuses to enter the castle in a state of nature after his much-needed ablutions. I, of course, have no such gentlemanly scruples and will be perfectly happy to run about the place stark naked as soon as I’ve washed the dust and dirt of the last century or so away and feel restored to my rude self again.’
‘Sam Barker took it up to the South Tower. That’s where all the men sleep,’ she said in a strangled voice she hardly recognised as her own.
‘I must remember to thank him for such a kindness, but I don’t think he’d want me searching the place from top to toe and getting dust everywhere right now, do you?’
‘I’ll find him and ask him to bring it out to you,’ she said in a loud voice she told herself wasn’t in the least bit squeaky with panic as the idea of this particular man appearing in the hall of his ancestors and naked as the day he was born sent a shudder through her that had nothing at all to do with her being cold.
‘My thanks, Miss Trethayne,’ he said as smoothly as if they’d been discussing the weather, then he sauntered away to join poor Mr Peters in the laundry as if he would never dream of wondering how it would feel if they happened to be naked at the same time.
Polly was glad to be alone as the very idea made her clamp her legs together against a hot rush of wanton excitement at her feminine core that felt sinful and delicious in equal measure. ‘Oh, heavens,’ she husked on a long, expelled breath that felt as if it had come on a very long journey all the way from her boots.
The most appalling images of a naked, sweat-streaked and vital Lord Mantaigne were cavorting about in her head like seductively potent demons now. He was disgusting, she told herself, and in more ways than one. He was certainly physically filthy, and she ought not to find that the least bit appealing in the man. There had even been a streak of ancient grey dust right across the front of his disgracefully open shirt and, come to think of it, that garment had clung to him as if it loved him as well. She could recall exactly how the dust darkened across the bare torso visible under that once-pristine linen and the powdery stuff had clung to the sweat on his tanned and glistening skin like a fond lover.
If she had dared let even a hint of her fascination with his work-mussed person show, he would have played on it as shamelessly as an actor in a melodrama, but even willpower couldn’t control the physical response of her body to his now he’d gone and her wicked imagination had taken over. Of course it was folly to wonder how it would feel to be his equal in sophistication and passion and flirt right back at him, to risk the shame and scandal of being a fallen woman for the absolute pleasure of being such a devastatingly masculine yet civilised and urbane man’s lover. He was an accomplished breaker of women’s hearts and it was good that she was nothing like the females such finicky men of the world chose as their paramours.
She brushed a hesitant, wondering hand tentatively over her breeches and up to her slender waist with the feeling she was leaving stardust in its wake, then she gasped as she realised where her too-vivid imagination was taking her again. So horribly conscious of her own body that she suddenly felt as if it had a life and demands independent of the rest of her, she slammed a door on the image of lordly Lord Mantaigne luxuriating in the makeshift bathing room they’d made in one of the laundries. It would be steamy, the air warm from the fire Dotty would have lit for the comfort of the weary labourers as they got rid of all their dirt, because Dotty had a soft heart under her gruff manner and she openly admitted making men comfortable had been the mission of her youth.
Thank goodness the self-appointed castle laundress was middle-aged and didn’t continue with her life’s work in quite the same way nowadays. The image of his lordship in his tub with a very willing and gleeful female seemed utterly disgusting somehow, as the one of him in it with the likes of her that hesitated on the edge of her thoughts never could be, even though her everyday self wished it was.
‘Oh, no, the valise!’ she yelped and ran out of the room to find Sam Barker before there was the slightest risk of the marquis carrying out his implied threat to parade about the castle naked if someone didn’t produce his clothes in time. ‘Useless dandy,’ she grumbled as soon as she’d run Sam to earth in the kitchen and met his amused gaze as he reassured her the master of the house had already been safely reunited with his clothes and there was nothing for her to panic about.
‘That’s what he thinks,’ she mumbled to herself as she went back upstairs to put out a few of their precious store of wax candles in honour of their unwanted guest.
* * *
‘So, what do you think?’ Tom asked his supposed secretary-cum-agent-cum-lawyer half an hour later.
‘Nobody would think you even knew what a broom looked like now, let alone how to use one,’ Peters told him distractedly as he did his best to shave by the light of a flickering candle.
‘That’s not what I meant,’ Tom told him grumpily, wondering why the world thought him such a peacock. ‘I was asking your ideas about the self-appointed keepers of my castle.’
‘From what I’ve seen so far, they seem a very mixed bag.’
‘True, but I’m ready to defer to your superior knowledge of the criminal classes. Do you think any are active law-breakers?’
Peters seemed to consider that question more seriously as he wiped the last of his whiskers from the blade of his razor and was himself again, whoever that might be. ‘I doubt it,’ he said, as if the fact surprised him as well.
‘So do I,’ Tom said with a preoccupied frown as he used the square of mirror his confederate had vacated to brush his hair back into gleaming order. ‘I suspect Lady Wakebourne would have them marched out of here faster than the cat could lick her ear if she had the slightest suspicion any had gone back to their old ways.’
‘It’s not just that. They respect her and Miss Trethayne. Even that battered old rogue in the gatehouse seemed more concerned about them than his own doubtful claim to employment and a roof over his head.’
‘So why are two ladies living in what should be an abandoned barrack with a