you clearly don’t have any,’ she informed him disgustedly as she chewed valiantly on the hunk of cheese and wondered if even she was hungry enough to indulge in a pickled onion or two to force it down with, as she could see no sign of anything else remotely edible or drinkable.
‘We don’t need them,’ he informed her defensively, looking endearingly sheepish even as he did so. ‘Neither of us wanted a female nagging and criticising and poking her nose in everywhere it wasn’t wanted when we can manage very well for ourselves.’
‘No, you can’t. I can assure you that you and Coste really, really can’t manage anything more refined than a sty, Captain Darke,’ she told him fervently, as she finally gave up on finding anything else remotely edible in the dusty larder and purloined his branch of almost-gutted candles to make a more thorough tour round the dusty, dirty, unused room and the once-pristine scullery on the other side of the kitchen that turned out to be piled with every glass, tankard and mug Kit’s house possessed. All were dirty and looked as if they’d been so for too long. ‘And wherever have Mrs Calhoun and Midge gone off to?’ she asked at last.
‘Kit’s housekeeper wouldn’t stay once he’d been gone awhile, nor let Midge stop here without her. She said we lived like swine and she’d no mind to go on mucking out a pigsty every morning, so you two obviously have a lot in common.’
‘How very sensible of her, but wherever did they go?’ she asked and when he didn’t reply, she walked back into the kitchen to find him watching her as if he wished she’d conveniently disappear as well.
Oddly hurt by his clear preference for her room over her company, she frowned and tapped an impatient foot as if waiting for his answer, when she suspected both women would be at Brandon and Maria’s rectory in Kent, awaiting the return of their master before they deigned to come back.
‘She just said Kit would know where to find her when he wanted his house made civilised again,’ he drawled unrepentantly.
‘How insightful of her,’ she said with a scornful glance round the room.
‘I’ll borrow a few deckhands to clean up next time we unload a ship.’
‘In the meantime you intend to go on treating my br … brave Kit’s house worse than a stable? At least a well-run stable is mucked out every day, but this place has obviously been going to rack and ruin ever since he left.’
Was Captain Darke actually blushing? Louisa wondered. Her half-guttered candles were flickering annoyingly and refused to illuminate him properly, but she was surprised he’d even heard it could be done, let alone learnt how to do it himself.
‘He said I was to treat the place as my own,’ he excused himself gruffly.
‘And you truly think so little of yourself, Captain?’
‘Yes, Miss Eloise so-called Rochelle, I do, and this is all I want or need of any place I lay my head nowadays,’ he rasped harshly, as if she’d stepped on to forbidden ground by even asking that question.
‘Why?’ she asked, biting back a ladylike apology for intruding on his private thoughts and opinions.
‘Because … Devil fly away with it all, woman, what right have you to break in here and interrogate me like some long-nosed inquisitor? While we’re on the subject of the devil, where’s Coste hidden the rest of the brandy, so I can get back to my previous occupation when you leave us or at least stop your infernal nagging?’
‘Inside himself from the look of it,’ she answered impatiently and watched him with an implacable look Kit called her I’ll-find-out-if-it-kills-us-both stare.
‘Selfish bastard,’ he grated in a much-tried voice and tried to look as if he didn’t know he was being inspected by his unwanted night visitor and found wanting.
‘You probably have enough left in your system to inebriate a goat.’
‘I never saw a drunken goat, but what an interesting life you must have lived to have done so, Miss Le Havre.’
‘Yes, I have,’ she informed him truthfully, or at least she had until she’d been hauled off to learn respectability at the age of thirteen, much against her will. ‘And it’s not Miss Le Havre, but Miss La Rochelle, if you’re capable of remembering your own name, of course, let alone mine, which I sincerely doubt just at the moment.’
‘I know that too well, but I dare say you could tell a tale or two about that life, could you not?’
‘I could, but I won’t.’
‘Yet you expect me to tell you my entire life story, whilst you reveal nothing of your own? You’re an implacably demanding, as well as an insensitive and intrusive, female footpad, are you not, Miss Rockyshore?’
‘You really have no idea, Captain Darke.’
‘So, is that how you keep your lovers under your slender little thumb?’ he drawled in his velvet-rubbed-the-wrong-way voice. ‘By dragging their darkest secrets out of them when they’re drunk, then holding them over the unfortunate idiots?’
‘Nothing about me is so very little, sir, I’m above average height for a woman,’ she parried coolly, ignoring the urge to counter the rest of his accusations as beneath her notice.
Trust him to take her words as an open invitation to let his silver-blue eyes rove over her boldly. He was good at defending his privacy, she mused, as he let his gaze track over her until those eyes had all but stripped her bare. Then the renegade let that blatant stare of his rest explicitly on the secret centre of her and she had to fight not to press her legs together and visibly, physically clamp down on the fiery demand suddenly all too alive and wildly curious for more under his outrageous scrutiny. Kit and Ben hadn’t fought battle after battle to preserve her honour in their youth so she could be secretly tempted to throw it away on a ne’er-do-well like this.
Yet that fully-formed temptation stopped her thundering scold and sharp exit in its tracks. If she let him take her virginity, then she’d lose all her value on the marriage mart the instant he did so. Not even a Charlton Hawberry would take another man’s leavings, so deeply ingrained as it was in a gentleman’s psyche that he must marry a virgin, or at the very least a virtuous widow—she would certainly be neither after a night in the ungallant captain’s bed. It might be a desperate idea, almost as reckless as climbing out of a second-floor window at midnight, but she wasn’t in a position to discard any possibility just now.
‘So I see,’ he said with a pantomime leer she almost applauded, but there was something deeper and darker than simple lust in his eyes as well. It suddenly occurred to her that the real Captain Darke, whoever he might be under all this dark and dangerous front he faced the world behind, could break her heart if she had one. Luckily she didn’t and stared boldly back at him.
‘That could change,’ she warned, ‘if you don’t stop staring at me.’
‘Me, Miss Rockisle?’ he said, and his silvery-blue eyes were beginning to lose the haze of brandy and world-weariness that had clouded them until now. She dare not look lower to find out if his body was as blatantly aroused as his cocky smile and intent gaze argued it must be.
‘Yes, you—we were discussing your total lack of ambition and self-respect rather than my height and frame, if you remember?’ she said coldly.
‘You can talk as
