frustration for you,’ Peters murmured.
‘Never mind that, who the devil is living here? I ordered it empty as a pauper’s pocket and they can’t be any kin of mine because I don’t have any.’
‘How did you plan to look after your team when we got here then, let alone the carts and men following behind?’
‘The boot is full of tack, oats and horse blankets, so it’s your own comfort I’d be worrying myself about if I were you.’
‘I will, once we have these lads safely stowed in the nice comfortable stable someone’s left ready for them,’ Peters said with a suspicious glance about the yard that told Tom they had the same idea about such empty but prepared stables and what they might be used for this close to the coast.
‘Keep that pistol handy while we see to the horses,’ he cautioned.
It didn’t take long to remove the harness and lead the now-placid team into four waiting stalls and rub them down. Once they were cool enough, Tom and Peters hefted the ready-filled water buckets so the horses could drink after their leisurely journey, then they left them to pull happily at the hay-net someone had left ready. Tom was enjoying the sights and sounds of contented horses when the shaft of mellow afternoon sunlight from the half-open door was blocked by a new arrival. Pretending to be cool as the proverbial cucumber, he cursed himself for leaving his coat and pistol out of reach and turned to face the newcomer with a challenge that rapidly turned to incredulity.
‘Ye gods!’ he exclaimed, stunned by the appearance of a shining goddess with no shame at all, at Dayspring of all places.
‘Minerva or Hera?’ he heard Peters murmur in the same bewildered tone and felt a glimmer of impatience that the man was ogling the woman he urgently wanted himself. He could hardly wait to wrap those endless feminine legs about his own flanks and be transported to the heights of Olympus as soon as he could get those scandalous breeches off her.
‘You should at least get Greece and Rome sorted out in your head before you make such foolish comparisons in future,’ the vision said crossly, proving she had acute hearing, as well as a classical education and the finest feminine legs Tom had ever seen, in or out of his bedchamber, and he badly wanted this pair naked in one as soon as he could charm, persuade or just plain beg her to let him make love to her.
‘I’ll be happy in either so long as you’re with me, Athene,’ Tom recovered himself enough to offer with a courtly bow she should find flattering.
‘And I have no time for such nonsense and nor do you, Mr Whoever-You-Might-Be. You’re going to be far too busy reharnessing those fine horses of yours to that pretty little carriage and driving them back the way you came to indulge in such ridiculous fancies.’
‘Why would I do that?’
‘Because I demand you remove them from our stables immediately.’
‘Our stables?’ Tom’s mind latched on to the possessive word among so many he could argue with and he wondered why it seemed so important she had no intimate other to pair herself with instead of him.
‘Ours, mine, whatever you prefer. I’d certainly prefer you to go quickly and stop staring at my legs.’
‘If you don’t want them leered at, you should resume your petticoats. We males can’t resist eyeing such fine feminine charms when they’re so temptingly displayed without them.’
‘A true gentleman wouldn’t look,’ she informed him, looking haughtily down a nose Hera or Minerva would have been justly proud of.
‘Oh, but he would, wouldn’t he, Peters? Peters is a proper gentleman, Athene, although I am only a nobleman myself,’ Tom said, not at all sure he liked being looked at as if he was a caterpillar on a cabbage leaf.
‘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
