at his reluctant hostess that should make her blush and run to fetch whoever tried to lend her countenance.
Not that she had any idea of her own looks, he decided with a frown. She must be close to six feet tall to meet his eyes so easily, especially when looking down her haughty Roman nose as if he was the source of an unpleasant smell she hadn’t been able to track down until now. Most of her inches were made up of leg and he almost wished he carried a quizzing glass so he could infuriate her all the more. Not that she didn’t have a superb body to match those long and slender feminine legs of hers; dressed in form-fitting breeches, flowing shirt and a tight spencer jacket as she was, he’d be a fool not to notice she had a fine collection of feminine curves to go with them.
The wonder was she could roam round Dayspring in such a guise without a pack of wolves hunting her as such beasts usually did any unprotected female. She must be able to go about unmolested, though, since she hadn’t stopped doing it, and that made him take her more seriously than he wanted to. If ever he’d met a feminine disaster waiting to happen it was this argumentative young goddess and he hadn’t time or energy to cope with the challenge she presented just now.
‘You don’t look like any of the portraits of past Lord Mantaignes scattered about the castle,’ she informed him with the sort of infuriated glare he hadn’t been subjected to since he last annoyed Virginia.
‘I doubt if one of my father survived my former guardian’s rule here, but I’m told I take after him,’ Tom said, wondering why it mattered.
‘Don’t you know?’
‘I don’t remember either of my parents.’
‘That’s as may be, but none of the pictures look like you,’ she said accusingly.
He sighed in his best impression of a bored society beau and hoped she found it as superior and annoying as he meant her to. She took a long look at his dusty but perfectly fitted boots, then her gaze flicked dismissively over the coat Weston would no longer be quite so proud to admit was his handiwork lying nearby, but he saw the odd giveaway sign she wasn’t as confident of his nonentity as she wanted him to believe. Her breathing came a little short and there was a hint of desperation in those fine eyes, as if the truth was too much to cope with and she wanted to fend it off as long as possible.
‘I dare say you know the State Rooms better than I do. My guardian never let me explore that part of the house when I lived here,’ he admitted, trying to shrug off the feeling he’d revealed too much.
‘The villagers do say Lord Mantaigne’s guardian was a cruel man,’ she conceded, thinking about rearranging her prejudices, but not yet ready to turn them on their head.
‘How tactful of them,’ he said with a bitter smile.
Why the devil had he let Virginia bullock him into coming here? Tom wanted to be out of this intimate stable in the fresh air. With hints of fish and brine, seaweed and wide oceans on the breeze from the sea, at least that was something his guardian had never been able to take from him. How could he have forgotten that and all the other things he loved about this place, despite the neglect and cruelty he’d endured? He’d never wanted to set eyes on this place, but the scent of the sea settled a strange sort of longing in him for home that he hadn’t even known he had until he got here.
He used to risk his life creeping down the hoary old stones of the North Tower as soon as his bare feet were big enough to cling to the bumps and cracks in the rock. Grably was too much of a coward to kill the ‘spawn of the devil’, he had called Tom when no outsiders were listening, but he wouldn’t have shed a tear if Tom had fallen to his death and saved him the stain of murder on his mean and twisted soul.
‘I suppose you could be him,’ a very different keeper of Dayspring Castle admitted begrudgingly and wrenched his thoughts back to the present. ‘You’re the right age, but Maggie said his little lordship looked an angel fallen out of Heaven and you don’t look angelic to me.’
‘You know my one-time nurse then?’ he said, sounding far too eager. That reminder of the one constant in his life after his father had died, until his guardian sent her away, caught him unawares.
‘I knew Lord Mantaigne’s childhood nurse before she died,’ she said, eyeing him as if unsure his word could be trusted or not.
Not, Tom concluded, at least not if she was aware of her own allure as she stood in the shadowed gloom of the stables and stared at him as if she could read his sooty soul. Not, if she was possibly the most unlikely virgin lady he had ever met, with her mannish garments, unmanly figure and a mass of unruly hair barely held by the tail she’d plaited it into some time during the last week.
An unforgivably urgent desire to see the heavy weight of it about her naked shoulders like rumpled silk taunted his body and his senses. Half hiding and half enhancing a figure he knew would be as perfect in real human flesh as any classical statue of a two-thousand-year-old goddess carved in ancient Greece, he could picture it rippling over the fine skin he suspected was creamy and satin smooth where the sun hadn’t reached her not-quite-redhead’s skin and tinted it pale gold.
Considering nothing about her seemed quite sure how to be, she was a very definite snare for a man who liked his ladies bold and confident of their own charms. Her hair wasn’t quite red, brown or blonde and he’d already had that silly discussion with himself about her eyes. He could feel Peters’s cool gaze on him as he realised what the unwary goddess wouldn’t let herself see—that she was in the presence of a lone wolf and could be very unsafe indeed. If not for where they were and what he’d been sent here to do, she would be in more danger than Peters realised, but Tom couldn’t afford distractions until he got to the bottom of a very odd barrel of fish.
‘Knew her?’ he asked after he’d racked his brains to recall what they were talking about before he got distracted again.
‘She died five years ago,’ his mystery snapped.
‘I have no resident agent here,’ he said stiffly. ‘Nor have I kept in contact with anyone in the villages.’
‘Something they know all too well,’ she condemned, and he suddenly felt impatient of his would-be judge and jury.
‘Something they can now complain about directly to me, if I ever manage to leave these stables and meet any of them,’ he said wearily.
‘Is he really the Marquis of Mantaigne?’ she asked Peters, as if unable to trust his word, and Tom bit back an impatient curse.
‘Ask yourself if he could be anyone else, ma’am, and I suspect you’ll have your answer. I’m his employee, so you can’t trust me to tell the truth. Lord Mantaigne could terminate my employment if I was to argue against him.’
‘As if I would dare,’ Tom allowed himself to drawl and felt he’d almost won back the detachment he prided himself on.
‘He looks useless enough to be a marquis, or he might if he was wearing that dandified coat,’ she allowed with a nod of contempt at a once-exquisite example of Weston’s fine work.
‘Do you think there might be a compliment hiding somewhere in that sentence if I look hard enough for it, Peters?’ Tom asked as if they needed a translator.
‘I wouldn’t bet your rent rolls on it, my lord.’
‘Paulina! Oh, Polly! Wherever are you hiding yourself this time?’ a brisk soprano voice called before being drowned out
