hound sat on his mighty haunches and eyed first him, then his younger mistress, as if awaiting his cue to protect her to the last breath in his amiable body.
‘Or you could make it a clear to your mixed pack of hell-hounds we’re not going to rip each other to pieces when their backs are turned?’ he added.
‘I would have to be certain myself,’ he thought he heard her mutter under her breath, but then she seemed to make a huge effort to be civil and held out her hand as a sign to their canine audience that peace reigned.
Tom took it, wondering at the state a lady could get her hand in and not care. A glance at her short nails and tanned skin, nicked and scarred here and there from her labours, did nothing to warn him how it would feel in his broad, well-manicured palm. Ah, here she is, at last, an inner voice he ordered not to be so foolish whispered. He felt emotions he didn’t want to examine stir and threaten something impossible at the feel of work-hardened calluses on her slender fingers and finely made palm.
She shouldn’t have to work at anything more strenuous than pleasing herself and me, his inner idiot whispered in his ear. A shock of something hot and significant he’d never felt before shot through him like a fiery itch. It was too much of an effort to shake her slender hand then let it go as if she was just a new acquaintance.
‘I’m honoured to meet you, Miss Paulina,’ he said as lightly as if they had met in a Mayfair ballroom or, heaven forbid, Almack’s Club. He’d long ago resolved never to venture there again for fear of the tenacious matchmaking mamas and their formidably willing daughters.
‘Trethayne,’ Lady Wakebourne said abruptly. ‘Her name is Miss Trethayne and since she has no elder sister that is all you are required to know.’
Tom felt the girl’s hand tug insistently in his, realised he was still holding it like a mooncalf and relaxed his grip with unflattering haste. No wonder she was glaring at him now, and the vast hound was growling under his breath, rather than running off to fetch Toby from the garden as he was bid, whoever Toby might be.
‘Three tired teams and their drivers will be arriving here in the next couple of hours, so I suggest we put aside questions of what a Trethayne and you, Lady Wakebourne, are doing here under my less-than-comfortable roof and get on with preparing the stables to lodge them as best we can.’
‘Something you should have thought about when you set out,’ Miss Trethayne informed him, and Tom bit back an urge to defend his right to visit his own house if he wanted to, or even if he didn’t.
‘And if you expect me to put off examining your presence here, perhaps you should lay aside your hostility,’ he suggested coldly.
Part of him wanted to trade words with her until the sun went down, for the sheer pleasure of gazing at her scandalously displayed form and extraordinary face, but the rest knew better. She had fascinating eyes and then there was that strong nose that should make her a character, not a beauty, but didn’t. Her mouth was too wide to fit an accredited beauty as well, but it was as full of unstudied allure as the rest of her. There, hadn’t he just ordered himself not to catalogue her graces? Fully recognising his desire to kiss her deeply and urgently would be folly; best not think of such fiery needs when dressed in tight buckskin breeches—for all they concealed of his errant masculine urges he might as well stand here buck naked.
‘You’d best get on with cleansing the Augean Stables before it’s pitch dark and you can’t see what you’re doing, then,’ she said with a shrug, opening the stable doors with a glance of contempt at his once-spotless linen and expensive tailoring.
He was glad to see it contained none of the cynicism in Lady Wakebourne’s gaze as she silently challenged him to keep any lustful thoughts he might harbour about Miss Polly Trethayne strictly to himself. Bracing himself to meet the assorted hounds at closer quarters with suitably manly composure, Tom stepped out in Miss Trethayne’s wake and blinked in the late-afternoon sunshine. The four dogs sat to attention at a stern word from Lady Wakebourne, looking more comical than threatening as they watched her as if they knew they’d violated the laws of hospitality by being uncivil to guests.
‘Lunar, Zounds, Ariel and Cherubim, otherwise known as Cherry,’ the lady introduced them. ‘Lunar, give a paw,’ she commanded the great hound, who was clearly reserving the option to bite Tom if he misbehaved.
The terrier, Zounds, let out a gruff bark; Ariel looked regally indifferent, and Cherry rolled onto her back and waved all four feet in the air in a frantic plea for attention.
‘Hussy,’ Lady Wakebourne said with a sad shake of her head that didn’t deceive anyone, and the half-grown spaniel-cross waved her paws to tell her mistress she still wanted her belly scratched, hussy or no.
Polly watched the castle’s official reception committee behave in character and sighed. It was too much to hope the man would be scared of Lunar’s mighty build and need to protect them to his last breath. She had sensed fear in the tall figure at her side and tried to convince herself it made him less of a man, but then he’d sauntered out of the stables in her wake as if he hadn’t a care in the world and confounded her again. How could she not admire a man who confronted his fears with such style, even if she didn’t want to like anything about him?
Cherry decided a pantomime of what she wanted wasn’t doing the trick and yipped a command in his lordship’s direction, so he bent to give the pup a full belly rub she enjoyed so much she let out a little moan of delight and threatened to surge to her feet and jump at him in an excess of joy.
‘No!’ Lady Wakebourne ordered firmly, so Cherry simply demanded more fuss, and Polly felt the rich echoes of his laugh prickle like a warning along her spine.
‘Misbegotten hound,’ Lady Wakebourne said, and Cherry wagged her tail as if it was a huge compliment.
‘Go get the boys,’ Polly ordered Lunar and Zounds, and they bounded off, or at least Lunar bounded. Zounds skittered after him as fast as his uneven gait would allow, and Ariel weighed his options and decided he would like a run, so he streaked after them like the wind. Cherry saw she was being left behind, gave Lord Mantaigne an apologetic lick and dashed off as well.
‘The pump?’ his lordship asked Polly with one of those exceptionally irritating eyebrows of his quirked in an imperious question.
‘There is no pump, only a bucket on a rope,’ she said to him with a nod at the most deeply shadowed corner of the yard.
This was no time to soften towards him and join in the mighty clean it would take before the empty stable block was at all usable. Polly fetched the giant key to the tack room on the other side of the quadrangle, daring him to complain at the decay he’d caused in the first place. They’d fought his wilful neglect since the first day they happened on the castle, so he could see for himself how hard that struggle was for an hour of his soft life.
He didn’t look soft as he turned the key in the ancient lock without apparent effort. It was beyond her strength to move it without both hands and much cursing and swearing, and Polly told herself it was wrong to ogle his magnificently displayed physique as blatantly as he had done hers and sighed under her breath. His coming here would change everything, and all the wishing him away in the world wouldn’t alter the fact he was home at last. An untamed part of her was intrigued and even a little bit triumphant about the fact he’d been well worth waiting for.
Well,
