my lord, and now I must be about my work again,’ she said, meeting his sceptical gaze with a blankness she hoped would signal her indifference.
Too well acquainted with her own features to find them in any way remarkable, she could make nothing of his frozen stillness as his grey eyes met hers. Yet a whisper of that forbidden longing brushed down her tingling spine like a lover’s touch once again. He turned to gaze at the Wiltshire countryside through the long windows. His grey eyes were so wintry when he fixed them on her again that she had to control an urge to shrink away.
‘I need to get on,’ she said truthfully.
‘Then stop treating me like a flat and tell me what you’re up to.’
Heaven forbid! ‘Her ladyship will need me any minute,’ she told him with a perplexed expression that should have told him she was innocent.
Lord Strensham’s reflexes were so good that her wrist was caught in an iron grip before she had time to take evasive action. She held as still as a statue and refused to struggle with him like a country maid in a bad play. Yet the touch of his warm fingers on her bare flesh sent an insidious streak of warmth jagging up her arm to earth itself in the most unwelcome places, and she shivered with superstitious dread before bravely meeting his eyes again. If only she was as indifferent to his touch as she had been to Nick Prestbury’s, she thought hazily, but it seemed there was no point wishing for the moon.
‘I don’t think my cousins will be downstairs betimes if the lady you refer to has been running the household round as you say. Since you don’t look like any ladies’ maid I ever came across, I rather doubt Lyddie will need you either,’ he said silkily as he ran his mocking gaze over the housemaid’s uniform no self-respecting dresser would be seen dead in.
Feeling the hot colour stain her cheeks, Thea could not govern her reaction to his touch. Lately she had shrunk from any contact with the male sex, managing to avoid the roving eyes of both visiting masters and their servants by keeping her head down and disappearing into her ill-fitting, hand-me-down clothes. Lord Strensham’s less than lover-like grasp on her wrist sent her wayward heartbeat dancing as if performing a waltz at Almack’s.
It was perfectly ridiculous, this terrible need to have him kiss her again, she told herself. Secretly longing for him to draw her nearer and satisfy this feral desire was folly. She controlled a warm shiver as his strong hand gentled on her slender wrist and sparked those ridiculous curls of heat into life. They were worse than strangers and must remain so. There was an unbridgeable gulf between them, and she ordered herself brusquely to stop staring up at him like a mooncalf.
‘And to think I was warned about gentlemen like you,’ she snapped.
He dropped her hand as if it burnt him and jerked backwards so violently he was in danger of being overset for a moment. His dark brows snapped together, his eyes fierce as a hawk’s and his firm mouth set in a hard line. At least he was himself again; the drawling fop banished by the raw reality of what lay between them, however he tried to deny it, and she tried not to exult at the transformation.
No, she was ruined in the eyes of the world and he didn’t want her even as Hetty Smith, foundling! Thea gasped at the bitter memory of that day at the crossroads and almost shrank away from him, shocked at her own stupidity in laying herself open to such hurt a second time. She stood and faced him, raising her chin to spark dumb defiance at him; set on defying him even if it cost her the place she needed so badly.
‘You know I don’t trifle with innocents,’ he ground out, as if the very idea outraged his peculiar notions of honour. ‘But if you trap any more unwary gentlemen in otherwise empty rooms you won’t be one of those for very much longer, you foolish child.’
Child—how dare he? Thea gritted her teeth and managed to remember why she had to stay here undetected for at least two more months. By dint of promising herself that she would seek him out the moment she came of age—and give him her unvarnished opinion of his dubious morals and scurvy manners—she somehow mastered her fury. Unfortunately a mental picture of him, faced with a vaguely familiar female haranguing him over the breakfast table, presented itself to her inner eye, and an appreciative chuckle escaped her before she could check it.
For a second his remote façade seemed about to crack and his chilly grey eyes warmed, as if he too realised how ridiculous they must look, facing one another across Sir Edward Darraine’s library like duellists. Then his expression became bleak and unreadable again, even as all manner of forbidden questions trembled on her unruly tongue. She blinked to rid her mind of a ridiculous image of those grey eyes hot with passion, a smile of infinite promise on a firm mouth that had suddenly become sensual rather than hard and angry, as he moved ever nearer to her own waiting one and…and nothing!
‘I ain’t got all day to waste gossiping, even if you have, m’lord.’
‘No, I dare say you have work to catch up on.’
‘Most likely I have at that.’
‘Just make sure you don’t get caught next time, Hetty.’
‘There won’t be a next time,’ she assured him emphatically, and swore privately that it was true.
Some risks were not worth taking twice, and my Lord Strensham was one of them.
‘If I catch you out in one more misdeed, your mistress will hear of it,’ he warned and his mistrust hurt.
‘Maybe she’ll wonder why you care,’ she was stung into replying pertly, wondering why that threat tormented her so much she had to blink back tears.
They could never be more than master and housemaid after all, the Winfordes had seen to that.
‘Try that tack and you’ll soon find out your mistake, my enterprising little doxy, and maybe I was mistaken about that innocence after all,’ he ground out harshly, and she was helpless in his powerful embrace before she had even registered the fact that he had moved closer.
Lost for words and even breath as the potent reality of being locked in his arms once more hit her, she forced air into her protesting lungs. Breathing in the scent of clean linen, warm male and fine broadcloth, she forgot all else. Strength so certain it knew nothing about force wrapped her round and she had the most absurd desire to nuzzle deeper into his arms and forget all her troubles, even as common sense was vainly ordering her to drag herself out of them by whatever means needed, fair or foul.
His touch was gentle and sure, and she felt as if she alone knew the breadth and depths that made up Marcus Ashfield, the person under the lordly cynicism. Even that foolish notion flew out of her head as he stroked down her cheek to her chin in a caress that had her obediently raising her head before her brain managed to inform her she was making life too easy for a practised seducer.
Even as her wiser self was ordering her to struggle, to kick or bite if that was what it took to get him to let go, the fool in charge angled her mouth to meet his descending one and determinedly shut her eyes to reality. His lips were gentle on hers and her eyelids fluttered open again so her dazzled eyes could meet stormy grey ones. She gasped in a breath that carried his unique scent and an echo of his latent power right to the heart of her. Then, as the blue faded from her turquoise eyes and they became green under such extreme emotion, his own need burnt hotter, and his kiss seemed about to draw the very essence of her into his powerful protection.
‘Sea-witch,’ he murmured, his lips so reluctant to leave hers that she felt his words as much as heard them.
Then
