her lips and they parted for him on a sigh, as if she spent her entire life waiting around for his kisses. Sensible Thea was screaming at the willing and needy creature who seemed to have been born fully formed and defiantly wanton in his arms that morning in the woods, but the thunder of his heartbeat where her wondering fingers rested against his powerful chest all but drowned her out.
She was putting the few dreams she had left at risk, for a few moments of enchantment in the arms of a philanderer. Yet his mouth firmed and demanded on hers, and he explored her lips with a wholehearted pleasure that was a seduction all on its own. Despite everything, she longed to explore this heady passion with this unique man. Stern Thea snapped something very rude at melting, desiring Thea, who just murmured something foolish and felt Marcus’s tongue explore her all-too-willing mouth with irrepressible delight as he asked more than her pride should grant him. A request she unhesitatingly allowed as her mouth opened under his, and the feel of him dipping between her lips and flirting with her tongue sent shivers of longing down her spine.
‘No,’ sensible Thea murmured a protest that she knew was half at losing his warmth as he raised his head.
She saw a blaze of emotion light his grey gaze to silver, and knew all that heated desire was for her. Then he put his hands on her upper arms and set her at a distance as she realised just what she had done.
‘Oh, no!’ she whispered and it sounded like a parade-ground bellow in the sunny room she had previously found so peaceful.
‘Oh, no, indeed,’ he murmured softly.
Wasn’t it just like him to act as if he had just discovered her committing some trifling misdeed? Especially when she felt as if caught by such wonder she was surprised the world had not changed by more than seconds since he shook the foundations of it again. It had never occurred to her that he might be as amazed by that tumultuous kiss as she was herself, so she took his light tone for mockery and her temper lashed the hurt aside to blaze at him.
‘I hope you marry the high-nosed bitch who runs us all ragged from dawn to dusk with her demands and her megrims!’ she raged, what had to be hot fury stinging her eyes. ‘You richly deserve one another, and at least then you won’t inflict yourselves on better people,’ she finished triumphantly and stamped a sensibly shod foot so there could be no mistake about her outrage.
‘Indeed,’ he replied blandly, all expression vanishing from his face as he stepped back from her, looking as if he had just encountered a flying artillery shell and was unsure where it might explode.
‘Oh, get out of the way, you, you…man, you,’ she demanded in reply to such blatant provocation and could have kicked him when he obligingly did so. ‘Somehow I’ll make you pay, my lord, if it’s the last thing I do,’ she threatened, once she was so far out of his reach that even he had no hope of catching her.
Thea marched out of the library with a seething mass of confused emotions powering her about her neglected duties so effectively that she had finished them in record time, despite that shocking interlude in Sir Edward Darraine’s well-stocked library.
‘No doubt you will, you little shrew,’ the rueful gentleman she left behind her murmured as the echoes of the door slamming still resounded.
Marcus had never intended to touch the girl again, let alone kiss her. Now he was half-willing to sell his soul to the devil for a night of insanity in her arms. It could not happen, he informed himself sternly. It must not happen. He hadn’t spent so long battling his inner demons to succumb within minutes of setting eyes on her again. Even such fiery passion faded, he reassured himself, and she would hate him for ruining her if he gave in to it.
So why did he constantly have this uneasy feeling that he was wilfully turning his back on something unique? Because he was an idiot, and, even if love existed, he still had nothing. Nothing to offer Hetty Smith, housemaid and enigma at any rate. Miss Rashton, heiress, wanted his title and a well-bred son and heir, so at least he had something to give her in return, even if the thought of bedding her left him cold. He shivered as he contrasted his molten feelings for Hetty with his indifference to the strident heiress.
Yet the lovely Mrs Fall would want affection at the very least. Timid little Sophronia Willet would sooner be locked in a cage with a hungry bear than marry him, so Miss Rashton it must be, and at least there would be no nonsense about love. No nonsense at all and the thought of carrying out his marital duties under his bride’s stern gaze made his toes curl.
A few minutes alone with Lyddie’s humblest housemaid was all it took for passion to make a fool of him. His loins quickened at the thought of her lips under his and the delicious friction of her curves fitting themselves to his angles. It always felt as if they had been formed to meld with such rightness, when the time inevitably came to do so. Not so, Major Ashfield sternly informed his traitorous body. He had to marry money, or let his dependants starve and reduce his brother to penury along with himself. No impulse to forget the world in a runaway wench’s arms could stand in his way.
Years of military discipline made him sit at Ned’s desk to write his letter, fighting the inclination to lounge there and muse over a stolen kiss, as well as Virgil’s Aeneid in the original Latin Hetty had left there. It was on that renegade thought that the peculiar nature of her reading sank in.
Marcus put aside the letter he couldn’t give half his attention to stare intently at the book, trying to make sense out of Hetty Smith. A female of birth and education who read Virgil’s Aeneid in the original Latin would be an eccentric, so surely a maidservant could not con such a text? Although this particular maid might pretend she was no more capable of reading it than she was of rowing to the Antipodes, he was far from convinced.
The wench was hiding something, besides sea-changing eyes a man might happily drown in and the softest, most tempting mouth he had ever kissed. Perhaps she had been waiting for her lover in that shack in the woods that night? The very thought made his long fingers tighten into fists and his mouth hard. She felt like the most innocent female he had ever kissed when she took fire in his arms, but was she acting a part?
If she could play the housemaid to Lady Lydia’s satisfaction, she might as easily fool an ex-soldier who had spent years fighting for his country rather than dealing with duplicitous females. Disillusion set another layer of ice about what he assured himself was a cold and indifferent heart, and he tried to consider the Darraines’ third housemaid dispassionately.
The cunning minx could earn a fortune on her back if that naiveté was an act. Marcus was well aware of the dangers of taking liars at face value, even if a less disillusioned man might forget discretion and common sense under Hetty Smith’s potent spell. It was clearly his duty to find out if she presented a threat to his cousin’s household after introducing her to it so blindly. Passion was a snare that could bring down the best of men, let alone a fortune hunter with nothing a year to support his obligations on, but he didn’t have to give in to it.
Picking up the calf-bound volume, he shook it and, when nothing fell out, assumed she had been looking in the wrong place. Yet Ned was a respectable country gentleman nowadays—and what fool would risk hiding anything in here, when his cousin was commonly known to be bookish? Maybe he had read too many improbable tales for his own good.
Of course the wench could have been taking a wistful look at the mysteries of the written word and not know English or Latin from Double Dutch. Despite this comfortable notion, he was left with a lingering impression of her remarkable eyes, full of native wit and wary as a cat’s. Someone must keep an eye on her, and, if a gang of felons were targeting the house, he would frustrate them, short of putting the under-housemaid’s slender neck in the hangman’s noose.
An icy shudder ran down his spine
