The Regency Season Collection: Part Two. Кэрол Мортимер
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want to know about.
‘Then it’s rightfully yours,’ she said and shot him a baleful look.
‘Ah, but it’s not my colour,’ he quipped.
‘Don’t shrug me off and don’t treat me like a charity case.’
‘I would never be so rash or so rude, even if you were anything of the kind and you’re not,’ he said sternly, as if he thought the rest of the world spent too much time tiptoeing about her temper.
‘You have no idea what it’s like to have nothing,’ she replied defensively.
‘Do I not? If you’d seen the ragged boy who used to risk his life climbing out of the highest tower window up there and down the outside of his own castle in search of scraps to fill his hungry belly, you might change your mind about my ignorance.’
‘But you didn’t really have nothing,’ she argued weakly, pity for such a desperate boy causing a lump of sadness in her throat she knew he would hate.
‘And neither do you. You have a family who adore you; friends who would walk barefoot to reach you if you were in trouble and the whole neighbourhood sings your praises at me until I’m almost sick of the sound of your name on their tongues.’
‘None of them need me now you are here.’
‘Just as well, since you’ve been hiding behind a set of harrows or pulling weeds out of turnips or whatever else you’ve been finding to do with yourself all the hours God sends these past few weeks in order to avoid me.’
‘I wasn’t hiding.’
‘Were you not? If nobody else could have done any of those tasks, then I bow to your superior knowledge and must consider you sociable after all.’
‘You know very well there was nothing uniquely skilled about any of the jobs I’ve done lately.’
‘Perhaps you ought to let someone else do them then. I’ve offered anyone who wants work all the employment they could dream of in my sadly neglected pleasure gardens, woods and the acreage the castle once kept under its own management. Kingwood wants to retire and tells me he’s only been farming the land you and your friends couldn’t cope with because he felt he owed it to my father. You have no idea how humble I’m becoming under the goad of such words, Miss Trethayne. Everyone here thinks my father a much better man than I’ll ever be, although I can’t remember much to back that opinion up. In fairness, he could hardly be a worse master than I have been, so the competition is not fierce.’
‘They want to admire you,’ Polly heard herself say softly and wondered how he’d turned her from raging virago into his sympathetic champion in so short a time. ‘Some would even love you, if you let them.’
‘Love is the most unreliable of human emotions, Miss Trethayne. I do my best to avoid feeling it or asking for it from others.’
‘Then I must feel sorry for you, my lord,’ Polly said with a corrosive feeling of disappointment and pity nagging at her as she turned to walk away.
‘Don’t. I’m perfectly content with friendship and mutual respect.’
‘I hope it keeps you warm in winter then,’ she murmured and would have gone back to her eyrie to take a second look at the riding habit that now sounded like a gift of love, except he held her back with the lightest of touches on her arm.
‘So do I,’ he said far more seriously than usual. ‘I also hope you’ll accept Lady Wakebourne’s scheme for your joint futures when she proposes it, Miss Trethayne. The lady has no family and those wild young rascals of hers to bring up on her own somehow. I don’t think you’d want her to struggle on alone, even if the idea of me freezing to death on an Arctic ice-floe would probably cost you no qualms.’
‘You’re so wrong about that,’ she told him, meeting his eyes for a long moment. ‘It would cost me a great many.’
‘But you have a tender heart, Miss Trethayne. I dare say you would make a push to rescue your worst enemy from such a chilly ending,’ he said, and there was something in his gaze she dared not read, something that spoke of more than lust or mere liking for her and that simply couldn’t be a possibility between them.
‘Perhaps I would,’ she agreed with a faint smile.
‘And you will listen?’
‘I would always give such a good friend a fair hearing and try my best to be reasonable about whatever it is she has to say.’
‘If that’s what it takes to render you open to reason, I must wish I was your friend then.’
‘So must I, my lord,’ she said rather sadly.
‘Could we not try it?’ he offered, and for a moment the chance of such an unlikely relationship tempted her to take the admiration in his gaze and warmth of his hand in hers to seal a bond between them.
‘I don’t think a marquis could be friends with a beggar,’ she said and hated herself for being less democratic than he was as she made herself turn away.
‘I don’t think that so-called beggar can be friends with herself until she accepts we are each of us more than a rank or a piece of ignorant name-calling,’ he said quietly as she went to walk away.
She hesitated, wishing so hard she dared accept his olive branch and see him in the same rosy light as the rest of the unofficial residents of Dayspring Castle did.
‘I expect you’re right,’ she said tritely and made herself leave, before she swore undying devotion to him, or even blurted out some disaster of an emotion he would dislike even more.
Thinking back to his idea that she would be happy to hear he’d met such an awful end, she fought down a denial it almost hurt her not to voice. Of course she didn’t want anything to happen to the arrogant lord of Dayspring Castle. The very idea of him enduring such hardship when she wasn’t there to try to make it less hurt her. Tears blurred her vision before she blinked them back as she strode off to her room to find clean clothes to put on after the bath she so badly needed.
* * *
Half an hour later Polly sat back in her tub of hot water in the women’s bath-house with a contented sigh, then reached for the soap Lord Mantaigne had insisted on sending for as a luxury he refused to live without. He wasn’t the man she’d thought him at first sight of all that perfect tailoring and gilded splendour, but he wasn’t the man he thought either. She’d done her best to pretend he was just a London dandy, but he was so much more. If he ever stopped keeping the rest of the world at arm’s length, he would be an extraordinary and unforgettable man. It was the waste of such magnificent potential that made her want to cry, though, not a more personal sort of desolation that she wasn’t the woman to unlock it.
Washing off the sweat and dirt of her labours, she did her best not to think of making love with the wretched man like this, with her limbs all smooth and warm and naked and her feminine curves undisguised by mannish clothes and rough labour. What would he make of her if he could see her naked? The very idea shot a hot quiver of anticipation through her like an arrow of molten gold, but that was a silly idea, wasn’t it?
Gold was far too soft even for Cupid’s arrows and she didn’t care to even consider being pierced by one of those. A knot of pure heat still clutched in her belly, though, and on down to whisper all sorts of impossible echoes of him and her at her deepest and most secret core. She considered what he might look like similarly naked and as curious about her as she was about him and blushed in places she didn’t know she could blush. Would he want her if he saw her like this? Would his manhood betray the fact a vigorous and healthy male would always want a reasonably well-formed female, if the chance arose to be closeted with her hot and naked in a steamy room with a fire lit in the corner to make it cosy and intimate? Probably, but a cynical voice whispered in her head that it didn’t mean she would be in any way special to him and he would be the sun and moon to her if she wasn’t very careful.
She ran a speculative