Elizabeth Rolls – In Debt To The Earl (страница 4)

He rapped sharply, noting with faint surprise that the door was actually clean...

The door opened and a girl enveloped in a grimy apron and clutching a rag stared at him. A few coppery tendrils of hair had escaped from her mob cap and brushed against a creamy-fair, slightly flushed cheek. A familiar odour that had nothing to do with fish drifted from the apartment. He sniffed—furniture polish? Yes, and something else, something sweet and indefinable that drifted through him.

‘Are you looking for someone?’

James’s world lurched a little at the slightly husky and surprisingly well-bred voice. His gaze met wary green eyes and an altogether unwelcome heat slid through his veins. How the hell did pond scum like Hensleigh acquire a woman like this one? Even as he wondered, the girl began to close the door. ‘You must have the wrong address.’

He stuck his foot in the door. ‘The devil I do.’

* * *

Lucy wondered if several foolish and altogether unlikely daydreams had become tangled with reality. The dreams where a tall, dark-haired, handsome gentleman came and swept her away into a life of safety. Only in her dreams, when this gentleman appeared at the door, she was somehow garbed in the latest fashions, with a dainty reticule dangling from her wrist. Not clad in a worn-out gown and grubby apron, and clutching a polishing rag. Nor in her dreams did the gentleman have cold, storm-grey eyes that looked at her as if she were something stuck to his shoe. Nor did he scowl. Her dream gentleman went down on one knee and offered her his heart. She wasn’t holding out for a prince, however, just a kind, respectable man who didn’t gamble and had a comfortable home. Nor did she insist on the glass slipper, which she thought would be most uncomfortable, but clearly, if she had a fairy godmother at all, the fairy’s wand had a slight flaw.

‘I’m looking for Hensleigh.’

For a moment the deep, velvet-dark voice froze her so that she just stared dumbly. It wasn’t so much that he was tall, although he was, but that there was something about the way he stood. The way he seemed to fill the landing. Perhaps it was his shoulders? They seemed very broad, much broader than Papa’s. Whatever the reason, her mind had scrambled.

She cleared her throat. ‘I’m sorry, sir. There is no one—’ Her mind cleared and her stomach chilled at her near mistake, at the cold eyes that raked her. ‘That is, he’s not here.’ She clutched the polishing rag to steady the sudden trembling of her hands. Hensleigh, not Armitage. Papa had drummed it into her years ago not to use their real name. Ever. The name he used changed periodically, but it had been Hensleigh for weeks now. Before that it had been Hammersley and before that...well, something else starting with H. According to Shakespeare, a rose would smell as sweet by any other name, but she thought the rose might find it confusing to be renamed every few months.

Cold eyes narrowed and her pulse beat erratically. His voice, lethally soft, curled through her. ‘Of course a rose by any other name may smell as sweet.’ She flinched. Was the man a sorcerer? ‘Although I’m sure it does become confusing.’

She bit her lip. Neither confirm, nor deny. Explanations are dangerous. There was only one reason such a man would be looking for her father. How much this time? A question that was none of her business even to think, let alone voice.

‘He isn’t here, I’m afraid. Please move your foot.’ She wished she hadn’t used that word, afraid. It nudged too close to the truth.

The visitor cocked his head to one side. ‘And when do you expect his return?’

His foot didn’t move. Lucy forced breath into her lungs. A cold knot, not entirely composed of hunger, twisted in her belly. ‘I... I don’t know.’ And for the first time in a very long while she wished that her father were about to walk through the door. This man had every nerve prickling the way he looked at her...as though he didn’t believe her.

‘I’ll wait.’

Let the wolf over the threshold? Alarm bells clashed.

‘No. He’s—’

Powerful hands seized her shoulders, lifting and dumping her out on the landing. Her breath caught and her senses whirled in panic, as he stalked into the apartment. For a moment she considered leaving him to it and racing downstairs to the relative safety of Mrs Beattie’s kitchen. Coward! Find your backbone, for God’s sake! He’d dumped her out here like yesterday’s rubbish! Anger drove out the fear and common sense flooded back. A man with designs on her wouldn’t have pushed her out on the landing. Ergo, she was safe. Gritting her teeth, she went after him.

‘How dare you! I don’t care who you are! Get out!’

His glance flicked over the room and back to her. ‘How do you propose to make me?’ he asked, as if he really wanted to know.

She had no idea how, but— ‘This is my home!’ she retorted. ‘I have every right to ask you to leave!’ As homes went it was pathetic, but that didn’t mean she had to accept this...this thug’s presence in it.

Amusement crinkled the corners of his eyes. ‘Your home, madam? Not much to defend, is it? Or are you defending Hensleigh? Or is it Hammersley this week? Where is he?’

She had spent the morning dusting and polishing. The floor was clean. Every stick of furniture gleamed. And she had never been so bitterly aware of the rickety table and chairs, the chipped looking glass over the fireplace, the bare floorboards or the threadbare curtain hiding the corner where she slept, as that scornful gaze raked the room.

‘I already told you, I don’t know!’ That he knew the last name they had used sent a chill slithering down her spine.

‘So you did,’ he said. ‘Are you going to invite me to sit down?’

‘No.’

He shrugged and sat down anyway on the battered chair by the cold, empty grate. There hadn’t been a fire in it for weeks. There was barely enough money for food, let alone luxuries.

She dragged in breath and let it go again. There was nothing she could do to shift him and she refused to rail at him like a Billingsgate fishwife. She stuffed her fury behind a solid door and slammed it shut.

‘You will excuse me if I continue my work,’ she said calmly and swiped her polishing rag back into the open jar of beeswax on the table. She could not afford more, but despite that she started all over again in the corner furthest from the fireplace, taking her time, hoping he would get bored and leave if she ignored him.

Unfortunately he didn’t ignore her.

That grey, assessing gaze remained on her as she re-polished the table with painstaking thoroughness.

‘I must say I envy Hensleigh,’ murmured her unwelcome guest after a few moments. She stiffened, but continued polishing so that the table wobbled noisily. ‘Lucky fellow,’ he went on, ‘having a wench willing to clean his lodgings twice in one morning and warm his bed.’

Everything inside her stopped as well as the polishing rag. And the temper her grandparents had tried so hard to curb slipped its leash. Slowly she straightened and faced him, the dusting rag clenched in her fist. ‘Wench?’ She restrained the urge to throw the rag in his face.

His brows rose. ‘A poor choice of words,’ he said. ‘You’re certainly a cut above wench-dom, even if your taste in men is execrable. You could do better than Hensleigh or whatever his name is this week.’

‘Really?’ Rage slammed through her, but she kept her voice dulcet. ‘You, for example?’

He smiled, reminding her of the wolf down at the Royal Exchange. ‘If you like. If you tell me where he is.’

‘They say it’s a wise child who knows its own father,’ she said, her stomach twisting. ‘It would be an interesting set of circumstances that permitted her to choose him.’

James wondered if he’d been hit on the head with a brick as the implications slammed into him. No one had suggested that the woman in Hensleigh’s lodgings was his daughter! He had assumed...

‘But,’ the impossible girl continued, ‘if you are prepared to acknowledge me as your natural daughter I’ll be very happy to have it so. Although...’ she looked him up and down in a way he found oddly unnerving ‘...you must have been a rather precocious child.’

James collected his scattered wits and found his tongue. ‘You’re his daughter, not his—’ He stopped there. If she was Hensleigh’s daughter—

‘Correct.’ The chill in her voice would have shaken an iceberg.

‘Do you expect an apology, Miss... Hensleigh?’ Hell’s teeth! Men did have daughters, even Hensleigh could have one. But—

She stared at him. ‘What? Do I look stupid?’

He took a careful breath. Delicate features, and the small fist gripping the polishing rag as though she’d like to shove it down his throat was gracefully formed, if grubby. She looked furious, not stupid. And her voice was well bred, even if it had an edge on it fit to flay a rhinoceros, and there was something about the way she held herself, and that damn polishing rag—an air of dignity. He’d meant it when he said that she could do better than Hensleigh. She was not a beauty, not in the strictest sense of the word, but—those eyes blazed, and the mouth was soft and lush—or it would be if it weren’t flat with anger. Damn it! There ought to be nothing remotely appealing about her! She was a redhead with the ghosts of last summer’s freckles dancing over her nose, the whole shabby room smelt of furniture polish, and the truth was that he didn’t want to believe that she could be Hensleigh’s mistress. Which was ridiculous. It didn’t matter a damn if she was Hensleigh’s mistress or not. Or did it? Stealing a man’s mistress was one thing, seducing his daughter quite another. And selling Hensleigh’s vowels if it might condemn this girl to an even worse situation was yet another thing.