Was Gregory really as mercenary as the men of Stoketown?
‘But let us not dwell on the past,’ said Lady Mixby, sighing and clasping her pudgy hands together. ‘I am so looking forward to hearing all about how you met Halstead and how you came to fall in love. I know—you don’t need to remind me,’ she said, raising her hand in the air as though in surrender. ‘Not a word about any of it until we are all together after dinner. Speaking of which,’ she said, getting to her feet, ‘I should really go and get changed. Or should I?’ she said, just as she reached the door. ‘Would it be terribly tactless of me to dress up when you have nothing decent to wear? Halstead himself is borrowing the Sunday clothes of the under-gardener, who is the only one of the male staff with broad enough shoulders to have a shirt that would fit. I shall ask Benderby. Such a treasure, you know. I can always rely on her to come up with a practical solution.’
The room seemed very, very quiet once Lady Mixby had left. Prudence had never come across anyone with the ability to speak continuously without pausing for breath before. Or with the tendency to flit from one subject to another like a butterfly.
How on earth could Gregory have led her to believe for one minute that Lady Mixby was a dragon? She was the very opposite. It almost seemed wrong to describe her as an aunt at all. In fact she’d been so welcoming that she’d completely dispelled the slightly oppressive atmosphere of the room. It no longer felt as though the furnishings had been expressly designed to depress the pretensions of impostors, but rather to enfold any weary guest in a sumptuous sort of embrace.
The only trouble was that now Lady Mixby had told her that one of Gregory’s ancestors had been an Elizabethan pirate she couldn’t help picturing him with a pearl earring and a rapier in his hand. So instead of arming herself with a quiver full of clever remarks with which to confound him, she now spent the time before dinner imagining him engaged in various nefarious pursuits. The most frequent of which imaginings involved him mounted on a black horse, holding up a stagecoach at midnight. Though the one of him lounging back in his bathtub, naked apart from some strategically placed soapsuds, came a close second.
By the time she was ready, physically, to go downstairs, she was no more prepared to cross swords with His Grace the Duke of Halstead than poor betwattled Lady Mixby would ever be.
Chapter Fourteen
‘Miss Carstairs, how very much better you look,’ said Gregory when she entered the dining room.
Prudence couldn’t help raising one hand to her hair and flushing self-consciously. Did he really like the way she looked in this gown, with her hair neatly brushed, braided, and coiled on the top of her head?
His eyes followed the movement of her hand. He must have seen she was blushing, but his expression remained completely impassive. How different he was now from the man he’d been in that barn, when he’d described her hair as russet glory and trembled with the force of the desire he said he’d felt for her. This Gregory was a complete enigma. It was as if, the moment they’d set foot in Bramley Park, he’d deliberately snuffed out the man she’d come to know.
So how could she care so much about what he might be thinking? How could she long for him to find her as attractive as she found him, seeing him for the first time closely shaved and in a full set of clean clothes—even if they did belong to a humble gardener?
Bother Lady Mixby for putting that vision of him with a pearl earring into her mind. Though, to be fair, she’d come up with that vision of soapsuds slithering over his naked masculine musculature all by herself.
Well, it was no use having visions of that sort. Because they were weakening her resolve to put an end to a betrothal which should never have begun.
She drew on every ounce of pride she possessed, and said, ‘Thank you,’ in as calm a voice as she could muster. ‘The maid you sent was very proficient. It is entirely due to her,’ she couldn’t resist adding, ‘that I no longer look as though I’ve been dragged through a hedge backwards.’
‘You have never looked as though you had been dragged through a hedge backwards,’ he said, in a manner that must have looked to everyone else like gallantry. ‘Not even after you spent the night sleeping in hay.’
‘Sleeping in hay?’ Hugo, who’d leapt to his feet, was grinning. ‘I heard a rumour that you spent last night in a barn, Halstead. And now you have confirmed it.’ He rubbed his hands together in glee. ‘I can’t wait to hear how all this came about.’