Housemaid Heiress

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 he ran his tongue along the softening gap between 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 at the thought of such an outcome, but the idea of any woman suffering such an untimely end would disturb him, he hastily reassured himself. Yet never before had Marcus experienced such an insane compulsion to seduce one of the servants, and how he wished he had only ever known her as such.

To compound his sins by continuing her downfall would be despicable, and he prided himself on carrying on his amours with women who knew the rules. Somehow he had managed to convince himself she was an innocent after all and, picturing her looking as confused and confounded as he had felt just now, he could not believe her the hard-eyed seductress he half wanted her to be. If only she were that siren, he could take her and be damned, but somehow he must slam the door on that heady notion if he was to be fit for company any time soon.

Could the wench’s eyes be best described as sea-green, aquamarine or turquoise? he mused. Without the abundant life behind them, they could be any of those fanciful colours. With it they were extraordinarily her own and then there was her mouth, so soft and yielding under his that he felt the rogue she thought him as his body clenched with need. He shook his head in an effort to gain control over his baser self. No sooner had he resolved to forget all idea of succumbing to Hetty’s artless charm that the memory of her tripped him up once more.

Well, it had to stop—the little witch was quite right to wish him on Miss Rashton. He lacked the funds to keep his vagrant waif in anything but penury, if he ruined her for the sake of his pleasure and made it impossible for her to stay under his cousin’s roof. Anyway, it would inevitably be more than that—once he lost the self-control he had once prided himself on, he knew he could never stop his obsession ruining her in more ways than one.

Hetty Smith was an ingenue with hard edges who could not possibly understand Virgil, he reassured himself, and marched from the room as if he was back on parade. He even managed to look delighted at the sight of the heiresses gathered in the drawing room, despite what fate and Miss Rashton had in store for him. At least he could not dwell on the third housemaid’s hidden depths in their presence, for fear of saying or doing something so idiotic even Miss Rashton gave him up as a lost cause.

Chapter Six

Thea climbed the back stairs to her attic, angrily muttering some satisfyingly unladylike oaths as she trudged up the seemingly endless flights of narrow wooden steps. His lordship’s practised kisses were not wondrous at all, obviously. Meanwhile every step taught her a salutary lesson in the many differences between an unimportant maid and the noble Viscount Strensham.

She must move about the house like some sort of undesirable beetle emerging from the very walls, while for such as my lord there were elegant marble stairs gently rising to the heights of elegance. Which suited her very well. She was much safer here than she would have been as an unsuspecting guest. She sincerely hoped the ignoble viscount was enjoying his Pyrrhic victory though, because soon she would walk away from his cousin’s house with her fortune and her freedom intact, while he bore off a much lesser heiress, and serve him right too.

Yet even after washing with the rough soap thought fit to keep servants clean and decent, and changing into her afternoon uniform, she was still haunted by the memory of Lord Strensham’s steely gaze softening for the open-mouthed idiot she became in his presence. She supposed he must think her an overeager trollop now. How could he do otherwise when she just stood round like a hypnotised rabbit waiting to be seduced whenever he felt amorously inclined? And why let him kiss her, when she knew he was an embittered cynic who meant nothing by it?

Well, if she was nothing to him, she would make sure he meant less to her. If he chose to kiss half a dozen maids every morning, it wouldn’t matter tuppence to Hetty Smith. The thought of a bevy of starry-eyed females lining up before breakfast to receive such a dubious honour, appealed to her sense of the ridiculous and rapidly banished her frown. She had survived worse things, she told herself, and ran down the back stairs to help serve the refreshments Lady Lydia ordered al fresco on such a beautiful afternoon.

Whisking unobtrusively into line, Thea recalled meals at Hardy House with a wry smile. Determined to do things right, Giles Hardy had sat at the head of a table long enough to seat a regiment, while his granddaughter sat at the foot and each had their own footman, with the butler orbiting between them like a satellite moon.

‘Earywigs in the cake and wapses in the lemonade again,’ whispered Carrie and Thea chuckled softly, but refused to join the second housemaid’s muttered litany on the lack of state kept at Rosecombe Park nowadays.

Jane often complained about the family’s insistence on saving tax by employing maids rather than footmen, but Thea had given up pointing out that if they did not, Jane might not be here to flirt with those stalwart specimens of young manhood she yearned for so badly.

‘More lemonade from the house, Hetty, and be quick about it,’ ordered the Darraines’ stately butler, sparing the least significant foot soldier from a line he directed with the aplomb of a field marshal.

Feeling her humble position under Lord Strensham’s steady gaze, Thea departed. She waited while one minion was spared to squeeze lemons and crush sugar and another fetched ice from the depleted store in the icehouse. Fifteen minutes spent in that sweltering kitchen fetching and carrying, and she could understand Cook’s bad temper and was beginning to share it.

‘Not before time,’ said the butler, sounding like an archbishop sorely tried by a minor cannon when she finally reappeared, hot and flustered from the kitchens.

She waited for further orders and wondered if she was fated to play the lowly housemaid for the rest of her life. It occurred to her that, once upon a time, she would have formed part of Lady Lydia’s bevy of ladies with large moneybags and doubtful pedigrees eager to wed a lord. The appalling prospect of competing with Miss Rashton in the Viscount Stakes grated on her wounded pride—at least that must be what sent a stab of dark pain shooting through her.

How the mighty are fallen, she thought ruefully, before diligently attending to her duties once again. The rightful heiress to one of the largest fortunes in the British Isles, she spent the evening carrying cans of hot water for the quality and closing curtains and attending to crumbs and spills.

If she couldn’t sleep for thinking of a particularly annoying nobleman, slumbering in comfort and solitude a floor below and half a world away, that was because he was so infuriating. All three housemaids made do with one old bed in their stuffy attic under the leads, so to feel resentment of the privilege he so undeservedly enjoyed was perfectly natural, she assured herself. Thea set about counting sheep with grim determination and at last fell into an uneasy slumber.

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