Housemaid Heiress. Elizabeth Beacon

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.