The Silver Squire

A slow pulse throbbed low in his belly, spreading to tighten his groin, and he cursed at his feet in irritated frustration. He couldn’t recall ever seeing a woman so simply attired—certainly none whose keep he was paying for and whose bed he shared. The women of his acquaintance, whether family or fancy, trailed about in lace with their hair in curls when ready to retire.

With a subtle air of disinterest he glanced at luxuriant, glossy fawn hair spilling over pristine, modestly embroidered cotton, tendrils curving into a gracefully narrow back. If her hair and eyes didn’t resemble fine cognac she might not tempt him so much, he savagely mocked himself, shoving aside any ludicrous idea that she could join those whose bed he shared.

Emma turned warily on her heel as he passed, keeping him at the corner of a watchful tawny eye. His casual entrapment complete, he halted a few paces behind, forcing her to twist about to face him. Her eyes blazed copper beneath his silver stare until she abruptly looked away.

Mrs Keene’s face was diplomatically lowered but her beady eyes were busy batting between the hostile couple. ‘Ah, but that’s no gentleman, you know, miss,’ finally worked out of one corner of her mouth at Emma, while her eyes slid in the opposite direction.

A slender white hand flew to smother a hysterical laugh. Emma agreed through her quivering fingers, ‘Yes, I do know that, Mrs Keene.’ Very graciously she added, ‘Nevertheless, on this occasion I think we shall allow him the sobriquet and insist on his immediate removal from the premises.’

‘I can’t do that, miss!’ Mrs Keene whispered, horrified at the very idea. Her eyes slid to the tall blond man, who in turn had his sardonic mercurial gaze turned on her lodger.

‘And why ever not?’ Emma bit out, wrapping her slender arms about her night-robed body to warm it and conceal its quaking.

‘It’s the silver squire,’ Mrs Keene spluttered out, so low and fast it merely emerged as a sibilant hiss and Emma could decipher none of it.

‘What?’ she queried on a frown.

‘She said I’m the silver squire,’ Sir Richard Du Quesne told her evenly. ‘Lightly translated, that means I own the freehold of this house and the rest of the street together with quite an amount of the city of Bath.’

After a stunned moment, digesting the awful news that she was actually attempting to eject him from one of his own properties, she fumed. ‘And you think that gives you the right to come here and harass me, I suppose?’

‘Your continual deceit earlier today gives me the right to come here and question you. So does a sense of duty to a close friend who cares about your welfare.’ As though just noticing the goggling, hovering landlady, an explicit flick of a bronzed hand signalled her to remove herself.

‘Don’t you dare go!’ Emma cried at the woman’s back, noting she had immediately turned to do his bidding.

Richard shrugged easily. ‘Please be seated, then, Mrs Keene, while Miss Worthington explains to me certain inconsistencies in her behaviour.’

‘I am under no obligation to account to you for one thing, sir!’

Emma’s thin hands tightened into fists behind her back. She could not believe herself to have been so stupid as to immediately race downstairs five minutes ago, on gleaning from Mrs Keene’s garbled croak that a gentleman awaited her company in the parlour. Before she could interrogate the woman further her mob-capped head had disappeared from around her chamber door.

Pulling on her heavy cotton wrap, Emma had simply bolted after her, wondering how Matthew had managed to bribe her landlady to allow him entrance at this time of the night; wondering, too, why on earth he had not waited until the morning to enquire how she’d done with her interview. Then it had occurred to her, with a scattering of icy needles about her body, that it might be something more serious than the success of her job-seeking that had brought him here so late. Perhaps something pertaining to her flight from London…and Jarrett Dashwood…And she’d fair flown below.

Not once had she dreamed that Richard Du Quesne might be irked enough by her escape to bother discovering where she lodged and immediately track her. But then the novelty of being shunned by a woman, even a modest spinster such as she, had probably been enough to inflame a need for immediate retaliation.

‘Did you walk back here?’

She glared at him, about to spit that he could mind his own business and go fly to the devil. A movement at one corner of a sensual, narrow mouth told her he was reading her mind.

‘I hailed a cab,’ she stiffly informed him.

‘Why did you run away?’

‘I was hungry,’ she returned flippantly, gazing insolently past him, ‘and couldn’t wait longer for you to return with a measly bun. I decided to make my way home for one of Mrs Keene’s delicious dinners before I faded dead away.’

He smiled at her churlishness, and at her long, slender fingers ceaselessly entwining then jerking apart.

‘Are you going to tell me why you’re here in Bath, unchaperoned?’ he asked quietly so Mrs Keene was excluded from his dialogue.

‘No,’ Emma simply said, and disdainfully flicked away her tawny head.

‘Very well. I’ll send an express to your parents tomorrow and thus find out.’ He was reaching for the door handle when she stopped him.

‘Don’t do that…please…’ was forced out as her eyes squeezed shut.

He walked back, straight past her, seating himself in a chair by the small hearth. A movement of his long, dark fingers this time had Mrs Keene beetling for the door and Emma enviously watching her.

She didn’t dare follow her landlady out, although he was taunting her with the opportunity. He had her exactly where he wanted her, she realised with impotent fury. Her face flung around, and she glowered her loathing.

He responded by smiling and settling back leisurely into the battered wing-chair, propping a booted foot on his knee. One dark hand was splayed idly against polished leather, the other against his face.

Emma sensed her teeth grinding, her fists curling. He was deliberately impressing on her just how easily he could keep her here, and that he was exercising patience in waiting for her to obediently disclose all to him. Her nails stabbed her palms as she suppressed a terrifying need to bound across the few feet that separated them and hit him.

‘Do your parents know where you are?’

‘My whereabouts are of no interest to them,’ she snapped back. ‘Why should they be? I am a spinster of twenty-seven and perfectly able to live alone.’

‘I know how old you are, Emma,’ he said softly. ‘I attended your twenty-fourth-birthday celebration…remember?’

‘Not by my invitation…’ she sniped, then twisted away and closed her eyes. Do not antagonise him, she severely, calmingly chided herself. He is of no importance whatsoever. Just use half-truths and guile. It will satisfy his base curiosity, thus enabling you to rid yourself of his damnable presence…then all will again be well. He is simply a hedonistic fool ruled by lust and alcohol…She hesitated in her unspoken censure, recalling that there had been less of an inebriated haze about this man than about Matthew on their reunion in Oakdene this week…and several times since.

‘Well?’ His mild impatience shattered the tension after several silent minutes. When she steadfastly refused to look at him or speak because she still hadn’t quite worked out which lies would serve her best, he added, ‘Have you nothing at all to say?’

‘Yes, I have something to say,’ she announced, honey-voiced, as feral eyes pounced on him. ‘And I do not think you will want to contact my parents to relay this. If you do not remove yourself this instant I shall scream and weep loud enough to wake the street and charge you with…’

‘With…?’ he prompted mildly through long, dark fingers curled against his sensual mouth, watching her from beneath heavy lids.

‘With attempting to force your vile attentions on me…with molesting me. Now what do you say, Mr Du Quesne?’ she flung at him, inclining slightly towards him in triumph.

He was out of the chair in a lithe second, making her jerk back and whirl away so fast, treacle hair flowed out thickly towards him.

‘I’d say you’re a little early with that complaint, Miss Worthington,’ he purred as he walked right up to her. Smoky silver eyes eventually reached her white face, having leisurely mounted her body.

He watched real fear dilate her pupils. He also saw that she was still itching to slap him. His teeth met, shifting his jaw aslant, as he finally accepted that he wanted it too. He was just longing for her to touch him…in any way…in that way.

He forced himself away from her, cutting off her escape route, for she was now liable to flee and damn the consequences, then he still wouldn’t know what the hell was going on. He stood with his back to her yet with her colouring, her sharp, sculpted little features imprinted on his mind. He laughed, low and private, in a way that had Emma swinging about, eyes raking the breadth of his shoulders to try and discover the reason for it.

Richard raised his sardonic dark face to the ceiling. So Yvette deemed herself a wildcat, did she? he mused ironically. Yvette was nothing more than a spiteful harlot…and spiteful in a manner that had little to do with how she liked to brand him as hers in a way easily recognisable to other women.

This was a wildcat, he realised ruefully…the genuine, un-adorned article. She even looked the part with her spare, graceful body and tawny colouring: like a small woodland creature…too beautiful to touch…too beautiful not to. And he felt a sudden drenching disgust at having resorted to subduing her with the threat of violation.

He’d never in his life done that…never needed to. Women, and plenty of them, came to him very willingly. Yet what tormented him most was, now he’d acknowledged the desire, self-discipline seemed to mock him. Angry frustration culminated in a dark fist cracking savagely against the door as he moved abruptly past it.

Emma jumped and stifled a small scream; so did Mrs Keene on the other side of the door, with one pudgy hand clamped to her mouth and the other to her battered, ringing ear.

Giddy with fatigue and hunger, Emma leaned against the wall to steady herself. She had eaten nothing since her meagre breakfast and was now ravenous. Her stomach endorsed its need for attention by growling loudly.

Richard arrowed a look at her as she instinctively pressed both hands to her flat abdomen, bending over a little as though to hide the offending noise.