A Regency Rebel's Seduction: A Most Unladylike Adventure / The Rake of Hollowhurst Castle
I’m very particular whom I allow to even call me darling, Captain Darke, and secondly, I certainly wouldn’t take a man like you to my bed, even if I wasn’t,’ she informed him haughtily, kicking herself for letting him know she’d been fascinated enough to find out what his name was after that first sight of him in Kit’s office.
‘You put such a high price on your charms, then?’ he asked as if he was surprised.
She had to bless his consumption of brandy for fogging his wits that he hadn’t even noticed her faux pas, even if it fuddled him into mistaking her for Kit’s mistress rather than his sister. After all, she didn’t want him to think of her as his employer’s close kin, did she? No, of course she didn’t. If he knew who she really was, he might ruin everything by handing her back to her temporary guardians, so it was far better if he thought her no better than she should be and let her stop here for the night.
‘A very high one indeed,’ she assured him with a toss of her head, which she hoped told him it was beyond anything he could pay, if he had anything left of his share of the last cargo after buying enough brandy to inebriate even him.
‘How’s a man supposed to know if a woman’s price is worth the paying when he’s not even been permitted to check the quality of the goods? Strikes me you’re asking a man to buy a pig in a poke, my dear.’
Good heavens! The appalling man really thought she was a streetwalker, casually selling her body for a bed and food in her belly as well as the clothes on her back. More of a roof-walker, her sense of the ridiculous reminded her, and the past years of suffocating respectability threatened to fall away under the liberty of his wild conclusions about Miss Alstone, spinster of impeccable birth, if not exactly unimpeachable upbringing. Maybe Aunt Prudence was right and she’d never be the proper lady she should have been since birth, if only said birth hadn’t taken place in a rundown lodging-house, so perilously close to the rookeries of St Giles it was almost a part of them.
She’d never know now how differently she might have felt about the world if she’d come into it at lofty Wychwood Court, a vast Tudor mansion in the county of Derbyshire that was the Alstones’ ancestral home. A house she’d never been invited to visit and doubtless never would be now, since her Alstone cousins seemed intent on ignoring any relations low enough to run the streets for most of their childhood and then lower the family name still more by taking to trade in order to make up their lamentable lack of the proverbial penny to bless themselves with. Reminded how little she’d enjoyed a life of cramping propriety, she made herself meet this monster of depravity’s sceptical gaze and match his cynical scrutiny with one she hoped he’d find just as difficult to meet.
‘The customer always has the choice not to buy,’ she said boldly, as if she fended off such outrageous provocation every day of the week and reminded herself that, if not for Kit and Ben, she’d probably be exactly what this poor apology for a gentleman thought her right now. ‘And I can take my pick of those who want to do so whenever I like.’
‘The most readily caught fish doesn’t always taste sweetest.’
‘But if you throw them back, I’ve found the little ones often live to grow up and learn a lot more, which makes catching them again into much better sport.’
‘I’ll have to be the one that got away, then, for hooking me would prove a challenge even to the most cunning enchantress, let alone an amateur angler like yourself, Miss … Confound it, whatever is your name, woman?’
‘Miss Confoundit? Now why didn’t I think of that?’
‘I’ll just make one up to call you by then, shall I?’
‘No, it’s …’ Louisa racked her brains for something suitably exotic, something an aspiring Cyprian might use to intrigue ardent gentlemen with plenty of gold in their pockets, if not rude and probably impoverished sea captains. ‘Eloise La Rochelle,’ she invented on the spur of the moment and decided she rather liked it.
Nobody would dare drive Eloise La Rochelle to such desperation that she’d risk climbing out of a second-floor window to escape her uncle’s machinations and her importunate suitor, she decided whimsically. Indeed, Eloise would doubtless have far less respectable gentlemen than even this one climbing up the creepers to her scented balcony in their droves of a night-time to beg for her nigh-on legendary favours instead.
Would she accept any of them? she wondered, as she slipped deeper into the dangerous fantasy of being a very different female from the one she was in reality, or make them climb back into the night? Charlton could go back the way he came as fast as gravity could take him and she hoped it would teach him a salutary lesson, but Hugh Darke? Daring, dashing Eloise La Rochelle might just let him stay for a while, because he amused and intrigued her, of course, and to enchant him into parting with the dark secrets that lurked in those ironic grey-blue eyes of his, until he finally laid even his cynical heart at her feet. Then he could take his brooding gaze and his warrior’s body down the stairs when he left, to scandalise and intrigue passing dowager duchesses with his disreputable looks and piratical charm and make them long to be as young, bold, stunningly beautiful and irresistibly seductive as the notorious Eloise La Rochelle of such scandalous fame even they couldn’t pretend never to have heard of her.
No, she revised her story, he wouldn’t be able to leave. He’d demand, then beg, then sell his soul to stay with her, if he still had one. Infamous Eloise La Rochelle would spoil him for every other female he ever met and in return he’d satisfy her as extravagantly as she would him, or be banished to decline and fall alone as a punishment for his sensual failure.
‘And I’m the Queen of Sheba,’ he responded sceptically to her exotic nom de plume, bringing her back to here and now with an unpleasant jolt, as she struggled with the uneasy certainty that he wouldn’t fail to pleasure her in such an encounter, even if she was a little foggy about what such sensual satisfaction would involve.
A very uncomfortable present it was as well, where he didn’t look at all enchanted by her assumed name or shockingly displayed charms and probably wouldn’t beg aught but peace from the likes of her, so he could broach another bottle and swinishly lose himself in drink once more.
‘I suggest you act a little more regally from now on, then,’ she told him crossly, turning her back on that ridiculous fantasy of him falling at her feet, tortured by passion and his searing, insatiable need for her as she searched the Spartan-looking kitchen for something to eat instead.
‘Make yourself at home, why don’t you?’ he muttered ungraciously.
‘Certainly I shall and you can build up the fire whilst I do so,’ she demanded, wishing she could find something more appealing than a hunk of hard and cracked cheese and some pickled onions along with, of all things, a naval officer’s dress sword, in Kit’s larder.
‘Coste sends out for food whenever we’re hungry,’ Hugh told her as if that explained everything and, since they were both men, it probably did.
‘On the rare occasions either of you forsake the brandy bottle long enough to bother to eat at all, I suppose?’ she asked sweetly.
‘Whatever our domestic arrangements may or may not be, we certainly didn’t invite you here in the middle of the night to see if they were up to scratch,’ he mumbled gruffly as he bent to stoke the fire.
‘Which is just as well, considering you clearly don’t have any,’ she informed him disgustedly as she chewed valiantly on the hunk of cheese and wondered if even she was hungry enough to indulge in a pickled onion or two to force it down with, as she could see no sign of anything else remotely edible or drinkable.
‘We don’t need them,’ he informed her defensively, looking endearingly sheepish even as he did so. ‘Neither of us wanted a female nagging and criticising and poking her nose in everywhere it wasn’t wanted when we can manage very well for ourselves.’
‘No, you can’t. I can assure you that you and Coste really, really can’t manage anything more refined than a sty, Captain Darke,’ she told him fervently, as she