Mary Brendan - The Silver Squire

Finally bored with this polite charade, he said in a guttural voice, ‘Find out to wherever it is she has absconded and furnish me with the news; I’m sure I can make her see sense. If you do not….’ He smiled grimly at Margaret ‘…I understand that the Fleet is able to accommodate families…’

‘This is a respectable house, is it not, Mrs Keene?’

‘Indeed it is, Miss Worthington. Oh, yes, indeed it is.’

‘And no gentleman is allowed within it after nine of the clock, you said, did you not? So you will insist this gentleman immediately removes himself,’ Emma prompted in a low, trembling rush.

Mrs Keene asserted nothing, simply gawked at the man to whom her lodger referred as though he were an apparition. Recovering her senses, she rolled her eyes at Emma, mouthing something completely unintelligible, before bobbing her mob cap and herself up and down as though in the throes of some palsy.

Emma watched her landlady’s ridiculously obsequious display for no more than a second. Her furious glare turned on the blond man, lounging by the mantel in Mrs Keene’s small parlour.

He looked right back. He couldn’t take his eyes off her.

Sir Richard Du Quesne’s jaw clenched…ached as he fought to keep his eyes from slowly stripping that virginal white nightgown from her slender body. Silver eyes returned sharply to her face and his angry attention had her valiantly, proudly tilting her chin. If it hadn’t been for small, pearly teeth sinking steadyingly into her full lower lip he might have been fooled into thinking she was perfectly composed. He read her next move as it occurred to her and artlessly showed in those lucid golden eyes. Shifting away from the fire, he made for the parlour door.

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.