Mary Balogh - Simply Unforgettable

“You have made the beds ?” It was Frances’s turn to raise her eyebrows. “That would have been something to behold.”

“You have a wicked tongue, Miss Allard,” he said. “I might have seen a mouse or two setting up house beneath your bed, but doubtless you will contrive to sleep the sleep of the just tonight anyway.”

And then suddenly, looking across the table at him, trying to think of some suitably tart rejoinder, she was assaulted, just as if someone had planted a fist into her stomach, with a strong dose of reality. Unless the absent landlord—and, more to the point, the land lady —arrived home within the next few hours, she was going to be sleeping here tonight quite unchaperoned in a room close to that of Mr. Lucius Marshall, who was horribly attractive even if he was also just plain horrible.

She lowered her head and got to her feet, pushing out her chair with the backs of her knees as she did so.

“I will go and see if the kettle is boiling yet,” she said.

“What, Miss Allard?” he said. “You are allowing me the final word?”

She was indeed.

As she hurried off into the kitchen, her cheeks felt suddenly hot enough to boil a kettle apiece.

It was the damnedest thing, Lucius thought when he was left alone, getting to his feet and going in pursuit of more ale.

She was clad quite hideously in a brown dress a few shades lighter than her cloak. It was high-waisted, high-necked, and long-sleeved and about as sexless as dresses came. It draped a tall figure that was slender almost to the point of thinness. It was a figure that was as unvoluptuous as figures came. Her hair was much as he had expected it would look when she still wore her bonnet. It was dressed in a purely no-nonsense style, parted ruthlessly down the middle, drawn smoothly back at the sides, and coiled in a simple knot at the nape of her neck. Even allowing for the flattening effect of a bonnet, he did not believe she had even tried this morning to soften the style with any little curls or ringlets to tease the masculine imagination. The hair was dark brown, even possibly black. Her face was long and narrow, with high cheekbones, a straight nose, and a nondescript mouth. Her eyes were dark and thick-lashed.

She looked prim and dowdy. She looked—and behaved—like the quintessential governess.

But he had been dead wrong about her, nevertheless.

For some reason that he had not yet fathomed—and it had to be the sum of the whole rather than any of the individual parts themselves—Miss Frances Allard was plain gorgeous.

Gorgeous, but without anything in her manner that he found remotely appealing. Yet here he was, stuck with her until sometime tomorrow.

He ought to have been happy to leave her alone in the kitchen, since she seemed content to be there. Certainly she did not put in any further appearance after drinking her tea and then clearing the table. Fortunately, she appeared to have taken just as strong an aversion to him as he had to her and was keeping out of his way.

But after half an hour he was bored. He could go out to the stables, he supposed, to discover if Peters and the other coachman had come to blows yet. But if they had, he would be obliged to intervene. He wandered into the kitchen instead—and stopped abruptly just inside the door, assaulted by sights and smells that were totally unexpected.

“Good Lord!” he said. “You are not attempting a beef pie, are you?”

She was standing at the great wooden table that filled the center of the kitchen, her sleeves rolled up to her elbows, a voluminous apron wrapped about her, rolling out what looked suspiciously like pastry.

“I am,” she said as he breathed in the aroma of cooking meat and herbs. “Did you think I was incapable of producing such a simple meal? I shall even contrive not to give you indigestion.”

“I am overwhelmed,” he said dryly, though really he was. Poached eggs had never been high on his list of favorite dinnertime fare.

There was a smudge of flour on one of her cheeks—and both the cheeks were flushed. The apron—presumably belonging to a very buxom Mrs. Parker—half drowned her. But somehow she looked more appealing than she had before—more human.

He reached out and picked up a stray remnant of pastry from the table and popped it into his mouth a moment after she slapped at his hand—and missed it.

“If all you are going to do is eat the pastry when I have gone to the trouble of making it,” she said sharply, “I shall be sorry I bothered.”

“Indeed, ma’am?” He raised his eyebrows. He had not had his fingers slapped for at least the past twenty years. “I shall pay you the compliment of returning the beef pie untouched after dinner, then, shall I?”

She glared at him for a moment and then . . . dissolved into laughter.

Lord, oh, Lord! Oh, devil take it! She suddenly looked very human indeed, and more than a little attractive.

“It was a foolish thing to say,” she admitted, humor still lighting her eyes and curving the corners of her lips upward so that he could see they were not nondescript at all. “Did you come in here to help? You may peel the potatoes.”

He was still gawking at her like a smitten schoolboy. Then he heard the echo of her words.

“Peel the potatoes ?” He frowned. “How is that done?”

She wiped her hands on her apron, disappeared into what he assumed was a pantry, and emerged with a pail of potatoes, which she set at his feet. She took a knife from a drawer and held it out, handle facing him.

“Perhaps,” she said, “you are intelligent enough to work it out for yourself.”

It was not nearly as easy as it looked. If he cut the peel too thickly so as to obtain a smooth, clean potato, he was also ending up with very small potatoes and a great mound of peelings. If he cut it too thinly, he had to waste another minute or so on each, digging out eyes and other assorted blemishes.

His cook and all his kitchen staff would have an apoplexy apiece if they could see him now, he thought. So would his mother and sisters. His friends would not have an apoplexy, but they would be under the table by now, rolling around under there with mirth and holding their sides. Behold Viscount Sinclair, the consummate Corinthian, singing for his supper—or at least peeling potatoes for his dinner, which was even worse!

At the same time he kept more than half an eye on Miss Frances Allard, who was lining a deep dish with the pastry, her slim hands and long fingers working deftly, and then filling the shell with the fragrant meat, vegetable, and gravy concoction that had been simmering over the fire, and finally covering the whole with a pastry lid, which she pressed into place all about the rim with the pad of her thumb and then pierced in several places with a fork.

“Why are you doing that?” he asked her, digging an eye out of a potato before pointing the knife at the pie. “Will the filling not all boil out?”

“If there were no outlet for the steam,” she explained, bending to put the pie into the oven, “the pastry lid would quite possibly blow off and we would be scraping half of both it and the pie’s contents off the roof of the oven and onto our plates. Onto your plate, I should say. I would have whatever was left in the dish.”

And speaking of lids blowing off . . .

She probably had no idea what an enticing picture she presented as she bent over the oven, her derriere nicely rounded against the fabric of her dress—proof positive that she was certainly not unshapely. She certainly had not gone out of her way to entice him since they had met. Indeed, her very first words to him, if he remembered correctly, were that he deserved to be subjected to any number of ghastly terminal tortures.