“Acquainted,” Montgomery said, “if that is what you wish to call it, madam. But you picked the wrong man to be acquainted with. I hold the purse strings. Understand that your efforts with Lord Devereux will lead you nowhere.”
Heat washed over her.
He wasn’t displeased about finding her sleeping in his chair; he thought she was his brother’s paramour.
Her and Peregrin Devereux? Ridiculous.
And yet one glance had convinced His Grace that she’d sell herself to noblemen for money.
The violent beat of her heart filled her ears. Her temper, checked for so long, uncoiled and rose like a prodded snake. It took possession, made her cock her hip and peruse him, from his angular face down to his polished shoes and up again, taking his measure as a man. She couldn’t stop the regretful smirk that said he had just been found wanting.
“Your Grace,” she murmured, “I’m sure your purse strings are . . . enormous. But I’m not in the market for you.”
He went still as stone. “Are you suggesting that I just propositioned you?”
“Why, isn’t that usually the reason why a gentleman mentions his purse strings to a woman such as I?”
A muscle in his cheek gave a twitch, and that worked like a cold shower on her hot head.
This was not good.
He was, after all, one of the most powerful men in England.
Unexpectedly, he leaned closer. “You will leave my estate as soon as the roads permit travel again,” he said softly. “You will leave and you will keep away from my brother. Have I made myself clear?”
No reply came to mind. He was so close, his scent began invading her lungs, a disturbingly masculine blend of starch and shaving soap.
She managed a nod.
He stepped back, and his eyes gave an infinitesimal flick toward the door.
He was throwing her out.
Her hand twitched with the mad impulse to slap him, to see the arrogance knocked right off his noble face. Ah, but that arrogance ran to the marrow.
She remembered to snatch the Thucydides and her notebook from the side table.
His gaze pressed cold and unyielding like the muzzle of a pistol between her shoulders all the way to the door.
* * *
The woman held her book before her like a shield as she left, every line of her slender body rigid. She closed the door very gently behind her, and somehow, that felt like a parting shot.
Sebastian flexed his fingers.
He had recognized her as soon as she had blinked up at him.
Green Eyes was in his house.
Green Eyes was his brother’s bit on the side.
She had slept like an innocent in his chair, with her knees pulled to her chest and a hand tucked under her cheek, the soft pulse in her neck exposed. Her profile had been marble still, she had looked like a pre-Raphaelite muse. It had stopped even him in his tracks. She had not looked like a woman who entrapped hapless noblemen, a testimony of her skills.
Her eyes gave her away, keenly intelligent and self-possessed, and hardly innocent. Any doubts, her reactions had settled: no gently bred woman would have reacted with impertinence to his displeasure. This one had wanted to slap him; he had sensed it in his bones. Madness.
He stalked toward the exit.
Being ordered back from Brittany by the queen at once for a crisis meeting was bothersome. Finding his house teeming with drunken lordlings after traveling for twenty hours was unacceptable. But to be sniped at in his own library by this baggage—beyond the pale.
A long, anxious face awaited him when he stepped into the hallway.
“Now, Bonville.”
“Your Grace.” The butler he would normally describe as unflappable had a wild look about him. “I take the fullest responsibility for this . . . situation.”
“I doubt there is a need for that,” Sebastian said, “but do give me an account.”
His housekeeper had become too flustered when he had walked through the front door without notice. She had managed to produce the guest list, and he had set off after the first name, the name of a woman he did not know.
“A dozen gentlemen arrived unannounced last night,” Bonville said, “and Lord Devereux, he clapped me on the back and said, ‘Bonville, be a good chap. You’re already preparing the big house party, there should be plenty of food and drink.’ A dozen, Your Grace! The kitchen staff . . .”
Ah, Peregrin, Peregrin. Briefly, Sebastian entertained the idea to hunt his brother down, to drag him to his study and give him a beating after all. Later. He would deal with his brother later, when anger wasn’t running through his veins like a live current. And he had to play host to his uninvited guests, for to do anything else would be to admit to the world that an eighteen-year-old had just run roughshod over the Duke of Montgomery. Iron self-control kept him from grinding his teeth in front of his butler.
“And more arrived this morning.” Bonville continued his harried tale. “Three young ladies and their chaperone, and we are not sure one of them is even a lady.”
“She is not,” Sebastian said grimly.
Wait. A chaperone?
“I thought so,” Bonville said. “Why would the daughter of the Earl of Wester Ross don a ghastly plaid and stroll about like a Jacobite . . .”
Sebastian raised a hand. “Lady Catriona is here?”
“Presumably, Your Grace.”
Damn. He should have heard the guest list to the end before setting out to find Madam.
“You mentioned three ladies,” he said. “Who else?”
“Miss Harriet Greenfield and her aunt, Mrs. Greenfield-Carruther. We gave them the apartment with the gilded ceiling.”
A Greenfield daughter and Lady Catriona. Neither of them would keep inappropriate company. So apparently Peregrin hadn’t lodged his paramour under his roof. And considering how Miss Archer had attacked him, she was hardly a professional.
Sebastian frowned. Travel fatigue must have scrambled his brain to make such an error. None of it explained this woman’s presence in his armchair, though.
“They are all at Oxford,” he said suddenly.
“Your Grace?”
“The women,” he said. “Greenfield’s daughter and Lady Catriona, and I suspect the third one, too—they are bluestockings. Their manners and dress sense can be . . . atrocious.”
“I see.” Bonville sniffed, sounding much more like his usual self.
“Bonville, you are one of the most competent butlers in England, are you not?”