‘I can think of better reasons to be a good patient,’ he told her with a mock leer and an altogether too-disarming grin.
There was still a hot promise in his gaze so she avoided it and frowned at a fresh cobweb instead. There could never be anything between a lord and a humble widow they would not be ashamed of afterwards. ‘I doubt you know how to be patient in any sense of the word, my lord,’ she forced herself to say lightly.
‘And I am trying so hard to be humble,’ he told her half-seriously and she nearly laughed. She could not imagine a less humble man if she ran through a list of the hot-headed and entitled officers she had met from the Duke of Wellington downwards.
‘It could take a lifetime,’ she argued and he smiled as if he knew he was naturally arrogant and impatient, but he was less lordly and very human in private.
‘I will need a lot of help, then,’ he said huskily and all the images in her head earlier were hot in his piercingly blue eyes as he gazed back at her.
Even his mouth looked firm and inviting as the notion of what that help might involve sang between them. He was an invalid, for goodness’ sake. And even when he was well he would still be a viscount. Before she went away again she ought to check the bandages on his wrist and ankle were tight enough, but not cutting into him, except being so close to him right now seemed a bad idea. She almost wished he would go back to being the arrogant and objectionable nobleman she met yesterday. It would be so much easier to treat him with cool and impersonal efficiency, then go back to getting the house ready for a wedding.
With any luck he would be well enough to be very gently driven to Broadley and the best inn in town very soon. He could live there in comfort until he was ready to be driven home in his own beautifully sprung carriage. And if she kept on putting his money, rank and privilege between them maybe she would stop finding him so attractive and powerfully male, even when he was lying there in Darius’s nightshirt and should look less than his usual overconfident self.
She heard a stir down in the yard and thank goodness for a distraction. Now she could be taken up with whoever was out there instead of him and she would not have to get that close to the man without Darius here to take away the intimacy of it.
‘I wonder who that can be?’ she said, with a tut-tut to tell him she did not have time or inclination for visitors. Really, she would be glad to see anyone who would drag her away from his side and break this ridiculous spell he seemed to have cast over her at first sight. She still loved Daniel and she always would, so of course she did not want another man and she really did not want to want a lord like this one.
‘I have no idea,’ he said, ‘but at least you can walk over to the window and see for yourself.’
‘Hmm, well, I cannot see why anyone would be... Oh, my word,’ she gasped as a team of dray horses came properly into view, then the dray itself appeared, loaded with boxes and all sorts of odd items as if half a house full of furniture and trappings were on the move, but what on earth were they doing here?
‘For goodness’ sake, woman, will you stop peering at whoever is out there and tell me what is going on?’ His Lordship snapped from the bed in angry frustration and there he was again, Alaric the Pirate; barking orders from his sickbed. Good, he should make her temper flare and stop her having silly and overheated ideas about Alaric the man.
‘If I knew that I might tell you,’ she said and turned back from the window with a frown and a stern dare not to even lift his head off his pillow, let alone attempt to get out of bed and see for himself. ‘There is a dray loaded with boxes and bags and furniture drawing up outside, Lord Stratford, and I have to suppose that the driver and his mate have been directed to the wrong place to deliver it since I did not order a single stick of it. I had better go downstairs and send them to wherever they are supposed to be going with it all.’
‘Ah, apparently your friend Miss Donne is even more efficient than I thought.’
‘What on earth can all that stuff have to do with her?’
‘The lady obviously has the good sense to worry about your reputation even if you do not, Mrs Turner. If you continue to stay here without a duenna of some sort now I am in the house, your good name will be in shreds.’
‘I do not have a good name for the gossips to destroy, so it does not matter what they think of me,’ she said. The bitterness in her own voice shocked her. The snide remarks about ladies who wilfully married below their station she had had to pretend not to hear in Bath must have hurt her more than she realised at the time, numbed as she still thought she was by Daniel’s death.
The sound of it made Lord Stratford frown, then look lordly and impatient. ‘It matters to me,’ he said so mildly she felt the sting of his temper more than if he had shouted at her.
A little bit of warmth and caring about her well-being was in there as well as impatience and that might have disarmed her, if she was not already furious about the
