Page 3 of The Spinster's Secret Scoundrel
He doubted Miss Naughton would be amenable.
Scanning the main room, he saw nothing out of the ordinary. A wooden table with four chairs, a cabinet with dishware, and a small escritoire. On the wall was a framed sampler of a goose. Thierry’s nemesis, today.
Miss Naughton finished knotting the rope about his chest and wrists, and stood back, fists on her hips, brow furrowed. It was the first good view he’d had of her shapely figure. Thierry considered himself a connoisseur of beautiful women. Perhaps Miss Naughton was a touch lacking in the bosom department, but she more than made up for it with a sharply indented waist and gorgeous, clutchable hips.
A pity couldn’t see her bottom, from this angle.
“What am I going to do with you?” she asked.
“Let me go?” Thierry suggested, with undue optimism.
She rolled her eyes. “Nice try.”
“I aim to please, Miss Knotty.” He tested the bindings. Annoyingly, they held. “On my mother’s honor, I am naught but a simple traveler passing through your charming little cove—”
“The jokes grow tiresome.”
“Right.” Thierry decided not to share the one he’d made in his head, about wanting to sail his lugger into her snug cove and let his seamen offshore. That one seemed rather crude even by his low standards.
She flipped open the parchment and took a closer look at the contents. “Fascinating. With assistance from the village geese, I have not only captured Thierry Desmarais, known smuggler” —a pointed glare at him— “but Le Fantôme,notorious roguewanted on both sides of the Channel, in part for wantonly destroying an Excise Officer’s revenue sloop.”
“I would bow, but you have bound me.”
“I am duty-bound to turn you in.”
“See? We share a talent for punny jokes, Miss Naughton. Truly, our love was meant to be.” He batted his eyelashes.
“I wasn’t joking.” She made a noise of pure disgust. “Does this approach actually work on anyone?”
“Lean closer, and I’ll tell you.”
Miss Naughton pocketed his incriminating list of ships and shipments, and edged fractionally nearer.
“Closer.”
She bent at the waist, giving him a delightful view down the bodice of her dress. Perhaps Miss Naughton wasn’t so lacking in the bosom department, after all.
“Come here, kitten.”
Unwise woman. When he inhaled her clean, earthy scent, Thierry lurched forward against his restraints and pressed his mouth to hers.
Unsurprisingly, his cheek stung seconds later when Miss Naughton’s palm cracked across his face. Thierry grinned unrepentantly as she stormed off.
ADELINE
A DIFFICULT DILEMMA
Ada huffed as she scattered handfuls of grain in the grass. Fat white geese waddled after her, rather threatening in their honks and hissing.
She had only a few more weeks to gather as many large eggs as she could get. A single bird could lay between thirty and forty eggs between February and May. Cavalier Cove’s sizable flock produced a lot of them. The unwritten village rule was that you could keep the ones laid on your property.
Hence, the grain.
Ada knew perfectly well how to attract geese. She knew how to entice them to remain on her property as much as possible, thus providing her with more eggs than one single woman could ever need or want to eat. She knew how to poke the bottom with a pin and drain the contents, had an entire book of recipes to use yolks and whites, and was adept at painting the clean, dry shells. In fact, she had acquired a reputation as an artisan of sorts. A country artisan, but respected in her way.
What she did not know was how to handle the man she had tied securely to her favorite chair.
Handsome.
