Page 18 of The Mad Baron's Bride
Leda’s stomach turned at the thought of eggs or meat, and she selected a piece of toast from the side rack. Gibbs offered her butter, the merest sliver, and by this Leda knew she was not yet back in his good graces.
“I stayed up too late reading.” Leda avoided looking at Brancaster. The memory of that kiss flooded her senses, and she feared the evidence of it would appear on her face.
Evidence of how she had completely, if momentarily, lost her mind. Kissing a man! Her employer’s nephew! In her own house!
Brancaster scooped out the soft innards of the egg, and Leda stared at the way his lips closed around the spoon, his cheeks flexing. Good Lord. Nothing about him was out of order, his cravat a tidy fold, a morning coat of dark blue brocade fitted over a waistcoat of dove gray silk, and yet the man could tempt an angel to sin.
And Leda was far less than an angel.
“We have made no headway in finding Brancaster a governess,” her ladyship observed.
“I thought he wished a bride.”
Her ladyship sniffed. “He need be more selective this time. He chose too quickly before, and mostly for pity, I think.”
“My error was letting my parents choose,” Leda murmured.
She wondered how her parents fared, for they, too, would have thought Leda dead all these years. Of a certain they believed she, and they, were better off that way.
“This time, he can choose from his heart,” her ladyship said.
“Or from a list of requirements, which would be the sensible way to go about it.”
Leda sat at the table. With a huff Gibbs moved the kettle of chocolate out of Leda’s reach and toward her ladyship. Leda sighed and wondered if she could make a move for the coffee, but the pot sat before Brancaster.
“I do think at the least you could travel to Norfolk with him and help him get his affairs in order. Meet the girl, and determine what sort of governess she needs.”
“Travel alone with a man for days? Staying at public inns?”
Brancaster lifted his head. The cravat didn’t disguise the bold slope of his jaw, the set of his chin. And the tousle of hair falling over his jutting brow did nothing to detract from the piercing cold in the glare he tacked on her.
“That would be a terrible idea.”
The toast scratched all the way down as she swallowed. Last night he’d wanted her. He’d kissed her. She’d felt his hunger in the way his mouth drew on hers, in the press of his big hands across her back, in the press of his—what was the word,manhood, between her thighs.
Traitorously, appallingly, a heat flickered there, like a tiny flame rising from coals she thought long turned to ash. She didn’t lust as other women lusted, she knew that. Her passions ran bloody.
But if there were a way she could stand in that moment and kiss him infinitely, with the flicker of candlelight sculpting his face and that delicious heat weaving through both of them, with none of the pain and humiliation and wounding that came after—she would still be in the parlor, kissing him.
“See?” Leda said. “Brancaster agrees.”
Lady Plume sighed and stared reproachfully at her nephew. “Did you tell her?”
“Tell her what?”
“How the former Lady Brancaster…never mind.” Her ladyship rose. “We must check the book. Perhaps there are new arrivals who will suit our needs.”
Leda fixed him with a glare as her employer departed. Brancaster studied the bottom of his egg. Gibbs fiddled at the sideboard, ears pricked.
“Tell me what?” she asked.
He pushed away his egg cup. “Why no woman of sense will come with me to Norfolk, as my bride or anything else. Ever.”
“Oh,it was a terrible tragedy. I don’t know the details, only the rumors, of course, but they say there is quite a stretch of cliffs alongside Holme Hall, situated on the seaside as it is. And the poor woman—” Lady Sydney lowered her voice— “threw herselffrom them.”
“She fell off the cliff?” Leda raised a hand to her mouth.
Lady Sydney shook her head. “Shejumped.”
