Page 5 of One Night for Seduction
“Is she expecting you?” the maid asked.
“She is not,” he replied tightly, and made a show of arranging his long limbs in the opposite direction as though he had become struck with sudden fascination at the wallpaper on the other side of the parlor.
There. That should put paid to further inquiries.
“Then why are you here?” the maid insisted. “Have you come to press a suit?”
“Nothinglike that,” Cole blurted out more forcefully than he intended. He gave up on the far wallpaper and turned to glare at the impertinent maid in the doorway.
She was no longer in the doorway. The maid now stood an arm’s length from the other side of the sofa. Her enormous mobcap still flopped too low for her eyes to be visible, but her slender fingers worried at each other against the starched panel of her apron.
The chitoughtto be worried. If one of the Middletons caught her interrogating a guest… Or if the head housekeeper should spy her underling shirking her duty…
“Haven’t you anything to do?” Cole said at last. He was not rude by nature, but then again, he normally did not find himself in conversation with other peoples’ chambermaids. Reminding her of her duty was doing her a favor, he told himself. If she lost her post due to such antics, Cole would not be to blame.
“I have more to do than time to do it,” the maid said.
Cole did not doubt this. He gestured toward the opposite side of the parlor. “Don’t let me stop you from what you came to do.”
To his surprise, her lithe hands retrieved a small journal from the pocket of her apron, jotted a quick note with the nub of a pencil, and tucked both objects back inside as though they’d never existed.
“Where’s your chaperone?”
“Idon’t require a chaperone. It’s Miss Middleton who—” He broke off as a sudden thought occurred to him, unlikely as it might seem. “Areyouthe young lady’s chaperone? Have you come to assess my character?”
“Did you hope for a stolen moment alone with her?” the maid countered.
“Heaven forbid.” He could not repress a shiver of horror. “I would never be caught alone with a marriageable young lady.”
“You’ve no wish to marry?”
“None,” he replied firmly. And definitely no wish to be compromised against his will.
“Then what makes you think Miss Middleton has any intention to marry?”
“Of course she intends to marry,” Cole said in exasperation. “All proper young ladies hope to find a worthy husband and become an equally worthy wife. What else is she going to do?”
“Mathematics,” the maid replied without hesitation.
He blinked at this non sequitur. “What sort of woman prefers mathematics to marriage?”
“A wise one,” the maid snapped. She ripped off her mobcap and glared at him, revealing a beautiful pair of angry blue eyes. “I’d rather devote the rest of my life to applied sums and long division than spend a single second in the presence of yet another man who thinks he knows what a woman wants without bothering to perform the most perfunctory of information gathering interviews to determine—”
“Miss Middleton?” stammered from his mouth, but Cole need not await verbal confirmation to recognize the truth. “Why are you dressed like a maid?”
“Why are you alone with me in this parlor?” she countered, hands on her hips.
At this unfortunate moment, Cole noticed that when the “maid” entered the salon, she’d shut the door behind her. His stomach bottomed in abject fear. If she hadn’t known he was coming, why on earth was she wearing a disguise?Hadshe known he was coming?
“Please tell me this was not an elaborate trick to compromise me into marriage,” he managed, every muscle tensing in anticipation of the worst.
“No,” Miss Middleton said, blue eyes flashing, “it isleveragewhich I intend to use to force you to leave mealone.”
“You mean to extort aduke?” He paused as full realization set in. “Intonotmarrying you?”
“Is it working?” she demanded.
He rose to his feet with alacrity. “I harbor no wish to marry you. None. At all.”
