My Dearest Enemy (10 page)

"Good afternoon, Mr. Thorne."
Familiarity breeds contempt, familiarity breeds contempt
, she silently re-peated. Then an evil suggestion occurred to her. But what if it bred something else entirely?

"I trust you found your chambers in order?" she said. "We generally keep that area shut off from the rest of the house, it being so remote and all, but we wouldn't want you to be unhappy in your room choice."

Avery, in the process of prowling toward her, stopped a few feet away. She forced herself not to back up. He was so damnably tall. She could almost feel him; his body sent out some sort of energy field, some—
thing
she could discern with a hitherto unused sense.

"I didn't mean to inconvenience you," he said, his smile fading. "It was the room I occupied when I stayed here as a child and thus the only one I remembered."

"No," Lily said hastily. "No trouble."

Avery's brows dipped as he studied Lily's stiff figure. Her smile was fixed, a subtle flavor of… fear in it? He frowned. What did Lily Bede have to fear from him? Except, of course, her imminent dispossession.

The idea gave him no satisfaction. He looked down into her dark, wary eyes, noting the way her honey-colored skin glowed with a sudden flush. Too appealing by half.

"Francesca, won't you have a seat?" he asked, turning away from Lily Bede.

Francesca smiled in startled delight. "Why Avery, how thoughtful. When did you acquire social graces?"

"I'm sure I don't know what you mean," Avery said, eyeing the heavy mahogany chair a second before lifting the entire thing out and away from the table. "I'm a gentleman. Of course, I'd hold a lady's chair."

He secured Francesca's arm, pulled her into the place vacated by the chair and slipped the chair under her. Perhaps a shade too forcefully. She dropped into the seat, blinking up at him.

"I may have spoken in haste—" Francesca said.

"Miss Bede?" He rounded the table, pulled Lily's chair out, and held it dangling from one hand while he waited for her.

Lily, also, blinked as if his actions surprised her. Was she such a stranger to etiquette that the simple act of being seated confounded her? Well, what could one expect of a household of women. "Miss Bede?" he urged.

She swallowed and gingerly moved into position. He slid the chair beneath her, pushing it forward. The edge of the seat hit her behind the knees and for a second she teetered. He grabbed her arm to steady her, and went still with shock.

Simple touch had never garnered from him such an intense physical reaction.

Suddenly he was completely aware of Lily Bede. He felt not merely the firm, lithe muscle of her upper arm, but the warmth of her skin, the smooth, velvety texture of it, suffused with her vitality. He wanted to rub his hand up and down her arm. He wanted to touch more of her. Lily Bede. His nemesis. He snatched his hand away.

Lily angled her head up. Her eyes looked brilliant. She'd felt it, too. She must have. She opened her mouth to speak as he bent nearer to her.

"I'm sorry Mrs. Thorne is not here to receive you," she said. Her words left Avery unsatisfied, vaguely disappointed. "Had she known you were arriving I am sure she would have postponed her trip. I hope you like mutton?"

He hated mutton. His distaste must have shown because Lily's expression became sharp. "Of course, it isn't exactly a Maori feast. But we do what we can."

"Maori feast?" Francesca quizzed.

"Mr. Thorne wrote Bernard a rather graphic account of a bushman feast he once attended, as guest of honor no doubt."

"No, not at all," Avery muttered uncomfortably. Drat, he'd forgotten all those overblown descriptions he'd written to his young cousin. "I was just passing through."

"And what did they have at this feast?" Francesca asked.

Lily smiled. "Bugs, was it?"

Francesca's mouth dropped open. "You ate
bugs
?"

"And snakes," Lily added, unable to control a mischievous impulse. He looked nonplussed for the first time since she'd met him. Almost shy. "Cuisine de rigueur for gods, I expect. Were they delicious?"

"Couldn't get enough of the little blighters," Avery said, meeting Lily's gaze and relaxing.

She was teasing him. He couldn't ever remember a woman actually teasing him. It was a novel experience. Not altogether unpleasant. He took his seat. "I strongly suspect that should Englishmen ever discover the culinary delights lurking beneath their dahlias the sheep industry shall forthwith collapse."

She laughed. A lovely sound, open and natural and inviting. And then, as if he'd caught her off-guard and tricked her into dangerous territory, her expression grew closed, her laughter faded. She turned toward Francesca, who was attending the conversation with an openly delighted expression. "Will you be going to the Derby again this year, Francesca?"

Still smiling, Francesca took a healthy swallow of sherry before answering. "I don't know. I'd thought to leave next Tuesday but there's really no reason to rush off. The Derby isn't for three weeks. Don't worry, Lil, I promise I'll find out the names of all the retirees for you."

"Retirees?" Avery cocked his head inquiringly.

"Lily collects retired race horses."

"Horses?" Startled, Avery glanced at Lily. She stared fixedly at her plate. Of course she would collect horses. What else would Lily Bede collect but his bete noir, the one remaining tie to the asthma that had molded and cursed his earliest years? Horses, to which he was amazingly, horribly, disastrously allergic. Of course, he would never allow
her
to know of this weakness.

"A few," Lily mumbled just as the hall door swung open, framing a woman sitting in a wheelchair. One leg stuck straight out before her, cotton batting cocooning the limb. Her brown eyes gleamed with triumph beneath a broad, moist forehead fringed by gingery curls.

With a grunt she grasped the wheels, heaved her weight forward, and popped the chair over the threshold. Avery scrambled to his feet.

"If you would be so kind as to make room for me?" the newcomer asked. Her voice was deep and resonant with the lilt of the northern province.

"Allow me," Avery said.

"And who are you?" the woman asked as he went to her aid, her head falling back to take in all of him.

"Avery Thorne. Miss Thorne's cousin." He pushed her ahead of him toward the table.

"Avery Thorne?"

Lily, apparently recalled to her duty as hostess, pushed away from the table and scooted over to the woman's side. Carefully, but with the air of one who is unmuzzling a potentially dangerous dog, she helped to ease the woman's wheelchair into place.

"Miss Makepeace, I had no idea you would be joining us for lunch," she said. "However did you manage the stairs?
Should
you have managed the stairs?"

"A woman only does herself and her gender a gross disservice by pretending to be less than she is, or inca-pable of what she is not," Polly said, unfolding her napkin and arranging it on her lap. Her gaze, leveled on Francesca, said clearly that she considered Fran-cesca to be guilty of at least one and probably both of these flaws.

Francesca yawned. "Excuse me, I was, er, up late last night."

"But how did you navigate the stairs?" Lily asked.

"Had the girls carry me down the stairs and I managed the flat parts myself."

"You must allow me to offer my services in the future," Avery said.

"Nope," Polly said. "A woman gets soft relying on men to do for her, and if there's one thing I can't abide it's a soft—"

"Well, it's lovely you can join us," Lily cut in, resettling herself as yet another short pregnant girl— Merry if Avery remembered correctly—bustled in and set another place. "Mr. Thorne, this is our guest, Miss Polly Makepeace. Miss Makepeace is one of the founding members of the Women's Coalition. We had our annual conference here not long ago. Unfortunately Miss Makepeace fell from her podium during the middle of her speech and broke her leg. She is convalescing here."

"I see," Avery said. Lily was using his home as a meeting house for suffragists? He disliked the idea. Intensely. Horses were one thing, political women were another. At least one could keep horses outside.

"She was in the midst of objecting to Lily's nomi-nation as their little organization's secretary," Fran-cesca said, helping herself to the decanter set in the middle of the table. "She became a shade enthusiastic in her denunciations."

Polly flushed plum colored and Lily's cheeks grew scarlet.

"I only had the best interests of the organization in mind. Nothing personal and Miss Bede knows that," Polly said and turned to him. "How'd you do? Heard of you. Adventurer chap. All 'into the jaws of death' and what not. Well, I tell you, sir, today there are more dire adventures awaiting London's poor women—"

The kitchen door opened, winning a look of relief from Francesca as Mrs. Kettle entered followed by Kathy bearing a huge porcelain dish from which a delicious aroma wafted.

Mrs. Kettle stopped before Avery and whisked the lid from the tureen. "Soupe a l'oignon, Mr. Avery, sir," she breathed.

"Very nice," Avery said, nodding.

"And after that coquilles Saint-Jacques au saumon, followed by the meat course, tendrons de gigot. For a salad we have d'epinards aux foies de gras and we finish with tarte au citron," Mrs. Kettle said.

"Thank you, Mrs. Kettle," Avery said. The elderly woman, Avery noted, kept her eyes strictly averted from Lily.

If Lily Bede spent money like this on every meal and hosted conventions for impecunious suffragists, and collected antique race horses as pets, she must be damn near running the estate into the ground. Which meant whatever niggling doubts he'd had regarding his anticipated ownership of Mill House could be put to rest.

He toyed with the silver demitasse spoon. The thought did not provide him the joy it should have.

The next evening, Avery exited his room, heading for the library where he intended to look over the household records. If he could find them. A pair of housemaids curtsied as he passed. They looked familiar. In fact, since his arrival yesterday he'd seen only three maids, all of them in various stages of gestation. He nodded. Their hands flew to cover their erupting giggles. Remarkable. He'd little familiarity with female servants—none, actually—but suspected that in most households the maids didn't burst into laughter when a man walked by them. After spending a lifetime among men, he found the entirely feminine world of Mill House as exotic and foreign a country as any he'd explored. It fascinated him.