Free My Dearest Enemy by Connie Brockway Page B

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.
----
Chapter Seven

 
    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.
    Female voices filled the halls from dawn to dusk with noisome music, trilling, warbling, croaking, laughter as light and incidental as a stone skipping on a mirrored pond, quarrelsome voices as harsh as a faulty brake. Or, sometimes, a murmur as fluid as a night bird's low call, like Lily Bede's—damn!
    The woman sneaked into his thoughts, catching him unawares at the most improbable moments. He'd once seen a shaman employ a crude figurine likeness of a man to curse him. The shaman had sent demons to visit his enemy, demons only the cursed man could see. Drove the poor blighter stark raving mad. Avery was half tempted to search Lily Bede's room for his own waxen image because he could not get the blasted woman out of his mind.
    Bloody hell. He was a gentleman, the penultimate example of self-control. God knew he'd spent his first two decades training himself in that discipline. He would
not
want her.
    He rounded the corner and slowed, noting anew how the Mill House of his memory compared to the reality. He remembered acres of wainscoted hallways and cavernous rooms with cathedral height ceilings, a million esoteric tomes stocking the library shelves, and a battalion of footmen cleaning hundreds of glass windows.
    In fact the rooms had two windows each; their ceilings