Free Drake's Lair by Dawn Thompson Page B

she interrupted, anticipation the housekeeper’s plea. “You have my word.”
    “Thank you, miss,” the housekeeper gushed. She seemed to deflate, as though someone had opened a valve and siphoned all the breath from her body.
    The earl most definitely did have a secret, one that she would have to discover, but not because Rosen had warned her about it, because an intuitive spark deep inside her warned that something abject threatened her directly, especially now that she had come to stay at the manor.
    He’d said that someone had deliberately set fire to the cottage. She vaguely remembered hearing something outside before she awoke to flames and billowing smoke. But what if he was the one who set the fire? Why was he out there at that hour in the first place, so far from the village? How was it that he just happened to be there to rescue her so conveniently—to bring her to Drake’s Lair, where he could see to her needs, and offer her his proposition? He’d said that he had been considering making an offer for that tract of land for some time. Could he have deliberately contrived the situation she now found herself in to that end?
    Her heart ached at the thought that what she’d taken for benevolence was rather something dark and sinister. Making matters worse, she couldn’t forget the lean, well-muscled pressure of his turgid body against her, or the alarming, icy-hot flutters that body set loose upon the heretofore virgin territory of her most secret self. Neither could she forget the warmth of him, or the musky male scent drifting from his damp, tanned skin.
    Rosen’s voice kept banging around in her brain: You have an enemy… one is not what he seems… he has a secret… there is nothing to be done …
    Well, there was something she could do. She wouldn’t involve Mrs. Laity; she’d given her word. But she would get to the bottom of the herb mystery. She would start with that. Perhaps James Ellery might know more than the housekeeper was willing to share. She hardly wanted to encourage him, after taking such pains to keep him at his distance, but there was nothing else for it. She would at least have to let him close enough to extrude whatever knowledge of the topic she could from him, since the others were all so unapproachable. Having decided upon that course of action, she turned again to the housekeeper.
    “Thank you, Mrs. Laity,” she said. “I’m sorry if I’ve kept you from your duties. I shall need to dress for dinner. His lordship suggested that I might have Zoe as my abigail. I should like to you arrange for a cot to be placed in my dressing room, so that she may take up her duties at once. If I am to stay, proprieties must be observed.”
    “Oh, Miss Melly, she’ll be that pleased! She’s always carping about bettering herself. She’ll be a fine abigail for you to be sure.”
    “Very well, then. Send her up if you will, and let us see what, between us, we can do to make me… presentable.”
     

 
    Seven
    Drake was in the drawing room having a sherry before dinner, when James Ellery joined him. The steward had changed his wet clothes, though he still looked bedraggled. His sandy-blonde hair was plastered wet to his head. It had lost its rakish appeal for the drenching, and the fingers that reached for the sherry glass Drake offered were waterlogged and cold. He drank from it around ticking jaw muscles, and the scowl that spoiled his handsome face was as dark as the storm rattling the French doors as though it begged admittance.
    “You look like a drowned rat,” Drake observed.
    “I feel like one. It’s hell out there—a real howler. Most of the roads are washed out—trees uprooted everywhere. It’s worse than the last, and it doesn’t show signs of stopping anytime soon. We passed coaches up to their axels in mud on the main highway. I shudder to think what the case is on the secondary thoroughfares.”
    “Did you get my trunks?”
    “Yes. The horses haven’t arrived, but