Page 11 of Don’t Let Your Dukes Grow Up To Be Scoundrels (Dukes in Disguise #1)

Chapter Eleven

Satiny skin over smooth hardness, the thrill of taking him in hand and making him gasp. The saw of his ragged breaths in her ear and the earthy, musky, pine-forest scent of him so thick in the air around her she could almost taste it. Taste him. And then she did taste him, when he released his passion right in front of her, showing her everything, every bit of agonizing pleasure right there on his face and in the lines of his big, work-hardened body…and he’d tasted like nothing she’d ever known. Salty-sharp and undeniable and Gemma woke herself moaning, the tips of two fingers in her mouth.

Cheeks burning, she sat straight up in bed, relieved and disoriented to find herself alone. Sunlight slanted in through the threadbare curtains at the wrong angle for morning, and for a panicked moment she thought she’d overslept and left all the chores to Lucy and Bess. But in the next breath, she remembered it was laundry day, and she’d been up at four to help Bess start the interminable process of bleaching, washing, wringing and drying the inn’s bed linens.

She couldn't let Bess do it all on her own; for one thing, Bess had enough to do getting the kitchen ready to serve meals to the steady stream of customers that was slowly increasing, day by day, as word of Five Mile House’s new management spread. Gemma had to help with the bed linens because it was her idea to wash them weekly.

One of the chores Bess had let slide as the inn fell into disrepair, the weekly washing was the first major innovation Gemma had managed to instate for the inn, other than importing suitable furnishings from Kissington Manor. If they wanted to attract respectable, wealthy overnight guests, the sheets had to be spotlessly clean, crisp and inviting.

And that meant, as it turned out, a grueling amount of work that had taken nearly the entire day and every ounce of Gemma’s strength. She’d sent Bess back up to her kitchen once she got the hang of it, and the physical labor had been taxing enough to keep her mind focused on nothing but the mountain of laundry in front of her.

She’d finished in time to take a short nap before the evening rush of dinner and drinking customers, and she’d assumed she would fall into bed as unconscious as a stone for the short hour she’d allotted herself…however, clearly her traitorous mind had taken the first opportunity to relive that tryst with Hal in the stables.

It was hardly the first time she’d seen a man’s penis. An all-too-common jape amongst her group of London friends was for a fellow in his cups to whisk out his willy and wave it about like a flag. As though expecting cheers from an adoring crowd, bless.

And while Gemma might have stubbornly held onto her technical virginity out of some contrary impulse not to live down to her reputation, she’d certainly done plenty of things that would make a true lady blush.

Hal wasn’t the first man she’d brought to completion; she’d experienced before the power it gave her to be in control of a man’s pleasure. She liked it. She had also enjoyed exploring her own body, bringing herself to a shivery climax in the darkness of her bedchamber, since no man she’d dallied with before Hal had ever been able to manage it.

Really, nothing about what happened with Hal could be compared to those meaningless, often-drunken exploits with the dissolute rakes and bored dandies of her social set.

With Hal, everything felt so…real. It seemed silly even to think it, but it felt almost...she bit her lip.

It felt honest . And she craved it in a way she hadn’t understood was possible.

Hauling her tired body out of the tangled bed sheets and over to the washstand, Gemma attempted to put herself to rights with the aid of a little cold water and a few hairpins. She lacked Lucy’s burgeoning skill at arranging hair, but she did the best she could.

She had to make an effort, she told herself as she pulled on the corset she’d learned to leave laced so she could do it up again by herself. She couldn’t afford to let her standards drop, just because there would be no one at the inn tonight other than farmers, shopkeepers, and the local blacksmith.

None of those people would care if she put on a fresh gown, Gemma knew. And while she couldn’t bear to touch the sweat-stained, wrinkled mess of a dress she’d worn to do the washing, she couldn’t quite work up the energy to deck herself out in one of her silk evening gowns either.

She was going to need to do something about her wardrobe, she realized as she sorted through her options. She was perilously low on serviceable, plain day dresses that could be rendered fit for chores with the addition of a linen apron. And her evening gowns, an array of flesh-baring, brightly colored silks and satins meant to be worn under over-dresses of delicate lace or shimmery gauze, were far too opulent and daring for the public room of a country inn. She would look like a peacock set among the pigeons if she wore any of them.

Just this once, she decided with a jaw-cracking yawn, she’d compromise with one of her simpler day dresses and perhaps dress it up slightly with a shawl. That should keep her from looking too terribly out of place without requiring too much effort.

An hour later, Gemma’s buttery yellow silk Jacquard shawl with the embroidered paisley border lay forgotten over the back of one of the armchairs flanking the fire, and Gemma found she had forgotten most of her aches and weariness as well.

“There’s such a crowd tonight!” Lucy beamed at her from where she sat perched on a high stool beside Hal, who was expertly drawing yet another pint from the cask of ale on the oak bar.

Gemma glanced around the warmly lit room, her spirts borne aloft on the waves of talk and laughter and clinking glasses. Like her father, she had always been one to take delight in company, but it was only by the exuberant happiness she felt bubbling up inside her at the sight of the full pub that she was able to truly understand how low her spirits had been since his death.

She needed this, the inchoate energy of a large group of people, to feel truly alive. This crowd was certainly different from the one she was used to in London, but she was surprised to admit to herself that the feeling she got from being a part of it was much the same.

She recognized quite a few of the farmers from the rogation party, some of them in pairs or alone, some with their wives and small children sitting on their knees or listing sleepily onto a shoulder.

In the dancing light of the fire from the hearth and the flickering candles set on overturned barrels and tables dotted about the room, the place looked softer. More welcoming. It smelled deliciously of the tender spring leeks Lucy had gathered for Bess to melt into her chicken and mushroom pies, layered over with the sour tang of the local cider and the mellow honeyed malt of the ale Hal had poured into a tall mug and set on the bar between them.

“No, thank you,” she told him. If she had a drink, she was likely to get sleepy again, and it was far too early to go to bed.

“It’s not for you, your ladyship.” Hal laughed at her, his eyes bright with something like fondness. His smile was a flash of even, white teeth against the darkness of his short, silky beard.

She knew it was silky, because she’d rubbed her cheeks, her lips, across the close-cropped grain of that beard and barely had a red mark to show for it. All she’d gotten was a tingling thrill that shot straight to her core, and that same thrill warmed her now as she stared into his deep green eyes.

“It’s for Bess,” he was saying when she managed to drag her focus back to the conversation. “She’s just now come from the kitchen to check on the tables and take her break.”

“I’ll take it to her,” Gemma offered, her gaze searching out the tall, trim form of the inn’s cook where she stood chatting with a family seated near the kitchen door. “It’s the least I can do, considering I got to have a nap while she was busy cooking these scrumptious chicken and leek pies!”

“I’m sure you earned it.” Hal cocked his head. “I heard you learned to use the mangle all by yourself. Now that would be a sight to see.”

Gemma flushed, partly from embarrassment and partly due to pure pleasure at the praise. “It was not a pretty picture, I assure you. But the sheets are pressed and I managed not to lose a finger in the process nor catch my hair between the rollers, so I would judge that a successful day’s work. I never could have managed it without Bess to show me how, though. It’s shocking, really, how little a lady is taught to do. Makes one feel quite helpless.”

Hal’s large hand closed around her wrist when she reached for the mug. His voice was as warm as the clasp of his fingers. “You’re not helpless, Gemma. Far from it. Because you’re willing to admit what you don’t know, and you’re quick to learn. That’s more than most can claim.”

“It’s odd, you know. I never would have considered learning how to do my own laundry before coming here. And I can’t exactly say I enjoyed the experience while it was happening! It isn’t fun in any sense of the word. But I’m glad to have done it. It feels good to know how to do things.”

She peaked up at him to see if he was laughing at her, almost expecting him to mock her silly forays into domestic competence, but Hal’s full lips were a serious line behind his beard.

“I wasn’t taught much as a child,” he said slowly. “My father was often gone from home, and my mother…died when I was quite young. I learned most of what I do now at a fairly advanced age. It was the people here who taught me: Mr. Cartwright, the blacksmith, showed me how to shoe a horse; I thatched my first roof under the watchful eye of Mr. Mulgrave; our local lambing expert is Mr. Kent, over there.”

Gemma felt her heart squeeze as if pressed between the rollers of the mangle she’d wrestled with all day. “I’m sorry about your mother,” she said softly, recognizing the momentary shadow of long-held grief that darkened his green-gold eyes. She saw the same look in her mother and sister’s gazes when they spoke of Father. She felt it in herself, the mere mention of Hal’s loss reminding her of her own.

“It was a long time ago,” Hal said gruffly. “Get along with you, take Bess that ale before it goes flat. And keep your chin up. You’re better at all this than I ever would have predicted.”

“Of course I am,” Gemma retorted, tossing her curls and swiping the mug of ale from the bar before marching off before he could see the pink of her cheeks and know what his words meant to her.

Not that she wanted to be good at running a coaching inn! It was hardly the life to which she was best suited, as anyone who knew her in London would be quick to point out. But Hal’s praise, sparse as it was, rang all the more sincere for being grudgingly given. Especially after their argument the evening before; it felt as though Hal was admitting he’d been wrong. About her.

No ode to her beauty or poem extolling her virtues could have made her happier.

In an exuberant mood, Gemma all but bounced over to serve Bess her ale. Bess had moved on to another table where Mr. Mulgrave, one of the farmers Gemma recognized, was animatedly chatting with a man at another table while three children of various ages climbed over him, the table, and the sticky pub floor. Mrs. Mulgrave was thanking Bess for a wonderful supper, made all the more wonderful by not having had to cook it herself, and Bess laughed.

The white man at the other table tipped a nod in Gemma’s direction as she walked up, but the lively conversation didn’t cease and the children went on with their games, and all around them were the sounds of people enjoying their pies, their ale, and the comfort of a little time spent together after the long, hard hours of work in the day.

Gemma appreciated it all the more, after the day she’d had. And knowing that it was happening here, at her family’s inn, gave her a warm glow. Because Hal was right—this place mattered to this village and the people who lived here.

It was really quite something to be a part of it, Gemma felt. Even for just a short while.

“Thank you for the ale,” Bess exclaimed. “But you didn’t need to do that, Gemma! I ought to be getting back to my kitchen.”

“Nonsense. There is no one else who needs feeding at present, and you have been on your feet since before dawn! At least take a moment to drink your ale.”

Bess took a dutiful sip and Gemma smiled in approval. Her smile slipped, however, when she caught sight of Lucy lurking near the stairs in her slightly too-short frock of simple and unadorned lavender muslin. She was alone, and Gemma sighed as her hopes for her mother’s appearance belowstairs withered and died on the vine.

Catching her eye, Lucy shrugged and spread her hands helplessly. Gemma beckoned her over.

Following her gaze, Mrs. Mulgrave said, “I understood that your mother had traveled here to Wiltshire with you, Lady Gemma. But I have not yet seen her out and about.”

“Ah.” More than a little embarrassed—and worried—to admit that her mother had not left her rooms in more than a week, Gemma felt her shoulders droop. “Unfortunately, my mother has been unwell.”

“Oh? I’m terrible sorry to hear that,” Mrs. Mulgrave said kindly. Gemma got the impression the woman would have liked very much to pat her hand comfortingly, if they’d known one another even a little bit better.

“Can I ask,” Bess began, then hesitated. “What is her ailment?”

Gemma hesitated, more out of uncertainty over how to describe Henrietta’s condition than anything else, and Bess hastened to add, “It is more than idle curiosity, I assure you. I have some nursing experience; the whole village suffered through a terrible fever last year.”

The same fever that had carried off the previous duke, Gemma surmised.

“Well, at first I thought it was grief, and Mama would begin to improve if we only gave her time. But then there was the shock of our…change in circumstances. And now I begin to worry that she will not ever recover her spirits. She will get dressed but will not hear of venturing downstairs. She barely eats. She takes no pleasure in the things that used to bring her joy, like paying calls or painting. She won’t even consider it, really. Lucy and I are at our wits’ end.”

“Would you allow me to try?” Bess asked, setting down her mug of ale.

“Try what? To get her to come downstairs?” Gemma blinked, her gaze straying to the clock behind the bar. “It’s nearly seven.”

“Will she be asleep yet?”

“No,” Gemma admitted, as Lucy joined them. “I was about to ask my sister to take her a tray and try to persuade her to eat something.”

“Let me invite her to come down and join us for supper,” Bess persisted.

Seeing that Gemma was wavering, Mrs. Mulgrave interjected, “Our Bess has a way about her, Your Ladyship. She once calmed a stallion that had got tangled in brambles so that the men could get near enough to cut the thorns away. Saved that horse from breaking its own leg thrashing about, trying to get free. There’s not many can resist her sweet nature.”

“Mrs. Mulgrave is too kind,” Bess protested, her fair skin showing a painfully red blush all the way down her long neck. “But I would be happy to visit with your mother and see if there’s a way she could be made more comfortable.”

Lucy clapped her hands together, eyes shining. “Bess, would you? Only I don’t know what to say to her anymore, nothing seems to penetrate, and?—”

She stopped mid-sentence, having caught sight of the way Gemma was biting her lip. A warning look came over Lucy’s small, pointed features. “Do not say no, Gemma! I vow, you are determined to do everything yourself, if it kills you and us!”

The injustice of this took Gemma’s breath away for a moment. “It’s not so much that I am determined to do it all on my own,” she said, more sharply than she liked. “It’s that there never seems to be much choice in the matter.”

“Well, Bess is offering you a choice now,” Lucy pointed out, crossing her arms over her flat chest. “I really don’t know what sensible objection you could possibly offer.”

“It’s a family matter.” Gemma spoke between clenched teeth, her jaw so tight it felt as though it might shatter like a dropped bar glass. “We ought not to burden anyone else with our problems. We shouldn’t even be discussing it here.”

At the table, Mrs. Muglrave, who had watched this exchange with considerable interest, sat back in her chair. Without looking away from Gemma, she plucked up one of her children, a toddler who had been reaching curious hands toward the whiskery little terrier under the neighboring table. As she settled the squirming child on her lap, she said, “Bless you, Lady Gemma. We’re all family here!”

“Yes.” Bess nodded decisively. “And you need not fear overburdening me—you didn’t ask, I offered! And I do hope you will allow me to be of some use to you and your poor mother.”

Blowing out a breath, Gemma studied Bess’s earnest face. Sweet natured she certainly was, but there was an inner fortitude to Bess that had impressed Gemma almost from the first. She had a spine of steel underneath all her calm loveliness and gentle manners, and a stubbornness to match Gemma’s own. Looking at Bess, Gemma knew her friend wouldn’t readily accept ‘no’ for an answer.

And would that really be so bad? For the first time in a long while, Gemma allowed herself to contemplate the possibility that she was not entirely on her own.

She had friends. Real friends, who would rally round and offer to help, and Gemma could accept that help. It was an unnerving sensation, but one she savored.

“All right,” Gemma conceded, taking Bess’s hand impulsively. “If you are certain you want to involve yourself in our rather convoluted affairs, I would be exceedingly churlish to turn you away. Especially when you’ve been such a good and true friend to me.”

Bess’s fingers twitched in Gemma’s hand, and she pulled away with a strained smile. So modest, Gemma thought affectionately. Bess could never bear compliments.

“I am honored to be your friend,” Bess said with some difficulty, her voice almost too low to make out. And begging their pardon, off she went up the stairs to beard the lioness in her den, with Lucy tagging along to make the introductions.

After ascertaining that the Musgrave family were not in want of anything, Gemma moved on, greeting the people she recognized and introducing herself to the ones she didn’t. She was surprised by how many familiar faces smiled up at her from their plates of chicken pie and mushy peas, and she reflected with an inward grin that attending all those social engagements in London had been good practice for running a business that relied, at least in part, on being charming and learning the names of a great many strangers in a short span of time.

It was not an unpleasant way to spend an evening, but she would have enjoyed it more if she knew what was happening upstairs with Henrietta. Glancing at the door that led to the stairs, she considered whether she ought to check on things there but before she could take a step in that direction, she was being hailed by Hal.

Drawn to him irresistibly, Gemma found herself leaning on the bar before she knew what she was about. The rumble of conversation ebbed and swelled around them, in the corner someone pulled out a wooden flute and piped a few notes, and in the dim glow of the firelight, Gemma thought Five Mile House had never looked better.

“Did I see Bess head upstairs?” he asked, resting his bare forearms casually on the bar. At some point in the evening he’d rolled up this sleeves, and Gemma found herself mesmerized by the tawny gold skin and lean, corded muscle on display. She swallowed hard.

“Yes. Perhaps Mama will listen to her. She certainly doesn’t seem to hear Lucy or me when we beg her to bestir herself.”

“It’s hard. Seeing your mother so unhappy.”

Something about the way he said it made Gemma think he was speaking from personal experience, rather than simple empathy. “It’s very much against her character. When Mama entered a room on Father’s arm, she lit it up like a glittering crystal chandelier set with hundreds of candles.”

“So your parents were happy, then?”

“Embarrassingly so.” Gemma laughed, her throat aching. “When they looked at one another, the whole world fell away. They were insensible of anything outside of their connection. It’s not at all the done thing, you know, to be so enamored of one’s own spouse, but they didn’t care.”

“That must have been a nice way to grow up. Around parents that were affectionate with one another.”

“Were yours…not?” Gemma inquired delicately, keeping her attention on the rings of condensation speckling the bar. She had the sense that if she looked at Hal, he’d close his mouth and push her away.

“My parents…were not as lucky as yours.”

Gemma bristled. “It wasn’t luck. They encountered quite a bit of opposition to their match, beyond the general faux pas of being besotted with one another. It wasn’t easy for them. My mother was considered entirely unsuitable. She’d been my half-brother’s nursemaid, you see. Not what the ton had in mind for the second wife of the Duke of Ashbourn.”

She lifted her chin, trying not to care what Hal thought but studying his face for clues as to his reaction to her scandalous blood line all the same.

But Hal’s only reaction was a sardonic lift of one tawny brow. “Is that meant to be shocking?”

Gemma’s heart lifted like a feather caught in a breeze. “I know you are not easily shocked, but you can take my word for it: the Ton was in an uproar. My mother’s name was not to be mentioned in Polite Society. They were featured regularly in the satirical prints, drawing after drawing of my father as a dog panting after my mother’s skirts while she decked herself out in the family jewels.”

Hal’s face darkened with a grim look that paradoxically lightened Gemma’s mood to no end. “Bastards,” he said succinctly.

“Rather,” Gemma agreed, wondering how she’d come to share such humiliating and intimate details of her past. At least she had managed not to blurt out that her parents weren’t the only ones to appear in the scandal sheets and the satirical prints pasted up in booksellers’ shop windows. She pushed away the scalding memory of those first few prints she’d chanced to see with exaggerated caricatures of her own form cavorting about London, before she’d learned to ignore them.

Mostly.

“The furor had mostly died down by the time I came out,” she said lightly, glossing over the way her debut had revived the gossip. “There were still the highest sticklers in the Ton who would never have dreamed of admitting Mama, or any of us, to one of their gatherings, but there were plenty more who were happy to count my family among their friends. I’m sure from the outside the Polite World appears to be all at the same level, but I assure you the Ton is as stratified as any other part of society. Perhaps more so. Despite my father’s title, we were decidedly not Haute Ton—but then, my father wouldn’t have wished to be. He’d had enough of that with his first wife.”

Gemma realized she was all but babbling and shut her mouth, chagrined. She’d meant to be getting to know more about Hal! But somehow he’d managed to turn the conversation around to her, as he always seemed to. Before Gemma could think of a way to get him to open up about himself, Hal had straightened up and pointed at the spot in the corner nearest the fire, where a few tables were being moved to create an empty space. “Look, they’ll be after young Flora to sing in a minute.”

Sure enough, in a few moments the customers had pulled a laughing, only slightly protesting Flora Pickford into the circle of light cast by the fire. Flora had her cousin Bess’s looks, along with a jauntily uptilted nose and a saucy gleam in her eye. The flute struck up a merry tune and Flora caught the folk song and took it up, trilling the lyrics about a maid from the country corrupted by a visit to Town as though they weren’t describing some poor girl’s ruin and doom.

Her voice was pleasant, a little soft and breathy on the high notes, but with a liveliness that had customers all over the public room tapping their toes and clapping their hands in time with the beat. A chipped crockery jug passed from hand to hand, people at the tables plinking coins into it in thanks for the entertainment.

The song changed to a funny little ditty about the many ways a maid might try to catch a husband. Gemma laughed and clapped along, sharing a grin with Hal.

A lock of dark auburn hair fell over his brow and candlelight gleamed on the sweat-damp skin at the hollow of his throat where his striped neckcloth had come loose.

His teeth flashed white against his dark beard and one brow hiked high when he caught her staring, but Gemma couldn’t help it. She’d told Hal something that had made her a pariah at her debut, and he’d barely batted an eye. And now he was standing there, looking like a rogue, a pirate, some devil sent to torment and tempt her from her path.

He really had no business looking like that.

She opened her mouth to tell him so, but froze as the music and laughter and noise of the inn fell silent. Flora’s last note held for half a heartbeat more, then withered and died out on a strangled breath as a waft of cool evening air rushed through the taproom.

Hal’s gaze lifted over her shoulder, hardening until his eyes were like two shards of cut jade, opaque and cold.

Wondering who on earth it could be whose arrival upset everyone this much, Gemma’s heart pounded as she turned to face the door.

There on the threshold, impeccably dressed and arrayed as though posing for a portrait, stood two of London’s most notoriously stylish ladies, accompanied by a gentleman whose sumptuous attire came close to putting both of them in the shade.

They surveyed the room slowly, feathered bonnets barely shifting, faces expressionless beneath the masks of their expertly applied maquillage. There was no hint of what any of them was thinking—until the gleaming, golden-haired gentleman drew a languid breath that curled his elegant upper lip into a sneer.

Murmuring something to his companions, he turned as if to lead the party back out into the stable yard, and behind her, Hal muttered, “Good riddance.”

The sheer contempt in his low voice sent a jolt through Gemma that seemed to knock her forward. Her sudden movement had the trio at the door turning back as one, expressions ranging from polite astonishment to gleeful malice shining clearly across the room.

“Will wonders never cease,” the younger lady said, her bored tone at odds with the teasing glint in her eyes. “Is that you, Gem? What on earth are you doing here?”

“You know these people?” Hal asked, his husky mutter making her shiver.

“They are some of my dearest friends,” Gemma said faintly, the tips of her fingers gone cold as ice as the air in her lungs seemed to grow thin. “Gabriel de Vere, the Duke of Thornecliff, his sister, Lady Rosalie, and her friend, Lavinia, the Countess of Winterbury.”

Not yet , she wanted to cry, I’m not ready, I’m not dressed properly, please, not yet , but there was no one to hear her.

She hovered by the bar for an agonizing moment, unsure what to do, how to mitigate the damage from the collision between her past and her present, until Hal made the decision for her.

“Your dearest friends,” he said softly, disdain in every syllable. “You’d better go and welcome them, then. Tell them drinks are on the house.”

Gemma took a hesitating step toward her old friends, who swept forward to greet her in a smothering mass of fine wool pelisses and kid leather gloves. They smelled of road dust, stale sweat and cloyingly floral cologne.

“My dear Gemma, it’s been far too long!” shrilled one of the ladies, Gemma couldn’t tell which in the hubbub. “Are you lost, too?”

“Lost?” she repeated dazedly.

“We’re not lost. Damned horse threw a shoe,” the Duke of Thornecliff drawled. “Couldn’t carry on all the way to Bath, so we thought we’d take shelter at the closest inn.”

“However, now that we’re here, I’m not so very sure we wouldn’t be better off taking our chances by the side of the road!” Had Lady Rosalie’s laughter always had that screech-owl edge to it?

“Oh certainly not, Rosie,” her bosom friend, the countess, objected. “The roads aren’t safe after dark. There might be brigands and cutthroats about! Or a highwayman!”

Thorne sniffed, one perfectly shaped brow arching impossibly high. “I’d rather lose my purse to a highwayman than gain whatever parasites are undoubtedly to be found in the bedding of this…establishment.”

The families and farmers seated at the nearby tables frowned. Gemma’s cheeks flamed with a combination of affront and embarrassment. But what could she say? She guaranteed the linens were clean, as she’d washed them herself that very morning? Everything in her shrank from admitting how far she’d fallen since her father’s death.

Both of Thorne’s companions gave muted shrieks of laughter and thwacked him on the arm with their beaded reticules in teasing punishment before turning back to Gemma.

“I say, Gem, it has been an age!” declared Lady Rosalie. “How did you come to be stranded in this backwater hovel?”

Words crammed into Gemma’s throat, choking her. It felt as if every eye in the place was fixed upon her, waiting and watching and ready to judge.

Funny, but she had not missed the sensation.

It was, however, a sensation she knew how to weather. Thorne and his ladies might have arrived a bit earlier than she was prepared for, but it was still a great stroke of luck that she must take advantage of.

She had to show them perfect hospitality, and enough entertainment that when they brought their travel tales back to London, everyone would hear about the lovely, convenient little place they’d discovered on the road to Bath. They would tell their friends, and those friends would sally forth to see it for themselves, and before she knew it, the inn would be a sensation and she would be walking down the aisle with an eligible and wealthy peer of some sort.

That was the plan, even if it was turning out to be far more upsetting than she had expected to encounter people from her old life here.

There was a surprisingly large part of her that wanted nothing more than to make up a story about a broken carriage wheel or some other mishap to account for her presence at Five Mile House.

But she couldn’t do that. Not least because she could actually feel the pressure of Hal’s glare all but burning holes in the back of her neck.

Turning her head quickly to give him a quelling look, she was taken aback by the hardness of his countenance. Arms crossed over his chest, making the muscles bulge tightly against the rolled-up sleeves of his shirt, jaw grimly set under the soft bristles of his beard, he could’ve been carved from ice.

Except his eyes, which burned like dark stars from under his lowered brow. He looked furious, and she realized he’d heard all the things her so-called friends had said about his precious Five Mile House—the same sorts of things she’d said when she first arrived here.

Everyone in the public rooms had heard it.

She couldn’t deny her place here. Not only would it not help her future plans, but it would be the worst insult she could give to the place she’d worked so hard on, and the people she was coming to care about.

So she tossed her head and summoned every ounce of cool, sophisticated ease she’d ever possessed. “Stranded? Oh no, dear. This ‘backwater hovel’ is mine; I am the proprietress. You must come in and make yourselves at home, because, as it happens I have it on good authority that there is, in fact, a highwayman on the loose.”