Sitting next to the petticoats were gloves and a bonnet—a decent, plain pale straw with a golden-brown satin ribbon. It was a respectable, modest object whose very decency only served to highlight the outrageous fact that a man had bought it.
‘I am in mourning, Polly. That—’ she gestured rather wildly at the walking dress ‘—is brown. Not even dark brown.’
‘His lordship said not to buy black, Miss Lytton. And that purple wouldn’t suit you.’
‘Did he, indeed?’
She snatched up the gown, almost whimpering with pleasure as her fingers closed on soft, fine cloth, then set her jaw and marched out into the sitting room, ignoring the jarring to her leg.
‘Where is he?’
‘You called?’ Blake opened the door and leaned one shoulder against the frame. ‘Good, I thought that colour would go with your hair. Suits your freckles too.’
‘My—my freckles have nothing to do with it.’ Trust him to tease her with one of her most prominent faults. ‘I am in mourning. My brother has just died. This is brown. Golden-brown.’
‘Your stepbrother,’ Blake corrected her. ‘And no one up here knows about it. I, on the other hand, have a reputation to uphold. I can’t be seen with you in that frightful old black thing. It makes you look like a moulting crow in a thunderstorm.’
He was teasing her. She could tell he was trying not to laugh, and his eyes were crinkling at the corners and his mouth.
Oh, his mouth…
‘Moulting crow? Crow?’ She let anger sweep over the desire.
‘It is simply the black gown,’ he said, with an unruffled calm that seemed uncanny given that an infuriated woman was shaking her fist, a gown clutched in it, under his nose. ‘I did not mean that you look like a crow… Without the black dress…’
There was a glint in his eye that told her it was not simply her own mind that had seen a second meaning to that last comment. No doubt he found it highly amusing to tease her about her skinny body.
But she was a lady, however much she felt like shrieking like a fishwife, and she simply could not respond to that jibe. ‘I cannot help the gown. I had to re-dye it. I cannot afford to buy a new set of mourning for every occasion like some Society lady.’
Now he had her discussing her impoverished state, blast him.
‘I know you cannot. That is why I have bought this.’
For a moment it seemed almost reasonable. For a moment. ‘I should not allow a man unrelated to me to buy me clothing—and certainly not intimate clothing. It isn’t decent.’
‘I thought it all exceedingly decent—positively Quakerish—but Polly insisted that was what you would want.’
He still lounged there against the door…all six foot something of gorgeous, infuriating male.
How would he like it if she went and bought him a pair of drawers? If he wore any, that was…
‘Now what are you blushing about?’
‘What do you think?’ She fought back the image of Blake clad in nothing but a pair of white cotton drawers, sliding off one hipbone on an irresistible downward course. Oh, her wretched imagination. ‘You went into the shop and actually argued with Polly over my… No, I do not want to even think about it.’
‘Good—don’t think, then. Just wear it.’
Something in his expression told her that he would be thinking about exactly what she was wearing—all the way down to the skin. The man must be some kind of insatiable libertine if he could become excited thinking about underwear on her angular body.
My plain spinster’s body.
Oh, yes, she had heard him talking to Jonathan—the entire conversation—even if she had pretended she had not. She had too much pride to fling his hateful, hurtful, but perfectly accurate words back at him.
And yet he had been kind when he had talked to her in the bedchamber, even though that kindness had consisted of cool questions and simple assurances.
There might be heat in that grey gaze, and he might be finding amusement in teasing her, but he would not act on that heat, she was certain.
That belief did not stop her wanting to throttle him with one of those fine cotton stockings now folded neatly on her bed.