Harry nodded and looked around. His cottage afforded him a lovely view of the white sand beach, where waves rolled in eternally, soothingly, blessedly. Chalk cliffs rose on either side of the beach, and there the waves battered the rocks. He could hear the piercing cry of terns as they dove for smelt, and a breeze ruffled his dark hair, carrying the scent of brine and freshness. He wanted to sink back into the porch swing, to stare out at the ocean… to stretch his aching shoulder where the bullet had torn through muscles and bone, and wonder what next he would do with his life.
Instead he looked down. The girl was still there, struggling to unhook her bonnet from one of the stiff, clinging branches. “Take it off,” he recommended.
“I can’t. The ribbon is knotted.” She jerked at the bonnet.
He heard a ripping sound. Another shower of petals fell off the rhododendrons, her bonnet dropped in the dirt, and a mass of curly blond hair tumbled around her shoulders.
“Good God,” he whispered. In an instant, the fall of hair transformed her from a frightened English girl to a kneeling houri, waiting to service her master.
He shook his head to dispel the vision. Obviously he’d spent too much time among the sheiks and Bedouins of the East if he was imagining erotic tableaux here in the heart of sunny Dorset. And obviously he’d spent too much time alone if he lusted after such a hoyden.
But the tightening in his groin could not be denied. He did lust. When he got back to civilization, away from this backwater inn with its charming guest cottages and its windswept cliffs, he would have to do something about his condition. Take a mistress, perhaps. Or accede to his mother’s wishes and take a wife. Or both.
Unaware of his wandering thoughts, the girl picked up the bonnet and stared at it, shaking her head. “Oh, dear. Miss Hendrika will be most unhappy about this.”
He didn’t want to ask, but the habits of a lifetime were too strong. “Who is Miss Hendrika?”
“She’s my chaperone.”
“Where is Miss Hendrika?”
“She’s at the inn, finishing her breakfast.”
“Ah.” The inn stood behind the cottage at the very top of the hill overlooking the beach, a white-pa
inted, two-story affair that looked like a larger version of his cottage, with a porch that ran the length of the building and chairs and rockers set out for the guests. That was whence the girl had undoubtedly come. “Aren’t chaperones supposed to…chaperone?”
“She’s rather old and a little dotty, and truth to tell, I think my stepmother told her not to bother chaperoning me too closely in hopes one of the suitors would compromise me.”
That frank speech settled it. This girl lifted the malaise that had plagued him since he’d been shot. And although he was not dressed to receive guests—he had discarded his jacket and his cravat as soon as he returned from breakfast—she would have to sit with him for at least a little while. Harry descended the steps and reached into the shrubbery, offering his hand. “Come up on the porch and explain.”
She eyed him doubtfully.
In a commanding tone, he said, “Really. I must insist.”
“So I noticed.” She crawled out and stood, brushing at the dirt caked on her knees and once again affording Harry a lovely view of her bosom. “But Lord Jenour-Redmond will certainly see me if I remain there.”
“Jenour-Redmond?” Harry knew him, and he could scarcely credit that that witless, graceless marquess was a suitor for the hand of this vivacious girl. “Why him?”
In a voice overflowing with tragedy, she confessed, “I have a fortune.”
“Dreadful.” He watched with appreciation as she rose to her full height.
With the precision of a government agent— which he was—Harry summed her up. Five foot four, one hundred and twenty pounds distributed in quite an attractive manner, and blond hair that she was trying to return, not very successfully, to its original position coiled at the back of her head. Her eyes were brown. No, dash it all, they were sparkling amber, of such a vivid hue that he immediately returned to imagining erotic scenarios involving her, him, and a mouth that looked delectable to the extreme.
He would have to be careful with this girl.
She was perhaps a little older than he’d first suspected. Normally he would have never said anything, but he saw nothing normal about this situation. “You’re twenty-two.”
She paused in the act of peeling off her soiled gloves. “Yes! How did you know? Most people think I’m younger.”
The gap between eighteen and thirty—his own age—was insurmountable. The gap between twenty-two and thirty was not so large, and made him feel less like an elderly letch leering at an innocent child’s breasts. Thank heavens, for he couldn’t stop leering—at the breasts and at the narrow waist below, and at the legs that, beneath the petticoats and skirt, must be long. “There is a touch of experience about you that no eighteen-year-old gently bred girl would have.”
Her narrow chin set and lifted, and indignation sounded clearly in her voice. “Sometimes they try and kiss me, but I don’t like it.”
“They?”
“The suitors.”