“Then enjoy spending the night on my stoop, for you are not entering my home, either.” He loomed in the doorway, his arms crossed, somehow a more solid barrier than if he had slammed the door in Sadie’s face.
She refused to notice how much the position improved the view of his forearms. She left the soap in her pocket, put her hands on her hips and glared right back at him.
???
The door behindNicholas connecting the kitchen to the rest of the manor creaked open, but he didn’t look to see who had entered. The staff had already cleaned up after supper, and whoever had come in would have to fend for themselves.
He met the deep brown gaze of the woman outside and didn’t blink. He wasn’t about to soften just because she was beautiful, with honey-brown hair, plump pink lips, and a generous figure.
He had reached his limit hours ago. Five women ago. No, that wasn’t fair. Most of the women his mother had invited were perfectly unobjectionable. He didn’t relish spending the next month with them, but he didn’t dread it either.
Then there was Miss Abigail Candile.
Miss Candile was everything he hated about socializing in Linzen rolled into one deceptively dainty package and wrapped in chiffon. In the half a day she had been at Marstede, she had already objected to the room provided to her, demanded specific luxuries impossible to acquire at short notice so far from the city, and mentioned her grandfather, the Duke of Kinseran, no less than three times in Nicholas’s hearing.
One of the other women, who had been comfortably bland on her own, turned into a ninny around Miss Candile. The others were too unassuming to challenge her or provide any balance.
In short, Nicholas had spent a few hours with the women so far and already wanted to cast a ward over his entire estate, locking out anyone female. His mother included.
He might have thought one woman as bad as a dozen back when he made the agreement, but he’d learned his mistake. Depending on who the one woman was, she could be infinitely worse than a hundred others. He did not want to take the chance and discover that this woman was another like Miss Candile.
She certainly wasn’t bland, like the rest.
“Go home,” Nicholas repeated. He should have slammed the door in her face, but arguing with her was a relief after the stilted politeness and forced smiles of the rest of the day. A far better palliative than the cup of tea he had planned to make when he came into the kitchen.
Her eyes sparked with fire, but before she could answer, the person who had entered the kitchen made her way to the door.
His mother pulled it open wider. “Nicholas, what are you doing standing in the doorway like that?”
She spotted the woman standing outside and trailed off.
He turned to face his mother. “You said five, Mother. Five women are already here, so this one is out of luck.”
“I never said five.” Madeleine Huxley would never lower herself to crossing her arms and glaring, but the tilt of her head was nearly as bad. Nicholas knew that tilt. “The agreement was fewer than half a dozen.”
“Half a dozen is six,” he grumbled. “Therefore, fewer would be five.”
His mother’s nose went in the air with an imperious sniff. “No one says half a dozen when they mean five, whether theysay fewer or not. Now let the poor dear inside. You promised to cooperate.”
The woman made no pretense of not being enthralled by this argument. Nicholas didn’t care. Better to be a spectacle than to give in. “This morning you promised I only had to put up with five women.”
“Half a dozen.”
The sixth guest his mother had invited suddenly looked thoughtful. “Are any of the women missing an arm or a leg? Not that I think losing a limb makes you less of a person, but if we are arguing technicalities, it ought to count as making the total less than half a dozen.”
Nicholas spun back to face her. “Are you volunteering to lose a limb in order to stay?”
Rather than running away, she raised a brow. “For all you know, I’m missing a leg already. It’s not like you can see under my skirts. In fact, all your guests might be missing legs. Have you checked?”
He looked down at her skirts, her crinoline wide enough that it was impossible to say what existed beneath. “If you are hoping I’ll demand you lift your skirts so you can later cry that I compromised you, I warn you now that such a ploy won’t make me marry you.”
“Nicholas!”
His mother’s voice, in that tone, was enough to halt the images racing through his mind of trapping this woman against the wall and slowly lifting her skirts to admire the shapely legs hidden beneath.
What was wrong with him?
Desperate to escape the unwanted thoughts, he pointed at the woman. “She’s the one who suggested lifting everyone’s skirts!”
