The Casanova Code (31 page)

Authors: Donna MacMeans

BOOK: The Casanova Code

11.45Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub

The landlord made a sullen bow and hurried off, just as the thick wooden door swung open and two bundled figures hunkered through, sodden and dripping.

Alexandra turned to the entrance and felt a warm glow of mischief evaporate her discomfort. “Ah! Cousin Lilibet! There you are at last. Have you sorted out the trunks?”

Lord Roland reacted with near-instantaneous haste. He wheeled about to the doorway and stepped in Lilibet’s direction, before he remembered himself and froze on the spot.

Most satisfactory.

Even more satisfactory, Lilibet gave no sign of noticing him. All her cousin’s attention focused on the little boy before her: she had already knelt down and was helping young Philip with the buttons on his wet woolen coat, the picture of concerned motherhood. “Yes, it’s all been unloaded,” she said. “The fellow’s coming in the back.” She glanced past the three men to Alexandra, as though they didn’t exist at all; not an easy thing to do, when the gentlemen in question might have made up a side of rugby without bothering to recruit another player.

Almost
too
unconscious, Alexandra thought, but then who needed wiles with a face like Lilibet’s? Her cousin straightened and began to unbutton her own coat, and Lord Roland seemed even more transfixed than before.

“Oh, for God’s sake,” someone muttered behind her. Wallingford, from the tone.

“I take it they know each other?” the other—Burke—asked dryly.

It was better than a play.

Alas, just as Lilibet reached the bottom of her coat, and Alexandra held her breath to see what would happen next, Miss Abigail Harewood swept through the door and ruined the scene.

She shook the droplets from her hat like a careless young spaniel and rushed up to her sister. “Alex, darling,” she said, shattering the silence, “you won’t believe what I’ve found in the stable!”

Alexandra heaved a disappointed sigh and wrinkled her nose. “What on earth were you doing in the stables, darling? Oh, do leave off that gesticulating and remove your coat. You’re showering me, for goodness’ sake. Here. Your buttons.” She unfastened Abigail’s wet coat with efficient fingers. “Now come along with me to the fire and warm yourself. We’ve a lovely hot dinner waiting for us at the table next to the fireplace. You can tell me all about what you’ve discovered in the stables.”

She slung the coat over her right arm, grasped Abigail’s hand with her left, and steered a course directly to the massive hearth, where Lilibet hovered, hands outstretched: a sight to enrapture the heart of any English gentleman, and particularly one that had belonged to her for years.

Alexandra would have to keep a close eye indeed on Lord Roland Penhallow tonight.

As she passed the gentlemen, however, those eyes did a vexing and unexpected thing. They observed not Lord Roland’s lovestruck gaze, nor even Wallingford’s thundering scowl.

They lingered, instead, on the way the warm ginger hair of Mr. Phineas Burke kindled into red-gold flame in the light from the fire.