if he’d do the polite thing and give her space. He didn’t. She felt his gaze slide over her face, then down her throat. The disdain in his eyes said he noticed everything: the hungry hollows of her cheeks; that her earrings were not real pearls; that Lady Mabel’s old walking dress had been altered by her own hand and clashed with her coloring.
Inside, she crumbled a little.
“The gall of you, to set foot under my roof,” he said. “That is unusual, even for a woman such as yourself.”
She blinked. A woman such as herself? “We . . . are acquainted,” she repeated, her voice sounding strangely distant.
“Acquainted,” Montgomery said, “if that is what you wish to call it, madam. But you picked the wrong man to be acquainted with. I hold the purse strings. Understand that your efforts with Lord Devereux will lead you nowhere.”
Heat washed over her.
He wasn’t displeased about finding her sleeping in his chair; he thought she was his brother’s paramour.
Her and Peregrin Devereux? Ridiculous.
And yet one glance had convinced His Grace that she’d sell herself to noblemen for money.
The violent beat of her heart filled her ears. Her temper, checked for so long, uncoiled and rose like a prodded snake. It took possession, made her cock her hip and peruse him, from his angular face down to his polished shoes and up again, taking his measure as a man. She couldn’t stop the regretful smirk that said he had just been found wanting.
“Your Grace,” she murmured, “I’m sure your purse strings are . . . enormous. But I’m not in the market for you.”
He went still as stone. “Are you suggesting that I just propositioned you?”
“Why, isn’t that usually the reason why a gentleman mentions his purse strings to a woman such as I?”
A muscle in his cheek gave a twitch, and that worked like a cold shower on her hot head.
This was not good.
He was, after all, one of the most powerful men in England.
Unexpectedly, he leaned closer. “You will leave my estate as soon as the roads permit travel again,” he said softly. “You will leave and you will keep away from my brother. Have I made myself clear?”
No reply came to mind. He was so close, his scent began invading her lungs, a disturbingly masculine blend of starch and shaving soap.
She managed a nod.
He stepped back, and his eyes gave an infinitesimal flick toward the door.
He was throwing her out.
Her hand twitched with the mad impulse to slap him, to see the arrogance knocked right off his noble face. Ah, but that arrogance ran to the marrow.
She remembered to snatch the Thucydides and her notebook from the side table.
His gaze pressed cold and unyielding like the muzzle of a pistol between her shoulders all the way to the door.
* * *
The woman held her book before her like a shield as she left, every line of her slender body rigid. She closed the door very gently behind her, and somehow, that felt like a parting shot.
Sebastian flexed his fingers.
He had recognized her as soon as she had blinked up at him.
Green Eyes was in his house.
Green Eyes was his brother’s bit on the side.
She had slept like an innocent in his chair, with her knees pulled to her chest and a hand tucked under her cheek, the soft pulse in her neck exposed. Her profile had been marble still, she had looked like a pre-Raphaelite muse. It had stopped even him in his tracks. She had not looked like a woman who entrapped hapless noblemen, a testimony of her skills.
Her eyes gave her away, keenly intelligent and self-possessed, and hardly innocent. Any doubts, her reactions had settled: no gently bred woman would have reacted with impertinence to his displeasure. This one had wanted to slap him; he had sensed it in his bones. Madness.
He stalked toward the exit.
Being ordered back from Brittany by the queen at once for a crisis meeting was bothersome. Finding his house teeming with drunken lordlings after traveling for twenty hours was unacceptable. But to be sniped at in his own library by this baggage—beyond the pale.
A long, anxious face awaited him when he stepped into the hallway.
“Now, Bonville.”
“Your Grace.” The butler he would normally describe as unflappable had a wild look about him. “I take the fullest responsibility for this . . . situation.”
“I doubt there is a need for that,” Sebastian said, “but do give me an account.”
His housekeeper had become too flustered when he had