The Problem with Seduction - By Emma Locke Page 0,4
barge in on her privacy after she’d already told him no?
Nelly’s pitiful protests were almost drowned out by Rand’s insistent demands that the man leave. A thunk against the door followed by a male grunt and Nelly’s screech caused Elizabeth to smirk in satisfaction. There was a reason her butler had the physique of a dockside worker. Let Rand see him out bodily, if that was what it took.
“Elizabeth,” a deep voice called through the wood paneling, “you have five seconds to make yourself presentable before I come through this door.”
She froze in her chair. It couldn’t be Lord Constantine. He’d already been paid.
“The devil you will,” Rand growled. “I have every intention of smashing your pretty face through this wall first.”
The door opened, followed by a man’s gloved hand reaching in. Then Lord Constantine himself ducked into the room, presumably avoiding Rand’s right hook, and slammed the door closed. “If this is what passes for hospitality around here…” he muttered, straightening his bottle green coat before he turned to her.
She remained seated, though her instinct told her to run. He posed no threat to her. Except, perhaps, the threat of a handsome near-stranger. He was sinful good-looking, to quote her maid, if one liked impossibly tall men with straight noses and a permanent furrow between their brows, which she very much did.
The door burst open and Rand’s burly build filled the frame. “I’m going to—”
Lord Constantine turned in place to face his opponent. He shook his head as if talking to a child. “Can’t you see I’m busy?”
“What the h—”
“It’s quite all right,” Elizabeth broke in before her butler could recover his wits and do actual, bodily harm to her guest. “Lord Constantine is the father of my child. I suppose that means I must see him on occasion, if only because I cannot legally keep him from seeing his son.” She gave her intruder a narrow smirk, sure now that she had nothing to fear from him. He’d won entry. Let him try for anything else.
If Rand’s wits had been addled by Lord Constantine’s tongue-in-cheek greeting, they positively scrambled at Elizabeth’s pronouncement. He stood upright, mouth agape, shoulders pulled back and hands fisted at his sides like the prizefighter he used to be. “Lord Constantine, madam—?”
She didn’t give his question time to hang in the air. The less said in front of Nelly, the better. “You know Lord Constantine,” she said with a husky laugh, as though they had indeed been lovers once and perhaps still were. “He’s always had a way of seeing me, even when he shouldn’t. You may leave now, Rand. Nelly, fetch another rag. Oliver is feeling damp again.”
Lord Constantine flinched, presumably at the thought of a wet babe. She smiled to herself, enjoying his discomfort. He had, after all, barged in on her.
Then the door closed behind her maid and suddenly the room felt cramped. Not because a cradle, rocking chair and two chests of drawers took up much of the space in the room. She was very much alone with a man whose broad shoulders and fashionably mussed hair once could have made her whisper an indecent proposal into his ear.
She laughed to herself. She had whispered an indecent proposal into his ear. It simply hadn’t been the kind that made a man hard. The opposite, in fact. “Lord Constantine, how do you feel about becoming the father of my child?”
Looking at the tall, well-formed man in buff breeches and black boots, she still couldn’t quite believe he’d said yes. Though she’d approached him precisely because she knew enough about him to suspect he’d agree, he was still very much a stranger to her. She liked it that way. She didn’t need him here, in her nursery, invading her privacy. In fact, it violated the terms of their contract.
She arched a single brow at the handsome rogue who watched her with a wrinkled, slightly pained brow. “My lord, I pray you don’t mind my saying so, but there is nothing more I want in this world than for you to see yourself out of my house.”
His answering grin caused a little flip in her belly. She was a mother, not dead. And he was sinfully good-looking. “I’ll be delighted to do so, but first, I must insist Oliver accompany me when I do.” He had the gall to look sheepish as her world teetered at a ledge. “Father’s rights, and all that. You do know what I mean, I think—Elizabeth?”