Page 13 of The Countess Caper

She stared at him for a long moment, then glanced at Summer. Her voice was gentle, excruciatingly polite. “Have you both lost your minds entirely?”

“He needs a wife,” Summer said, as if that explained everything. Or anything at all.

Roarke rubbed his face. “I am begging you to stop helping.”

Tessa felt as if she was watching a play on Drury Lane. She’d had strange conversations before. One didn’t fill a house with ladies on the run without a surprising discussion or two. Or twenty. To say the least.

But this was something else entirely.

“I don’t need a husband,” Tessa felt the need to point out.

“You need money,” Summer told her. “For this house.” She waved her hand, encompassing the general state of things. And she wasn’t wrong. She was also mad as ten cats in a bathtub.

Not a metaphor.

As Tessa had occasion to know. Magpie House had come with a dilapidated barn full of peevish occupants.

Tessa couldn’t marry Roarke. He didn’t even like her. He just stood around watching her disapprovingly from the corner of ballrooms and museums and muttered about redheads. She knew because she couldn’t help but watch him back.

And that was before The Incident.

Plus, she’d just abducted him. In her experience, earls frowned upon that sort of thing. Not that she’d abducted anyone recently, but they certainly did not like being held up by a highwayman. Or disagreed with at dinner. Ignored. Or mocked, which was usually so much easier.

Drowned in a large crystal bowl filled with claret.

“I’m not sure I like being bartered,” Roarke only said mildly.

The women snorted in unison, without an ounce of pity. “Welcome to every day of our lives,” Tessa said.

Wisely, he abandoned the protest.

But he stayed where he was, watching her patiently, completely at ease even though he dwarfed the furniture, and she wasn’t entirely convinced the spindly antique chair legs beneath him would hold. Dust motes danced in the air around him, like a crown.

“He’s kind and does not fuss overly,” Summer continued.

“I am starting to feel like a pig at market,” Roarke said.

“And he’s handsome enough, I suppose,” she allowed, ignoring him as only family could. “If approximately ten feet tall and built like an ox. You don’t believe that Beast of Dartmoor nonsense, surely. Oh, and he’s kind to dogs!”

“Right,” he said in his calm, gravelly voice. “That’s enough of that.”

He rose from his chair and clapped his hands around Summer’s shoulders, lifting her bodily off the floor. She squeaked mutinously. It did not deter him one whit. He merely strode across the parlor, deposited her gently in the hall, and then closed the door in her face. And then he locked it for good measure.

“Roarke!” Summer shouted, rattling at the handle. “Let me back in.”

“No.” He turned to face Tessa, whose mouth had dropped open despite herself. Summer was not often bested. Nor were duke’s sisters carted about like a sack of potatoes. “Let’s try that again, shall we?”

Chapter Six

“I have to tell you, Lord Dartmoor, I am usually accustomed to being the oddest person in the room.”

He smiled briefly. “I am not here to usurp your crown.”

“I fear you’ve already won it,” Tessa muttered.

He placed his hands on the back of the settee. It only groaned a little in reply. It was patterned with sleepy-looking quails and was her favorite. She hoped to be able to mend the tear in the fabric by the armrest. “Why do you say you are odd?”

She shot him a look of incredulity. “Are you mocking me, my lord?”