CHAPTER EIGHT
The hell but this was the way to do it. Tonight was the night she got on board and gave him what he wanted to know. The name of her supplier. Then he got rid of her before she hid behind any more suits of armour. Fell? His backside. As for trying to play him over Gil? A few swipes at the junk in this dump and he'd see how canty she was then, thinking she was getting one up on him, indeed.
He shut the dining room door. Maybe shock tried to rake his scalp to see how her gown hung on her hips, when what he wanted was shock to rake her scalp at the thought of that suit of armour being binned. But anyone who knew her from before would look twice. The purpose in asking her here didn’t include sleeping with her although he did admit, he preferred her in red. That blue was too close to damned crow’s feathers. It hung like them too.
“Wait.” He reached the dining chair before her. “You must pardon me. As you were always so fond of reminding me—“
“Me? Divers?”
“--manners were never my strong point.”
Maybe he had broken these God awful plates that you couldn’t see the food for the flowers on and consigned Sir-whatever-the-hell that mouldering heap’s name was, to the rubbish dump? Maybe it made him feel all of eight again, standing in the darkness of that hallway with Rose, he wasn’t eight. The last thing she’d be expecting was him to pull the chair out. He flashed his best smile as he grasped the carved orbs that topped the back posts while he was about it too, reeking the confidence he was master of.
“A great heavy thing like this isn’t something you should attempt to move.”
Bloody hell, he shouldn’t either unless he expected a broken back for his trouble. He clasped the back posts tighter, so the veins on his knuckles stood out. How much did this thing weigh? A ton? Whatever it weighed while he could afford to look less than the suave person he purported to be, a man the world smiled upon, he wasn’t going to, despite the fact that after earlier his ribs were bloody killing him.
“Then perhaps you should leave it? Personally it’s something I never try to move. In fact I don’t know the last time they were moved. It might even have been in Sir Tredwynne’s time for that matter.”
“Then how do you sit at them?”
“I don’t as a rule. But you did insist. The trick was always just to squeeze into them. If you pull them too far you will only have to push them in again.”
Now she told him?
“Not a trouble. Please allow me.”
To do what? Snap his spine in two? He shifted his weight. They must have made men of the same oak in these days. She rested her timeless gaze on him.
“And if you push them too far in, you will only have to pull them out again.”
Really? He straightened, trying to ignore the pain fisting his spine. Should he keel over now or what?
“There.”
Hopefully he would have more success with the food even if Gil wasn’t exactly a cook. Thank Christ the room was dark as the night sky so no-one would see if the food was any good or not. That geriatric yew tree just outside the row of windows and that bloody mess of ivy clambering all over them, no doubt wrecking every inch of the brickwork, meant there was hardly a scrap of light to be had in this dismal dump of a room.
Hadn’t she ever thought about cutting the lot down, getting rid of these frowning portraits of her Elizabethan forebears, doing something about these dusty old flagstones, chopping up these chairs and replacing them with something more fashionable? It must be murder in here of a winter’s night.
He could quite see himself as master of Doom Bar Hall. Without all this junk in it of course. But it wasn’t going to happen. How desperate was Destiny Rhodes to have thrown herself in with it? Either that or she was blind as a bat, or off her pretty head? And she was still pretty, if you liked that kind of pretty, her troubled eyes glittering in the soft candlelight with a bandit’s boldness, for some strange reason. Like? All right, she wanted to eat him alive.
But that was all right provided she was first on the menu. And after all, he hadn’t knocked down that suit, had he?
Smothering his amusement, he crossed to the sideboard where a row of candles flickered in their tarnished sticks. The smell of beeswax was not a honeyed memory. It was like everything he remembered from his childhood here. Richly unwelcoming. “Some wine?”
“I don’t mind if I do.”
“Even if it’s not the best?”
“What? When beggars can’t be choosers? I mean, you will have seen the state of Orwell? You’d have to be blind not to and stupid not to know he has drunk most of this place dry. As for me? Well, I’ve barely touched the stuff since … since my Ennis died.”
The lucky bastard. Still, who was he to judge? He tilted the bottle. It was time to begin the play. That bold, unholy look and the bold, unholy way she spoke said she was more than up for it. Well, certainly she was up to something. A little cocky riling wouldn’t go amiss. Already he’d made some bad choices here, getting rid of the servants when isolation was not the name of this game and there had been nothing to say he’d have gotten involved with them had he kept them. Tonight he rectified that mistake by getting rid of her.
“That’s not exactly what I remember of you.”
“I’d like to say you remember wrongly and that’s the whole trouble with you. But there. Tonight, since you’ve asked me to dine with you, Civility's my middle name."
Really? That would be a first. But all the better for his purpose. He knew what he remembered and what he remembered was right. Her sailing home from parties with claret stained lips. Sailing out to them too. An exciting, exotic ship. Unafraid of storms. At home in squalls. Wild as the wind on the sea.
There was no trouble with his memory. But then again the past was also a fabulously extinct land where memory bearing coffins had been nailed forever shut and sunk in crypts hundreds of feet beneath the ground. The past was what had got him into this mess. Her. Eirwin.
"Well?” He set the decanter back on the silver tray. “How about we have a toast then to the future and all the changes I intend making here? Here." He handed her a glass. "To the future of O'Roarke Hall."