Worth Lord of Reckoning Read Online Free Page A

bruise.”
    “The ice stores are always low this time of year.”
    “Then we’ll put the last of it to good use,” he said, gathering up her hamper and his boots. “I’m Kettering, by the way, at your service.”
    When courtesy demanded that she give him at least one of her names, she remained quiet as they moved along the garden paths toward the back of the house.
    The names he had for her would probably get his face slapped.
    She came up almost to his chin, a nice, kissable height, and she moved with confident grace, though he kept their pace slow in deference to her injury. Truth be told, he rather liked that she didn’t chatter. He could only hope she lived on one of the neighboring estates and enjoyed the status of merry widow.
    Worth Kettering had a particular fondness for merry widows, and they for him, over the short term in any case. He was good for an interlude, a spontaneous passion of short duration—short being sometimes less than a half hour but invariably less than a week.
    He’d studied on the matter and concluded women wanted more than a little friendly, enthusiastic rogering—that was the trouble. They wanted gestures, feelings, sentimental notes , bouquets, and passion, and he was utterly incapable of all but the passion.
    He was so lost in a mental description of the follies resulting from females embroidering on passion—the notes and waltzes and flowers and whatnot—that he nearly didn’t notice when the lady at his side preceded him into the back hallway leading to the kitchens.
    Sconces were lit along the corridor, so he let her lead the way and used the time to admire the retreating view of her confident stride.
    “You will please sit,” he instructed his companion.
    Her lips thinned, but she plopped her wet self down at the long kitchen worktable, one that had been scarred and stained when Kettering had been a lad. He was pleased to note his initials had not been smoothed off the far corner in the years since his childhood.
    “I suppose tea would be in order,” he decided, hands on hips. Thank a merciful God, the hearth held a bed of coals and a tea kettle ready to swing over the heat. He quickly assembled the required accoutrements, aware of his guest watching him the whole while.
    “Perhaps you’d better speak,” he suggested, “lest I conclude a blow to the head has stolen your faculties. I’ll put some sustenance on a plate, if you don’t mind. The ride out from Town is damned long—pardon my language—and I didn’t intend to finish my journey with an impromptu rescue at sea.”
    “You certainly make yourself at home in the kitchen,” the lady remarked, and her tone said clearly, she did not approve of his display of domesticity.
    “I’m a bachelor, and most kitchens are organized along the dictates of common sense.” He demonstrated his bachelor savoir faire by opening drawers and cupboards rather than leering at Trysting’s cranky mermaid. “One learns to manage or one starves. Even the best staff is somewhat at a loss for how to cosset a man of my robust proportions.”
    Her gaze drifted over him, calmly but thoroughly. He was nearly as wet as she, and he didn’t mind the inspecting—inspecting was all part of the dance—but he did mind being ravenous.
    “You’ll pardon me while I nip out to the ice house to find something cold for your head.”
    “That really won’t be necessary,” she said, starting to rise, only to sit right back down, her hand going to her temple.
    He scowled in a manner guaranteed to silence prosy barristers and conjure files gone missing in the clerks’ chambers.
    “Fainting on your part would be a damned nuisance all around, madam. Keep to your seat. No head wound can be considered trivial, and the welfare of guests is taken seriously at Trysting.”
    “I’m not a guest.”
    He cut her off with a wave of his hand as he made for the back door. “Guest, trespasser, vagrant, tinker, what have you. I’m off to fetch some ice,