My Dearest Enemy

by Connie Brockway

  “Yes, sir.” Bernard didn’t sound convinced.

  “Out with it.”

  “Well, sir, I was wondering what you proposed to do about it. Her future, that is.”

  “I wasn’t aware I needed to do anything about it,” Avery answered. “In fact I have learned only this morning that I may be entirely—and I do not hesitate to add happily—excluded from any involvement in Miss Bede’s future whatsoever.”

  “Sir?”

  “I’ve had contact with Horatio’s bank and, er, glanced over the household records,” Avery explained. “It is not too far beyond the realms of possibility that Lily Bede might actually end her five years as manager here with a small profit to show. If she does, she’ll inherit Mill House.”

  The boy met his gaze directly. “And then what?”

  “What do you mean, then what?” Avery said irritably. Lily inheriting Mill House wasn’t the best possible situation but the end result would be the same. “She’ll sell the place—to me—and go off and do whatever it is she wants to do. Buy herself a closet full of menswear, I should imagine.” His gaze flickered toward the enticing swell filling out the backside of Lily’s bloomers.

  “I doubt she’ll sell Mill House to you.”

  “Whyever not?” Avery asked in amazement.

  He’d designed solutions to meet every possible contingency that might interfere with his acquisition of Mill House, even the unlikely one where Lily inherited it. In that case, he’d planned on paying Lily a generous price for the estate, which she would then gratefully accept and go away. The boy’s doubts disrupted that neat little bit of scripting.

  “Who else would she sell it to?” he asked.

  “I think it likely she’d sell it to Mr. Camfield.”

  “And who the bloody hell is Mr. Camfield?”

  “Please, lower your voice, Cousin Avery. Mr. Camfield is our neighbor. He bought Parkwood last spring. He’s ever so rich, at least mother says he is, and he wants to expand his holdings. Miss Bede says he’s a progressive thinker, very supportive of women.”

  “I’ll bet he is. And I’ll bet he joined the progressive thinker ranks the day he met Lil—Miss Bede,” Avery muttered darkly.

  “Well, she did say as how she had aided at least one male in seeing reason.”

  Avery made a disparaging sound. “Mr. Camfield is doomed to disappointment if he is counting on acquiring Mill House. It’s mine. If by some miracle Miss Bede inherits it, she’ll deal with me and none other.”

  “Perhaps, in spite of what mother thinks, she won’t want to sell at all,” Bernard suggested. “Perhaps she’ll try to run the estate herself.”

  Avery snorted. “Unlikely. Whatever else Miss Bede is, she is no fool and only a fool would choose a risky venture over a comfortable future.”

  “Where would this comfortable future be?” Bernard asked.

  Avery shrugged. “Wherever she wants it to be.”

  The boy ran his hand through his hair, setting it on end. “I can’t accept that. You can’t just leave her to her own devices. It won’t do.”

  Can’t accept that? Won’t do? Now, Avery appreciated a strong-willed lad as much as the next man—he’d been one himself—but this bordered on insolence. “Would you care to elaborate?” he asked in a careful voice.

  The boy rounded on Avery. “I know she’ll have money, but if she sells the estate she won’t have anywhere to go. Mill House is her home; my mother and my aunt are her family. She’ll be torn from those who love her.”

  Bernard flung out his arm in passionate appeal. Avery gazed at it, touched in spite of himself. He could imagine what a home could mean … and the loss of it.

  “No one’s tearing Miss Bede from anywhere and while your concern for her is noble, remember, even if she does inherit, your mother and aunt would still leave.”

  The boy scowled at him in confusion.

  “You wouldn’t expect them to stay here as Miss Bede’s boarders, would you?”

  Bernard shook his head.

  “But,” he said consolingly, “once I acquire it, your mother can continue to make her home here with me. Don’t worry. I wouldn’t bar Miss Bede from the door when she comes visiting, if that’s what you fear.”

  “You don’t understand. Miss Bede won’t come visiting.”

  He didn’t like that. He’d developed a rather nice image of Lily Bede knocking on his door. He would invite her in and treat her with all the courtesies and geniality she’d lacked in her reception of him. It would irk her no end. “Whyever not?” he demanded.

  “Because of society!”

  The meaning of the boy’s words hit Avery with unnerving force. Bernard hurried on, taking advantage of the splinter of pain revealed for a second on Avery’s face.

  “Miss Bede is proud,” Bernard said earnestly. “Very proud. Once she’s left this house, I can all but assure you she’ll never call on mother and Aunt Francesca again. She’d never risk bringing censure down upon them by presuming on an acquaintance.”

  “That’s absurd,” Avery bit out.

  “Is it?” The boy’s blue-green eyes, which were the same color as his own, begged for assurance.

  “Of course. Money buys expiation for a multitude of sins. The small matter of her illegitimacy will soon be forgotten.”

  “Maybe amongst the aristocracy but country society is a far more unforgiving lot.”

  “Then she’ll move to London,” Avery said, feeling more and more that he was being backed into a corner.

  “Away from mother and Aunt Francesca? Away from her horses? She hates London.”

  “Drat it all, Bernard,” Avery said, “you’re borrowing trouble. The chance of Lily Bede succeeding, though greater than I’d ever anticipated, is still damn nigh nonexistent. All it would take would be a worm infestation in the orchard or a bit of dry rot discovered in the barn to eat up that pitiful profit she’s managed to scrape together.”

  For a long minute, Bernard stood silent, his brow furrowed in imitation of a much older man’s concern.

  Avery laid his hand on Bernard’s shoulder. “I promise you,” he said, “that I am, and will remain, mindful of my obligations to Miss Bede.”

  Whatever the boy read in Avery’s eyes seemed to satisfy him, at least for the time being, for he let go a small sigh of pent-up anxiety. With the uneasy sense that he’d just promised far more than he’d intended, Avery dropped his hand and started toward the beech tree. Beneath it the three women were spreading blankets while Hob drove stakes into the ground to secure the small striped pavilion Francesca had insisted on bringing.

  “And if she doesn’t succeed in winning Mill House what will you do then?”

  With a growl, Avery swung around. Bernard blinked at him. The lad was like some terrier with a rat. He just didn’t give up. Just like myself at that age, Avery thought. He, too, had never lacked courage—though some would call it suicidal impertinence, he amended with an inner smile. Obviously a family trait. “I’ll take care of her.” He turned around again.

  “Really?”

  He stopped. “Really.”

  “You swear?”

  Family traits aside, there was such a thing as knowing when to quit. “Bernard—” he began warningly.

  “What if she doesn’t want to be taken care of?” the boy pressed.

  Avery spun around. “I don’t give a bloody damn what she wants!” he thundered. “I’m a gentleman, damn it all. As long as she’s my responsibility, I’ll do whatever is necessary to see she’s provided for. If that means keeping her at Mill House, that’s what I’ll do, even if I have to chain her to the bloody wall!”

  “Could you really do that?” Bernard asked, wide-eyed.

  Avery shot him a sardonic glance and stalked away, flinging over his shoulder as he went, “Do you doubt it?”

  Lily flipped open the lid of the woven basket and surveyed the contents. Cheese, ham, a potted quail, a half dozen loaves of crusty bread, ceramic jars of butter, and an oiled paper
wrapper containing a heavy butter cake saturated in rum. She sighed.

  She was going to have to speak to Mrs. Kettle about her current flights into the exalted—and blasted expensive—heights of haute cuisine. They simply couldn’t afford it.

  Each morning Lily found the small, wizened cook bent over scraps of paper scrawled in an unintelligible hand, her lips moving silently as she read to herself the magic ingredients inscribed thereon. And she did it all for him. In fact the entire household seemed in thrall to the dratted creature.

  Including me, she thought. She kept her head averted, but could not help seeing him out of the corner of her eye. He’d flung his jacket over his shoulder and his shirt was open at the throat. The sun flared off his rumpled, unkempt locks with a buttery gleam.

  Lily stopped unpacking, sitting back on her heels and listening. For a second there she could have sworn she heard him shouting her name.

  Nonsense. They were enemies, for God’s sake. Two dogs on opposite ends of a juicy bone. She should be worrying about the bone, not the color of the other hound’s eyes!

  Lily could have pinched herself in frustration. Not only was her plan to rid herself of her infatuation through familiarity not working, it was ricocheting.

  Arguing with him in the sitting room a while ago, her eye on a level with his strong, tanned throat she’d been seized by the most amazing impulse and she knew, not feared, she knew that if she remained within arm’s reach of him she would act upon it. She’d touch him.

  She’d practically run from the house. And she’d planned this picnic in order to blow some of the cobwebs from her thoughts, but her thoughts remained stubbornly entangled with him.

  A kiss would do the trick, Lily thought. Just one kiss and she would realize that she’d invested the experience with a momentousness that in reality it simply didn’t own. She’d be cured. She’d stop waking up in the middle of the night to vague, disturbing images of Avery Thorne and far less vague, but decidedly more disturbing, sensations involving the same man. And his mouth. And his chest. And his hands.

  Unfortunately, the likelihood of Avery kissing her and putting an end to this nonsense was about the same as her farm manager Drummond being civil. In other words, none.

  It wasn’t fair. Men went about deciding whom they’d like to kiss and acting on it. Why shouldn’t women be allowed to take a like initiative?

  She glanced over her shoulder. Avery and Bernard were still deep in conversation. Avery turned so he was facing her. Against his skin, burnished beneath tropical suns, his shirt looked dazzling white. His Mediterranean-colored eyes were narrowed against the midday glare of the sun. That must have been where he’d gotten that fine fanning of pale lines at their corners.

  “Gorgeous, isn’t he?” Francesca whispered.

  “I’m sure I don’t know what you mean.” Lily returned to rummaging in the bottom of the basket for the oranges she’d seen Mrs. Kettle pack.

  “And so shy,” Francesca murmured.

  “Shy?” Lily asked increduously, ignoring the fact that she’d had the same impression. Francesca nodded. “He is the most domineering, arrogant, autocratic man I have ever met.”

  “You obviously haven’t met many men.”

  “You’re teasing me,” Lily said flatly. “You must be.”

  “No,” Francesca denied. “I’m quite sincere. Avery Thorne is a very shy man. I will admit that something about you seems to draw out his finer qualities—”

  “Finer qualities?” Lily sputtered.

  “Yes. He’s quite quick-witted when engaged in a conversation with you. When he’s with me, or even Evelyn, he’s painfully reticent.”

  “Ha, you mistake him. He doesn’t speak to you be cause he’s a misogynist. As a woman you are beneath his notice.”

  “Don’t be obtuse,” Francesca said flatly. “He’s a man. If he was as haughty and full of himself as you think, don’t you imagine he’d spend his time regaling us with tales of his adventures? He’d constantly be driving home his superiority with tales of his fearlessness.”

  Lily was unconvinced.

  “Lily,” Francesca sighed, “the man has been around the world. He has seen things no European has ever witnessed. If anyone has cause to be proud, it would be him. Yet he never speaks of himself at all. I tell you, he’s shy, at least around women, and who would expect different? He was raised in the company of males.”

  “He doesn’t seem to have any trouble voicing his opinions around me,” Lily said gruffly. Apparently he considered her so far removed from being a regular woman that he felt none of the discomfort around her that he did around feminine creatures. She glanced down at her bloomers.

  “Yes.” Francesca grinned. “I’ve noticed that.”

  “Not that I care,” Lily said.

  Francesca chuckled, tapping her lightly on the cheek. “You’re a terrible liar, Lil, not to mention sincere and valiant and worthy. I swear you’d bore me to tears if it weren’t for that delicious little hedonist you keep so carefully hidden.”

  “I’m delighted I amuse you,” Lily said. She found an orange.

  “Oh, you do,” Francesca said. “But even more than amuse, you intrigue me. Such middle-class constraints choking that bohemian heart of yours. You look like a refugee from a seraglio and act like a prioress.”

  “I’m sure I don’t know what you mean,” Lily said, lying back against the tree trunk and digging her nails into an orange rind. She pared it away, careful to avoid looking in the direction of the approaching males.

  Francesca spread her skirts with an elegant flip of her wrists and settled like a butterfly on the lawn beside her. She reached into the basket and withdrew her own orange. “I mean that if I were you I would never allow a man to get me into such a state.”

  “I’m not in a state.”

  “Oh, darling.” Francesca shook her head, her mouth tipping with amusement. “You are in such a state.”

  “I don’t like this!” Lily burst out.

  “That’s obvious.”

  “For me to be so preoccupied with … it is stupid!”

  “Well now—”

  “It’s unfair!”

  “Decidedly.”

  “It’s such a waste of time!”

  “Don’t blaspheme, dear.”

  “What am I going to do?” she finally asked. Francesca dropped the orange she’d been inspecting and with a delighted smile that seemed to say she’d been waiting for Lily to ask just that question, moved nearer—and told her.

  Chapter Ten

  Resting on his elbows, one leg crooked and the other stretched out before him, his vest unbuttoned and his collar agape, Avery tilted his head back and blew out a fragrant cloud of cigar smoke. Through the bluish haze, he saw Lily, seated at least a dozen feet away and upwind, wrinkle her nose and cough. Nearby Polly Makepeace grilled poor Bernard about his “life at an institution.” Hob had managed to shove her here in her wheelchair.

  Perhaps it was because he’d never had the opportunity to enjoy the company of women when they were at ease and relaxed, but he found he rather enjoyed listening to them. He discovered they were much more complex than he’d have guessed. Except for Lily Bede—whom he’d never made the mistake of underestimating.

  He turned his head to see her better. In profile her lashes were extravagantly long, her nose patrician, her nostrils wide, her lips full.

  Impossible creature. Argumentative. Pinch-penny. Incisive. Tender. She probably laid abed at night plotting ways to provoke him. Her determination to have Mill House was nearly as great as his own. Finding such resolution and intensity in one of the creatures he’d been taught were pliant and tractable confounded him and must account for his utterly inexplicable fascination with her.

  “What are your plans for tomorrow, Lily?” Evelyn was asking.

  “Not much,” Lily responded. “I have an appointment to speak to Mr. Drummond, the same as I do every third Monday of the month.”

  “You should tell you
r overseer to wash the raddle off your sheep soon,” Polly spoke up, drawing the amazed looks of the entire party. “Saw the beasts standing about in the stuff. It’s going to be a nasty hot summer. You don’t want the sheep sickening while their wool dries.”

  “I will mention it,” Lily said.

  “Miss Makepeace’s father oversaw one of the Earl of Hinton’s farms,” Evelyn confided.

  “Sounds tedious,” Francesca said and then, at Evelyn’s gasp, added, “Oh, not your father’s occupation, Miss Makepeace. Lily’s plans for the morrow. Drummond and she have never gotten along.”

  Lily wished Francesca hadn’t brought up her problems with the farm manager. Avery would see her inability to handle Drummond as evidence of her ineffectiveness. Though why that should matter to her was beyond her understanding. “We deal reasonably well together.”

  “But Lily!” Evelyn exclaimed. “You are always saying that the man has no respect for you. Last time you had an appointment, he locked you out of his office.”

  Lily produced a nervous laugh. “Oh, that was just his little joke.”

  “I suspect he’d listen to you if Avery stood at your side,” Evelyn said sagely. Lily glared at her.

  “That won’t be necessary.” She glanced at Avery, who lay spread out like a potentate amidst his concubines.

  “I remember old Drummond,” he said lazily. An idea was taking form. He wanted to discover what Lily had done to the farm. The record from the household had only told of expenditures on soap, dry goods, and groceries. The bank’s officers had not known how she’d managed to accrue a positive balance, only that she had. Perhaps she’d made her profits by selling off equipment, or by overgrazing the pastures. Drummond could tell him. “Taught me to snare rabbits.”

  “Such a font of knowledge,” Lily said.

  “Oh, you’d be amazed,” Avery told her. “Drummond’s really rather a dear.”

  Lily’s mouth dropped open. “Drummond? Dear?”

  “Well, maybe ‘dear’ is overstating his appeal a bit.” Avery couldn’t help but grin.

  Lily’s dark eyes widened, her brows rose, the corners of her mouth tipped up, and she laughed. Throaty, deep, delicious laughter that vibrated through his heart.