Worth Lord of Reckoning Read Online Free PDF

addling his tired wits.
    She was pretty, which was likely the source of the problem. He had a weakness for pretty women, though he’d learned long ago that they had no weakness for him. The pretty ones fretted at the most inopportune times about whether their hair was mussed, and he, of course, liked to muss a lady’s hair. Then, too, pretty women were always looking past one’s shoulder to see who was watching and to whose more interesting, titled, or wealthy side they might flit.
    Still, they were pretty , and beauty in a female could mesmerize him, despite common sense and humiliating experience in his youth to the contrary.
    The lady in his kitchen bore a touch of the exotic, all of her features and colors one detail away from perfection. Her eyes were not the fashionable blue. They were gentian, almost lavender, and so luminous as to look as though they belonged to a temple cat in human form. Her hair was not quite black, but on the curling ends looked sable, and it fell down her back in a cascade of curls and twists and flyaway strands that begged a man to write sonnets and conjure naughty fantasies.
    Her hair looked in want of taming, and he liked that. She probably hated her hair, being female. He knew better.
    As he rose and mentally appreciated her too-generous mouth and somewhat Nordic nose, his solicitor’s brain also tried to assemble facts on a different level, for she’d intimated something about his dear Mrs. Wyeth.
    “You knew how much ice was on hand,” he said, as if accusing a clerk of reading his private correspondence.
    She accused right back. “You aren’t a little old fellow hunched over his desk at the Inns of Court.”
    Whatever that meant. “You knew your way to my kitchen, without the least guidance.”
    “I assumed you’d need somebody to keep you from stumbling into the butler’s pantry. I took pity on an absentee landlord.”
    “Absentee owner,” he retorted, his brain still unhappy with the logical conclusion.
    “Absentee, in any case.” Her humble bench might have been a throne for all the disdain in her glare.
    “What is your name?” He softened his tone, in deference to another one of God’s impending nasty jokes. She might, were there a merciful Deity, be an acquaintance of his housekeeper’s, one accustomed to the friendly cup of tea after services.
    Which were held five miles away, if memory served.
    “My name is Jacaranda Wyeth.”
    “I don’t suppose your dear mama is in my employ?” What sort of name was Jacaranda, and why was he doomed to deal with women who were unforthcoming regarding the simplest truths?
    “I am in your employ, or I was as of recently.”
    “You’re not quitting.” He used his best unruly-client voice. Settled ’em down instantly, though the effect on little Avery was less immediate with each application.
    She tipped her chin up a mere but ominous quarter inch.
    Damn and blast, she was magnificent. And troublesome.
    The worst of his many weaknesses was for troublesome women.
    “Drink your tea.” This earned him another quarter inch of chin-raising. “Please, Mrs. Wyeth, lest it grow cold.”
    Then the thought of warming her up, warming up all that magnificent temple cat- beautiful-exotic-Celtic-woman rippled across his imagination, and he had to sit down again.
    Beside her unforthcoming self.
    Of course.
    She drank her tea, proving even a joking God wasn’t without compassion, for Kettering needed the time to think of cold eel pie, privy rats, and those unruly clients.“You are my housekeeper, then?”
    “And you are my employer.” She pushed her mug away.
    Worth refilled it and stirred in cream and sugar. A bachelor developed such habits, or he’d start looking about for a hostess.
    “How came you to be in the pond at such an hour?”
    “Today was long and hot,” she said, taking a sip of her tea. “A little dip spares the maids having to lug water and the footmen having to haul the tub. The staff knows to leave me the