Read Online Seduced by the Scoundrel by Louise Allen - Free Book Online

her, his eyes dark, his breath short. ‘I think you’ve been sent to try my will-power to the limit—’
    The door banged open behind them, and he turned away so abruptly that she almost fell. ‘Over there by the table, Timmins.’
    The man put down the buckets and walked out while Averil hung back in the shadows behind the door. He must have guessed what they had been doing, she thought, her face aflame.
    ‘I can’t do this any more,’ she said the moment they were alone. ‘I cannot. I don’t understand how it makes me feel. I am
not
wanton, I am not a flirt. I don’t even
like
you! You are big and ugly and violent and—’
    ‘Ugly?’ Luke stopped sorting through the heap of linen in the corner and raised an eyebrow. Nothing else she had said appeared to have made the slightest impression on him.
    ‘Your nose is too big.’
    ‘It balances my jaw. I inherited it from my father.’ He tossed the tangle of clothing on to the table. ‘There is some soap on the shelf.’
    ‘Did you not hear a word I said just now?’ Averil demanded, standing in his path, hands on hips.
    ‘I heard,’ Luke said as he dragged her back into hisarms and kissed her with such ruthless efficiency that she tottered backwards and sat down on the bed with a thump when he released her. ‘I just do not intend to take any notice of you losing your nerve.
    ‘You’ll get over it. Make sure the collars and cuffs are well scrubbed. You can dry them on the bushes on the far side of the rise. Just make certain you keep the hut between you and the line of sight from the sea.’
    Averil stared at the unresponsive door as it closed behind him and wished she had listened and taken note when she had overheard the sailors swearing on board the
Bengal Queen.
It would be very satisfying to let rip with a stream of oaths, she was quite certain.
    Castration, disembowelling and the application of hot tar to parts of a certain gentleman—if he deserved the name—would be even more satisfying. She visualised it for a moment. Then, seized with the need to do something physical, if throttling Luke was not an option, Averil shrugged out of the leather waistcoat, rolled up her sleeves and went to find the soap. It was just a pity there was no starch or she would make sure he couldn’t sit down for a week, his drawers would be so rigid.
    She began to sort the clothing, muttering vengefully as she did so. None of it was very dirty—the captain was obviously fastidious about his linen. It also smelled of him, which was disconcerting. Was it normal to feel so flustered by a man that even his shirts made one think of the body that had worn them?
    Averil searched for marks, rubbed them with the soap, then dropped those garments in the hot water. How long did they have to soak? She wished she had paid more attention to the women doing their washingin the rivers in India; they seemed to get everything spotless even when the water was muddy. And it was cold, of course.
    She was scrubbing briskly at the wristbands of one shirt before she caught herself. What was she doing, offering comfort to the enemy like this? Let him launder his own linen—or do whatever he would have done if she hadn’t been conveniently washed up to do it for him. But then, she was clad in his shirt and he said he had no clean ones, so if she did not do it, goodness knew when she would get a change of linen herself.
    Her fingers were as wrinkled as they had been when she had come out of the sea, and she had rubbed a sore spot on two knuckles, but the clothes were clean and rinsed at last. Wringing them dry was a task beyond her strength, she found, so she dumped the dirty water outside on the shingle, filled the buckets with the wet clothes and trudged up the slope towards the camp fire.
    The buckets were heavy and she was panting by the time she could put them down. ‘Would someone who has clean hands help me to—?’ Luke was nowhere in sight and she was facing eight men, with Dawkins in