The Lurid Lady Lockport by Kasey Michaels

Author:Kasey Michaels
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: historical romance, regency romance, bargain, funny romance, bestselling, romance classic
Publisher: Kasey Michaels

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Rice (as far as Gilly was aware, he possessed no other name) was all that a butler should be: stuffy, condescending, laughably correct in his manner and bearing, unflaggingly loyal, and, most importantly, more than willing to surreptitiously guide Gilly away from any potential social faux pas.

He seemed to regard his new mistress as a child who had somehow strayed from the nursery and inadvertently acquired a Countess's coronet through no fault of her own. Because of her extreme youth and readily apparent naïveté—and abetted by the story of her past gleaned from members of the staff—he felt an instinctive sympathy for the child. He also was aware that she had been literally blackmailed into marriage and, although he believed the very sun to rise and set with his own Master Kevin, he also believed Gilly was too much the innocent to be married to such a man of the world.

So far Rice's sojourn at The Hall had been most pleasant. He was happy to be back in harness, as it were, having found retirement after Kevin's father's death too uneventful by half, and thoroughly enjoyed having a staff to bully once more.

He had become the scourge of the half-dozen young village girls who had recently been added to the housekeeping staff as he patrolled the corridors, his tall (very), thin (extremely), brittle-looking form encased in proper black, his white gloved fingertips occasionally inspecting a table for dust. The Hall might be shabby but, with the estimable Rice in charge, the accumulated filth of two decades was rapidly being swept away.

With an apron tied about his middle, he supervised the polishing of silver or instructed the very insulted Hattie Kemp in the fine art of French pastry making.

Olive Zook, whom he secretly believed to be a lamebrained lunatic, although a harmless enough sort, he left to her own peculiar devices.

Mrs. Whitebread was the only real cloud on Rice's horizon. The woman greatly admired the butler and followed him about the whole day through, looking for all the world like a tongue-lolling puppy, answering all his inquiries with exasperating misinterpretations of his questions. By the end of each day he was hoarse from shouting at her as well as increasingly more certain the daft woman had designs on the bachelorhood he had clung to so doggedly these five and fifty years.

Gilly also believed the housekeeper was nursing an attraction for the butler, which heartily amused her, as Rice was not exactly Gilly's idea of handsome. Not only was he painfully thin, but he had, at her last count, exactly a dozen outrageously long gray hairs spanning the top of his head (carefully cultivated from a slightly thicker side and back growth) in hopes, thought Gilly, of deflecting the sheen reflected from the chandeliers off his otherwise bare skull, and thereby not blinding anyone.

Gilly did find Rice's face interesting. He had soft, baby-like skin that was creased with a fine web of lines, crossing and recrossing each other like veins on a dry leaf, and he possessed the bright rosy red cheeks of a choirboy.

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