Patricia Rice by All a Woman Wants Read Free Book Online Page B

Her refusal to acknowledge his physical presence made him feel like an uncivilized ogre.
    Beatrice drew a deep breath and dared a glance at
her irritable boarder. He was big and solid and his wet shirt revealed
entirely too much of—
    She didn’t dare think of what lay beneath the wet
linen. Meeting his eyes was somehow worse. Mr. Warwick’s glare managed
to heat her all over, as if he’d assessed her and found her lacking and
was angry at her for it.
    She didn’t want to ride beside him in the narrow
chaise. He smelled of manly perspiration, and she could see golden brown
hairs curling against the thin linen. She wished he’d don his coat.
    He didn’t wait for her to find an argument. Without
permission, he grabbed her around the waist and set her firmly on the
carriage seat. Before she had time to catch her breath, he climbed up
beside her. She burned through the corset where he’d touched her.
    “I’m not a patient man, Miss Cavendish. If there’s
work to be done, I do it, and I see no sense in dillydallying. Where are
your fields?”
    “I... Why, I suppose we’d best see the ones nearest
town first.” Seated beside this giant man, she didn’t quite know what to
do with herself.
    Briefly, she shut her eyes to recover her wandering
thoughts from her guest’s raw masculinity. “If there’s work to be done,
then we’d best be about it,” she said as formally as she could.
    He shot her an aggravated look, but she ignored it as the horses trotted down the broad main road.
    “The fields, Miss Cavendish. Why aren’t they
planted?” He gestured toward narrow strips of land, some plowed, some
planted, some still dense with weeds.
    “Widow Black has been in ill health and can’t work
her rows. Mr. Williams broke his foot and hasn’t returned to his field
since the plowing. The tenants who worked those other strips left after
Father died, and I didn’t know how to assign them to someone else.”
    She could feel the force of his astonishment and refused to meet his gaze.
    “You mean each of those damned strips is worked by a different farmer?”
    “Your language, Mr. Warwick,” she responded primly. He was supposed to be teaching her, not yelling at her.
    “Damn my language to hell and back!” he shouted.
“Language has nothing to do with this. You’ll have a whole town of
starving people if this is the way you tend your land. What in hell kind
of system is this?”
    “It’s the way things have always been done, and it’s
always worked quite well.” She didn’t dare look at him. She could
remember the furious arguments her father and Mr. Overton had had over a
similar topic.
    “Medieval,” he grumbled. “I suppose now you’ll tell me that they each have equal strips of fertile and less fertile land.”
    “That seems fair to me. Why should we favor one tenant over another? The widow deserves the same chance as Mr. Farmingham.”
    “Don’t tell me.” He lashed the reins to speed the
horses. “Mr. Farmingham is the one whose strips are planted and growing,
isn’t he?”
    She glanced sideways and, noting the grim set of his
square jaw with its neatly chiseled chin, glanced away again. “Mr.
Farmingham hasn’t been ill all winter.”
    “Mr. Farmingham should be rewarded for not being ill
all winter,” he shouted. “How the devil can you collect rent from
tenants who produce no income?”
    “I don’t know,” she said faintly. She really didn’t.
She knew her father’s journals recorded the rents, but she couldn’t
fathom the initials and abbreviations he’d used.
    “Give me the estate accounts,” he said wearily “We’ll start there. Where I come from, women know how to handle such things.”
    Beatrice turned to him in amazement. “They do?”
    He urged the horses faster. “They had to learn or
starve. We’ve come a long way since the land was first settled, but the
attitude hasn’t changed.”
    She sat back and marveled at the idea of women