A Marrying Man?. Lindsay Armstrong

       CHAPTER ONE

      GEORGIA NEWNHAM unlocked her front door, flung her mail down onto her hall table, threw her muddy coat and equally muddy riding boots down in disgust at the terrible weather and walked into her lounge in her socks. Her home was in fact a converted loft above a set of stables, not large but comfortable, with two bedrooms and a lounge separated from the country-style kitchen by a half-wall. It was all wood-panelled in the old-fashioned Queensland colonial manner, but furnished colourfully and luxuriously.

      The last thing she had expected to see was an absolute stranger sitting peacefully on her tartan-covered sofa.

      ‘Who on earth are you?’ she demanded, missing a beat in her long-legged stride, but only one, before walking up to him.

      The man stood, and turned out to be very tall—at least six feet four to her five feet ten. He had a thin face, she saw, not handsome but interesting…a face with a faint scar running from the outer left eyebrow to the temple, hair that was mid-brown, a pair of greeny, gold-flecked, oddly insolent eyes and a rather hard-looking mouth. He wore a tweed sports coat—a very fine, discreet tweed, but not new—with khaki trousers and a checked shirt open at the throat.

      ‘My apologies, Miss Newnham,’ he drawled, in a light voice with a decidedly masculine timbre. ‘I’m William Brady and—’

      ‘I don’t care if you’re William Shakespeare, Mr Brady,’ Georgia broke in angrily. ‘How dare you break into my house? If you’ve come to rob me let me warn you that my father is a barrister, my uncle is a judge and the Attorney-General happens to be my godfather!’

      The stranger spoke again and the timbre of his voice struck her once more, and not only that; his cultured accent also held a sort of…what was it? she wondered. A dispassionate sort of irony?

      ‘I haven’t come to rob you, Miss Newnham,’ he said. ‘I’d hardly have stayed to introduce myself if that were the case.’ A corner of that well-cut mouth twisted and his hazel gaze slid down her figure leisurely, then came back to her cornflower-blue eyes with a mocking little salute in his own.

      As it happened, Georgia was not new to this kind of masculine appreciation, which didn’t mean to say that she cared for it—and even less so as she realised that her drenched cotton blouse clearly showed the contours of her bra and breasts beneath it. Extremely shapely contours too, as she’d been given to understand by quite a large body of opinion. But that didn’t necessarily commend anything to her either. ‘Watch it, Mr Shakespeare,’ she said, through her teeth. ‘What have you come for? How do you know me when I don’t know you from a bar of soap, and how the hell did you get in?’

      The last thing she was prepared for was the glint of amusement that came to those hazel eyes, and she said imperiously, ‘Now look here—’

      ‘My apologies again,’ William Brady murmured. ‘We haven’t met before, Miss Newnham; all my knowledge of you is from hearsay, but I would imagine it’s pretty accurate. As to how I got in—’ he produced a brass key from his pocket ‘—I used this.’

      Georgia stared at it. ‘But all my keys are silver—’ she began.

      ‘Nevertheless, it worked.’

      ‘Well, I don’t understand!’ She put her hands on her hips and glared at him.

      ‘Perhaps you should take greater care with the keys you distribute, Miss Newnham,’ William Brady suggested coolly.

      ‘And perhaps you should take greater care with the things you say, Will,’ she flashed back. ‘What are you implying?’

      ‘That you may have retrieved your silver key from the—er—temporary owner of it, but not before he got it copied. Well, that’s one explanation, I guess.’

      Georgia flung back her tousled mane of fair hair and opened her mouth, but her uninvited guest pipped her to the post.

      ‘Very effective, Miss Newnham,’ he drawled. ‘If you stamped your foot, you’d look remarkably similar to a spirited filly with a cream mane—have you one of those in your stable?’

      Georgia breathed deeply and decided to change gear. ‘If you’ve come here for any purpose other than to insult me, Mr Shakespeare,’ she said, coolly and composedly, ‘would you please state your business? If not—don’t be offended if I call the police.’

      The stranger eyed her