Craving the Forbidden (Mills & Boon Modern) (The Fitzroy Legacy - Book 1) by India Grey

neck.
    Standing back again, she pulled a face.
    There. Disfiguring dress and headmistress hair. Jasper’s dull girlfriend was ready for her public, although at least Sophie had the private satisfaction of knowing that she was also wearing very naughty underwear and what Jasper fondly called her ‘shag-me’ shoes. Twisting round, she tried to check the back view of the dress, and gave a snort of laughter as she noticed the price ticket hanging down between her shoulder blades.
    Classy and expensive was always going to be a hard look for the girl who used to live on a bus to pull off, as Olympia Rothwell-Hyde and her cronies had never stopped reminding her. Attempting to do it with a label on her back announcing just how little she’d paid for the blackout dress would make it damned impossible.
    She gave it a yank and winced as the plastic cut into her fingers. Another try confirmed that it was definitely a job for scissors. Which she didn’t have.
    She bit her lip. Jasper had already gone down, telling her to join them in the drawing room as soon as she was ready, but there was no way she could face Tatiana, who would no doubt be decked out in designer finery and dripping with diamonds, with her knock-down price ticket on display. She’d just have to slip down to the kitchens and see if the terrifying Mrs Daniels—or Mrs Danvers as she’d privately named her when Jasper had introduced her this morning—had some.
    The layout of the castle was more familiar now and Sophie headed for the main stairs as quickly as the narrow dress would allow. The castle felt very different this evening from the cavernous, shadowy place at which she’d arrived last night. Now the stone walls seemed to resonate with a hum of activity as teams of caterers and waiting-on staff made final preparations in the staterooms below.
    It was still freezing, though. In the portrait hall the smell of woodsmoke drifted through the air, carried on icy gusts of wind that the huge fires banked in every grate couldn’t seem to thaw. It mingled with the scent of hothouse flowers, which stood on every table and window ledge.
    Sophie hitched up the narrow skirt of her dress and went more carefully down the narrow back stairs to the kitchens. It was noticeably warmer down here, the vaulted ceilings holding the heat from the ovens. A central stone-flagged passageway stretched beyond a row of Victorian windows in the kitchen wall, into the dimly lit distance. To the dungeons, Jasper had teased her earlier.
    The dungeons, where Kit probably locked up two-timing girlfriends, she thought grimly, shivering in spite of the relative warmth. The noise of her heels echoed loudly off the stone walls. The glass between the corridor and the kitchen was clouded with steam, but through it Sophie could see that Mrs Daniels’ domain had been taken over by legions of uniformed chefs.
    Of course. Jasper had mentioned that both she and Thomas the butler had been given the night off. Well, there was no way she was going in there. Turning on her high heel, she hitched up her skirt and was hurrying back in the direction she’d just come when a voice behind her stopped her in her tracks.
    ‘Are you looking for something?’
    Her heart leapt into her throat and she spun round. Kit had emerged from one of the many small rooms that led off the passageway, his shoulders, in a perfectly cut black dinner suit, seeming almost to fill the narrow space. Their eyes met, and in the harsh overhead bulk light Sophie saw him recoil slightly as a flicker of some emotion—shock, or was it distaste?—passed across his face.
    ‘I was l-looking for M-Mrs Daniels,’ she said in a strangled voice, feeling inexplicably as if he’d caught her doing something wrong again. God, no wonder he had risen so far up the ranks in the army. She’d bet he could reduce insubordinate squaddies to snivelling babies with a single glacial glare. She coughed, and continued more determinedly. ‘I wanted to borrow