by Eloisa James
Her eyes narrowed, and for a moment he thought he was going to get a glass of champagne in the face. But Prufrock rang the gong for supper, and she simply turned her shoulder to him and sauntered off with Sébastien, making a point of clinging to his arm.
After the meal, Piers’s mother rose and with a twinkling, sweeping smile that encompassed everyone at the table, including her former husband, said, “Why don’t we retire to the drawing room together? Prufrock has been kind enough to arrange for some small entertainment.”
One look at her face and he knew that his Maman had some devilish plan in mind.
“Dancing!” he said moments later, seeing the floor cleared and Prufrock at the piano, accompanied by a weedy-looking footman with a violin. “How very kind of you, Maman. That’s just what I was hoping for.”
His mother swanned over to him in a cloud of jasmine. “Darling, the world does not revolve around you, and I’m sorry if I ever gave you the impression that it did. Now sit down there and rest your leg. Sébastien will dance with me, of course.”
“Of course,” Piers echoed, sitting down, because when one’s mother decides to stage a comedy, why not enjoy it?
His father sat down on a straight-backed chair at the other end of the sofa and watched. He didn’t even make a pretense not to, just sat, his eyes fixed on his former wife as she circled the floor in a waltz, laughing up at her nephew.
“She’s as light on her feet as she ever was,” Piers said, after a time. He would rather have a conversation than watch the dancing. It was making him irritable to watch Bitts grinning down at Linnet, for one thing. He liked to think of Bitts as a doctor, however incompetent, not a young gallant.
“Your mother?” His father nodded. “You should have seen her when she was seventeen. She was as slender as a willow, with a sparkle in her eyes that made all the men in the room fall in love with her.”
“Are you going to ask her to dance?”
His father glanced over at him, a little twist on his lips that Piers realized, with a shock, he’d felt on his own face, time and again. “Oh, I shall ask. She’s arranged the entertainment, and it would be unchivalrous for me not to allow her to refuse me. We didn’t waltz back then, of course.”
“Back then?” Piers repeated, rather dim-wittedly.
“I broke all the rules of society,” his father said. “I didn’t wait to be introduced, to request her hand in the dance. I simply pulled her onto the floor.”
“Well, go then,” Piers said. “Pull her onto the floor.”
“She doesn’t want to be pulled. She wants the chance to turn me down.”
Yes, Piers definitely recognized that sardonic smile. It was his own.
“And my transgressions mean that she deserves that pleasure,” the duke added.
His mother might well refuse to dance with his father, but Sébastien wasn’t going to turn down the chance to dance with Linnet, and he’d be damned if he’d sit watching from a sofa as Sébastien whispered into his fiancée’s ear.
He got up to leave, and then hesitated. “Good luck,” he told his father.
“Too late for that,” the duke said. “Good night.”
Chapter Sixteen
You’re a pig,” Linnet informed Piers. He had woken her by dangling a ribbon over her face so it tickled her nose.
“I brought you hot chocolate.”
“That goes some way toward ameliorating your piggishness,” she said, pushing herself up against the backboard so she could drink her chocolate. And watch Piers surreptitiously, though why she was beguiled by such a boorish character she could hardly say.
But a woman who’s dreamed all night that a certain doctor was kissing her—and not stopping with mere kisses—can hardly pretend to herself that she isn’t fascinated.
“Don’t make such a dead set at Sébastien,” he said. He still hadn’t met her eyes. Instead he was playing with the ribbon the way a small child might, tying it in knots and testing its strength.
“You’re ruining that ribbon and it’s one of my favorites.”
“Made of silk?” He tied another knot.
“Of course. Why?”
“We need something better with which to tie patients to the table during surgical procedures. We’re using ropes, and they complain of burns later. Maybe silk would work.” He tested it again by running it against the edge of the footboard. It promptly snapped in half.
“Oh for goodness’ sake,” Linnet said. “Did you have to break that? Wind silk around the ropes.”
“Good idea. Did you hear what I said about Sébastien?”
“Yes. Are you worried about losing your playmate?”
Piers snorted. “I wish I was the boy you keep calling me.”
“Why?”
“In thirty, forty years at the most, we’ll have something to control infection. Surgery will be revolutionized.”
“You’re what, thirty years old? You could be operating at seventy-five, propped up against the table.”
“Taking my patient’s nose off with my shaking hands,” he put in.
“I call you a boy because you act like a child whose parents have disappointed him, and he’s determined to pay them back.”
“I love my mother.” He seemed to be truly listening to her. But then Linnet realized that it wasn’t in Piers’s nature not to listen.
“Of course you love your mother. But you love your father, too. And he loves you.”
“All this tender emotion so early in the morning is curdling my stomach.”
“You seem to have problems with your stomach,” she said pointedly. “Maybe Sébastien will be operating on you in thirty years.”
“Damn, I hope not. He’s as good as they come, but it’s not a pretty affair. Let’s go, shall we? I can’t take this much intimacy, and definitely not with a woman I haven’t slept with.”
Linnet drank up her chocolate and then swung her feet out of bed. She felt a pang of real sadness at the idea that Piers could never make love. “How did you injure your leg and—and the rest of you?” she asked, going over to the screen. She’d put her clothes out the night before.
When he didn’t answer, she turned around to find him gazing at her back. “What? Did I spill the hot chocolate?”
“That nightgown is practically transparent,” he said, his voice low and growly. “I can see your buttocks.”
She whisked herself behind the screen, feeling a rush of heat in her stomach—and a corresponding twinge of sadness. She, who never really wanted to sleep with a man (if she admitted the truth to herself)—well, she could envision herself in bed with one.
Piers.
Piers, who was incapable. It was the cruelest of ironies.
“I don’t like that word buttocks,” she said, controlling her voice so that not even a hint of desire emerged. “That’s a doctor’s word.”
“What would you prefer? Bottom? Arse? Ass?”
“Bottom, I suppose.”
“I think I like ass. It has such a round sound. Round and luscious.”
Linnet pulled her gown over her head and let it settle around her. Then she reached behind her and felt her bottom. It certainly felt round. Hopefully it was luscious, too.
She walked out and over to her dressing table. “I just have to brush my hair. I decided I would braid it today and see if that keeps it from getting too tangled. It’s giving Eliza no end of trouble.”
He walked up behind her and started doing up her buttons without being asked. Linnet drew the brush through her hair, and then caught his eyes in the glass, and paused.
“Just as if we’d been married ten years already,” he said with a lopsided smile.
“You don’t mean to ever marry, do you?”
“I don’t see any point.”
“Why not?” Then she realized why. “Oh, because you can’t have children?”
“The institution is designed for precisely that,” he said. “No point in it otherwise.”
She opened her m
outh, but realized that she didn’t feel like defending love, or even companionship, to a misanthrope. Besides, she agreed with Piers that love and marriage often had little in common. She tied the half ribbon around the bottom of her braid and rose. “Shall we?”
He looked her up and down. “You look about fourteen with that braid. And you’ve left off your stockings.”
“I’ve come to agree that there’s no point. We never see anyone on the way out of the house anyway.”
“Prufrock is not one of those butlers who believe the staff has to be up and about at the crack of dawn.”
“He is a very unusual butler,” Linnet said, falling into step as she tucked her hand under Piers’s arm.
“I told you. He’s not a butler; he’s a spy for my father.”
“But why does your father have a spy in your house?”
Piers shrugged.
“Stop shrugging; you do that entirely too often when you want to avoid a question. Why does your father have a spy in your house?”
“I suppose he wants to know what goes on here.”
“And you said he has one in your mother’s house as well.”
“Yes.”
“He’s still in love with her, you know. And the feeling is mutual.”
“Sébastien said as much to me. They’ll have to make up their own minds about whether they want to act on it.”
Linnet glanced at him, but could see from his jaw that he didn’t want to discuss it further. Besides, it really was no business of hers. “So you told me that the rooms in the castle are all organized by various diseases.”
“As well as by sex,” he said, using his cane to knock a rock off the path before he stepped forward. “Patients are so pesky about decency and propriety.”
“Why is Gavan next to Mr. Hammerhock, then? You told me that Mr. Hammerhock could be infectious.”
“It’s unlikely. Petechial fever seems to stop being infectious after the skin lesions break open. I was just trying to stop you from falling in love with him. His charming rash makes him a danger to any woman. Not to mention that adorable lisp he developed. Although sadly, it seems to be going away as of last night.”
“I think the air is warmer today,” Linnet said as they turned the last bend, passed the guardhouse, and could see the pool.
“I don’t like the sky,” Piers said, squinting up.
“What’s the matter with it? There aren’t any clouds.” She dropped his arm and turned her back to be unbuttoned.
“That brooding color means a storm. Maybe.”
“Maybe? You’re a diagnostician of diseases, not weather.” She pulled off her dress. “Just get undressed, would you? I practiced swimming last night—”
“You did?”
“On the floor. Eliza came in, which confirmed all her suspicions that I’ve completely lost my mind.” She ran over to the rock overlooking the pool.
“Slow down. You’ll make me feel like a cripple.”
“By wounding your non-existent feelings?” she taunted. She moved to the very edge of the rock. There was a light wind blowing from the sea, bringing a kind of salty fever to the air.
Piers was pulling off his boots. He had taken one look at her, and then gone back to undressing. Obstinately, she wanted him to look again. She could tell that the wind had molded her chemise to her body, revealing every curve. She wanted . . .
With a start of guilt, she realized how cruel she was being. It was truly unkind to flaunt before him what he could never enjoy.
She sat down, pulling her knees to her chest. Piers was taking off his shirt, and she watched him while pretending to stare at the water. His chest was beautiful, with a sprinkling of hair that darkened just as it arrowed into his breeches. Her fingers trembled to touch him, to run her fingers over his chest, around to his back, down to his—
Buttocks. Or perhaps the right word for a man’s behind was arse, she thought, watching as he turned to put his breeches and shirt to the side.
A moment later they were both plunging down into the water. Rather than feeling mortally cold, she loved the thrill of the drop, the way the water shocked her, as if she had been sleeping until the instant she hit water.
And then she loved the way Piers hauled her up and against his body. But he didn’t let her cling there long.
“One hand on the side,” he barked. “Now, try swimming.”
She took a deep breath and pushed away from the side of the pool. And promptly sank.
He pulled her back up and shoved her toward the side again. “Float for a moment and then start moving your arms,” he ordered. “And don’t forget to kick.”
She was shivering so violently that she didn’t think she could move . . . but she did. A moment later she was moving through the water: slowly, but she was moving, not sinking. Piers stayed beside her, shouting instructions, most of which she couldn’t hear. But finally she got the idea, the way the arms moved separately, up and around, the way her head turned to the side, the way her legs—
He grabbed her legs with those clever hands, surgeon’s hands, and held them straight to show her how to kick.
Being a weak fool, she instantly stopped thinking about swimming and thought, slide your hands up, up.
He didn’t.
Five minutes later she had made it all the way across the pool. Her heart was racing, and she couldn’t stop grinning.
“Are you all right to go back the same way?” he shouted.
Without answering, she pushed off from the side and began to fight her way back through the water. Halfway across, her eyes stung, her mouth was full of saltwater, and her arms were exhausted.
A wave slopped over her head, and she hesitated, just long enough so she began to sink.
Piers’s arm curled around her waist. “Good enough,” he said into her ear. “Come on.” He pulled her to the side and then against his body. She curled against him naturally now, like a baby clinging to its mother. Except the way his hard body felt against hers had nothing maternal about it.
“Your heart is racing,” he said. “Too much exertion for someone who does little more than dance.”
She wasn’t going to explain why her heart was racing, so she let him hoist her out of the pool, and didn’t even watch as he thrashed away, back through the water, beating the waves to the side as if they were no more than ripples in the bathtub.
Linnet’s legs felt like soggy bread pudding. Perhaps he was right. She found the stack of towels that Prufrock had sent down and took all of them again.
Really, she should tell Prufrock that they needed an extra towel, one just for Piers. But lying back on the rock, she had to admit that she liked taking one off her body to give to him. Or two off her body.
It made him look. It made her feel fiercely alive, as if the blood sang in her veins.
Of course, that was why her mother set out so cheerfully on her assignations. They made her feel alive, one had to suppose. Poor Mama.
Linnet turned on one side in her nest of towels, remembering her mother’s laughter. She must have been addicted to the kind of pleasure Linnet felt around Piers. As easy to explain as Piers’s father’s being addicted to opium.
As simple as that.
And Piers was right: she hadn’t ever really forgiven her mother for wanting to be with strange men more than she wanted to be with her daughter. Enough so that she set out one rainy night to meet a man—they never knew who—and died when her carriage crashed into a piling.
I would never do it, Linnet thought. I would never . . . but that doesn’t mean I can’t understand it. Not when Piers’s very touch set fire raging through her blood.
Somewhere around her heart, some sort of emptiness, as icy as the water, eased and fell away. “Love you,” Linnet whispered, telling the wind, the warm rock beneath her shoulders, the smell of fish and the sea, the memory of her mother.
Piers came up, dripping, and flicked cold water over her face. “Are you planning to share one of those towels? Ne
ver mind the fact that my body is so much larger than yours.”
She pulled the towel off her head and gave it to him.
“I need another,” he said, rubbing his hair.
She gave him the one wrapped around her feet.
“Do you know how many people have diseases that cause their toes to drop off? I’d like a different towel.”
Linnet blinked. “My toes are firmly attached.”
There was something wicked in his eyes, something primitive that made her whole body respond. Instantly. She felt like a slave girl lying at the feet of a raja, boneless and without will.
“Another towel,” he demanded.
She took her time, pulling the edge of the towel from under her shoulders, rolling a little to the side, unwrapping herself as if she were a present. She didn’t have to glance down to know that her nipples stood out under the wet chemise. She didn’t have to glance up to know that he was devouring the sight.
She tossed the towel in his direction and settled back, her arms above her head.
He rubbed his body, looking down at her the whole time, without a shred of remorse or propriety. “You,” he said finally, wrapping the towel around his waist, “are—”
His head jerked up. “Bloody hell!”
Chapter Seventeen
Linnet sat up and followed Piers’s fixed gaze toward the horizon. Coming toward them was a kind of dark mass, as if the night sky had appeared out of nowhere, come down to the sea and was—
Piers yanked her to her feet, reaching with his other hand for his cane. Then he dropped her hand. “Run! Run as fast as you can back to the castle.”
She looked back over her shoulder. The dark, roiling cloud was coming, so close that she could see it moving. But the uncanny thing was that the sky opposite was still blue, the sun still shining.
He had started up the path. “Linnet!” he bellowed, not looking back. “Run, you blithering idiot!”
She dashed after him. He was going quite quickly in a sort of three-pronged run, watching the ground intently to manage where his cane landed on the rocks. Once she caught up, she turned around again.