The Prince

by Katharine Ashe

  No. He wouldn’t. He would say that the least appropriate place for her to be was in a pub with young men making lewd gestures. Then he would look at her with eyes full of affection and pity and her heart would implode.

  He loved her. He wanted the best for her. But he knew her weaknesses.

  She should not go to the pub with Archie and the lads. They had accepted her as a man. What other purpose had she for socializing with them?

  Loneliness.

  It was weakness. She had the company of Mrs. Coutts and the piglet. And she was accustomed to being alone—truly alone, even with her friends. Alice, Constance, and Tabitha cared for her, but they did not share her love of medicine. Iris just liked to laugh, and Libby provided plenty of fodder for that.

  To none of them was she fully herself.

  She went to her bedchamber, changed into her nightshirt, and sat at the dressing table. The kohl that extended and thickened her brows went first, wiped entirely away with cream. The whiskers followed.

  She stared at her reflection, her eyes very wide and soft in the lamplight. With her cropped hair, bare features, and man’s nightshirt open at the collar, she was neither youth nor young woman.

  “I am me. I am only me,” she repeated, louder.

  She wondered what he saw in these lips that fascinated him. She touched her fingertips to her lower lip. Heat skittered about her belly. With a quick little breath, she skimmed her fingertips over the tender skin where the whiskers had been. The pink was fading already. He was a master draughtsman, an exceptional painter, and a genius chemist.

  When she had come into the house earlier, she had seen light beneath his studio door. She could not wait for Sunday to thank him. Pulling a dressing gown on over her nightshirt, she went from her room.

  As soon as she opened the door to his quarters she understood the real reason she had not been able to wait for Sunday. Here she felt at home. Here in his studio she was both woman and student. Here lived the only person in the world who knew the entire truth about her.

  Pushing the door open, she stepped inside.

  A lamp by the easel illumined the chamber in an amber glow. The purpose of the bar across the doorway to his bedchamber was now entirely clear.

  Stripped to only breeches, his arms and torso glistening with sweat, and eyes closed, he was pulling himself up and lowering himself down and repeating that action slowly and at an exact, even tempo: up, down, up, down, without a missed beat. The muscles were well developed, finely cut, elastic and lean, contracting and relaxing, each a miracle of function, and all together a thing of power and great beauty.

  Now she comprehended the silence and fluidity with which he could move. No human body, however well-conditioned, could entirely overcome his lack. But the strapped muscles of his abdomen, chest, and arms would allow him temporary speed and stealth that many men with both feet could not achieve.

  Why he wanted to be capable of speed and stealth, she could not guess.

  In a scampering rush, the piglet flung itself past him and into the studio, its sleepy snorts elated as it cavorted about her feet.

  Taking a silent step backward, Libby prayed he would ignore the noise.

  He opened his eyes.

  Chapter 11

  An Interruption

  She should move. She should leave. She should at least turn around until he donned a shirt.

  Instead she stared and her pulse beat a battle drum against her ribs, her cheeks and entire body filled with heat, and a thousand questions clamored onto her tongue.

  He lowered himself to his bare foot and grasped his cane that was propped against the doorpost. The loose fabric on the right leg of his breeches was pinned up. Obviously the peg had not been surgically attached. No wonder he had such pain; he was walking on a wholly deficient replacement.

  He said nothing. Except for the deep inhalations and exhalations that shifted shadows across the contours of his chest and abdomen, he did not move.

  The piglet scuttled across the room and into his bedchamber again.

  “Apparently,” she said, “it is content in having revealed me here and will now return to its bed and the sweet dreams of the innocent.”

  “Why are you here?” he said in an unremarkable tone, as though he weren’t wearing only breeches and standing with damp hair and trickles of sweat caressing his superb musculature. “Are you unwell?”

  “No. I have been out at the pub with friends, and I think I did not realize until just this moment quite how intoxicated I am. I came to—”

  He walked toward her. Without the support beneath his right leg, the muscles in his arms and shoulders and chest quivered with the extraordinary effort. But he barely limped, effectively using the walking stick as a leg. A scar two inches long carved a slender track in his waist.

  “I came to tell you how well the adhesive functions,” she forged ahead. She had seen men’s bodies before. She was a medical scientist, the daughter of a physician. The naked male torso was nothing but a collection of muscles and bones and—oh, good Lord, he was exquisitely beautiful. “It is light.” So beautiful. “And flexible. Yet it holds the whiskers firmly. In only two days the irritation to my skin has vanished.”

  “I know how well it functions,” he said, halting so close that she could feel the heat from his body in the chill air between them, and watch the muscles relax into sculpted beauty. “I tested it thoroughly before giving it to you.”

  Other small scars marked the perfect flesh here and there. She wanted to ask him about them. Then she wanted to explore each with her fingers.

  “I realize that, of course,” she said. “But—”

  He lifted his hand and wrapped it around the side of her face. She did not resist the urging of his grasp that turned her face upward as his fingers sank into her hair.

  In the darkness his gaze upon her features was like midnight.

  “You should not be here.” His voice was rough, but his fingers were twined in her hair and he was so close—so close—as though he had no idea what his body close did to hers.

  “You are telling me I should not be here and holding me, at once.” It came out as a reedy whisper. “That is irrational.”

  He was looking at her features, one at a time, studying as he always did, but differently now, as though he’d all the leisure in the world to do so.

  “You should not be here,” he repeated. Then his gaze dipped to her lips.

  Explosions of pleasure made her body feel raw. Vulnerable. She wanted to lean her cheek more snugly into his hand, to be held, to turn her face and feel the sensation of his palm against her lips.

  “I wanted to thank you,” she said.

  “You have thanked me already.”

  “Admittedly, the ale has robbed me of acute thought. But I think I would have come to share this news with you anyway, even without the drink. It is, you see . . .”

  A droplet of moisture made a trail along his cheek to cling to his jaw, which was dark with whisker growth. She had the mad, wild urge to lick that trail and taste his saltiness.

  She set her fingertips on his chest. His breathing hitched and his hand fell away from her face.

  Splaying her fingers over his pectoral muscle, she brought her palm flat to his skin. His heartbeats were quick, his flesh hot and damp.

  She was affecting him.

  Her hand, pink from scrubbing, shone starkly against his golden brown skin. Staring at his nipples she felt hers prickle to achy peaks. How would it feel to press them against his firm chest, to give her body what it obviously wanted?

  It would feel good. So good.

  Sliding her hand over his ribs, exploring the hard controlled beauty of him, she leaned forward.

  Then her hand was hovering in emptiness.

  She watched him walk across the studio and into his bedchamber. The door closed.

  Breaking free of paralysis, she returned to her bedchamber in a muddle. Removing the dressing gown and nightshirt, she climbed beneath
the covers and felt the soft linen slide over her skin, caressing her as she had tried to caress him.

  He found her beautiful. His flesh had responded to her touch. Why wouldn’t he allow it?

  Her body was strung with tension, her head swimming. The tight peaks of her breasts practically wept with need.

  Slipping her fingers over her breasts, she stroked the firm tips, and a moan began in her throat. Around the puckered nipples her breasts were soft. She had bound them into wrappings dozens of times already, flattening them as much as possible, but she had never done this—she had never allowed herself to truly feel her own flesh. What sort of person of medicine was she, to ignore a physical response that she could so easily study?

  The sort of person who had never felt this physical response—this lust—before living in this house.

  Sliding her palms over the curves of her belly and hips, she explored, noting the sensations the caresses aroused. But her lips were parted, her breaths quickening, and she was not thinking of medicine. She was thinking of him, of how it would feel were his hands now where hers explored, reveling in this voluptuous examination, this fantasy that came so easily.

  Perhaps he found her only beautiful as a subject of study, just as she found her patients fascinating. Perhaps she did not rouse in him the desire that looking at him—hearing his voice, touching him, meeting his gaze—roused in her.

  That would explain it.

  She slid her fingers between her thighs. Sweet urgency grew as she let herself think of his male beauty, his scent of sweat and cologne, and his skin beneath the fingers that were now waking her body, stroking, probing, slick and wet and unrestrained. Picturing his hand on her, she arched into the caress. Whimpers of pleasure escaped between her lips. With the covers tangled about her, she tried to imagine herself like other women: at twenty years old a wife by now, who knew a man’s touch.

  But she was not like other women. She was a man.

  Chapter 12

  A Request

  She found him at the Gilded Quill. In this modest place, decorated in dark wood and white linen, and smelling of beeswax, sage, and cakes, Ziyaeddin met friends for dinner or tea, and occasionally clients.

  Most often, however, he was alone here, with a cup of coffee—which he had taught the cook to prepare with sugar—a newspaper, and his thoughts. His sketchbook was always open, his pencil ready should an interesting character present itself for study.

  Today he was only sitting, neither drawing nor drinking, alone as he was rarely now in his own house—sitting at a table by the window and staring sightlessly at the street.

  He was not especially surprised when she appeared. She was Joseph Smart whenever she left his house, and she was Joseph Smart now, feathery whiskers and all.

  She came directly to him. “May I join you?”

  He inclined his head.

  With the ease of a youth who had been doing so a lifetime, she lifted the tails of her coat to avoid sitting on them. She was intelligent. Clever. Quick. Observant. Of course she would perform even the minor act of sitting as she did all else: with purpose and perfection.

  Weeks earlier Charles Bell had sat across from him in the seat she now occupied, marveling at young Mr. Smart’s knowledge and abilities and wondering aloud if this was merely the shine on a new penny. Ziyaeddin had replied to the surgeon that it was, rather, the honest glow of a guinea.

  Now that guinea looked him squarely in the eye.

  “Last night at the pub I drank to excess,” she said. “I have never drunk so much, and I was too caught up in celebrating to study the effect it was having on my thoughts.”

  “Celebrating what?”

  She waved a dismissive hand. “What I am saying is that I hadn’t the foresight to halt myself from going to your quarters last night. Actually, it is a fascinating study in compromised reason. When I had the impulse to speak with you, I was imagining you exactly as you are whenever I am there. With the spirits confusing my thoughts I did not consider that when you are in your chambers you are not always standing or sitting before the easel, fully clothed. It was careless of me and I am ashamed for that.”

  “For that?”

  “Yes. I have the most wretched headache and sour stomach as proof of my carelessness too.”

  “For only that?”

  Her eyes widened, two pools of deepest sea that made him want to drink from her. Allah, how he thirsted.

  “Yes,” she repeated, then with another frown: “I should not have drank as I did. Drunkenness and disorderliness are prohibited by the terms of my indenture, of course. But I am not ashamed of seeing a partially naked man, if that is what you mean to suggest.”

  “Perhaps I did mean to suggest that.” He folded his arms. “I am now reconsidering.”

  “I am a person of science,” she said in exaggeratedly crisp syllables. “I have seen many men unclothed.”

  “I am also now reconsidering the respect I had been holding for your father.”

  “Of course my father never allowed me to see a fully unclothed man. Only parts.”

  “What a relief,” he murmured.

  “Yesterday in anatomy we began dissecting preserved organs. I was invited to demonstrate.”

  “Ah, thus the celebrating.”

  Her lips snapped together. Those lips were so different now than the night before when they had been parted with expectation, shimmering with moisture, and entirely ready to be kissed—without words asking to be kissed. Now they were uncertain.

  “Have I mistaken it?” he said.

  “No. I was indeed celebrating that. It is a great honor to be chosen to lead the first dissection of the session.”

  “I have no doubt you impressed Dr. Jones and your classmates.”

  She tucked in her chin a bit. “You remember my professor’s name.”

  “Would you prefer I forget the details of what you tell me?”

  Markedly deep, quick breaths were swelling her chest. Beneath the wool and linen it was flat as a boy’s, and he wondered how she could move with such energy and comfort though she was bound into this costume.

  “Thank you for remembering the details.” She spoke quietly. “I beg your pardon for interrupting you last night. And for touching you as I did. I hope you will forgive me.”

  “It was I who behaved rudely.”

  “It was my fault to be there. Not yours, of course. I am sorry. Will you forgive me and shake hands?”

  He simply couldn’t. Touching her the night before had been a grave mistake. This entire charade was a mistake. But at least this one aspect of it he could control.

  If he touched her hand now he would want to touch all of her.

  “Here is a lesson, young Joseph: do not offer your hand to a man who does not deserve your civility.”

  “But you do deserve my civility. I am not naïve. Nor ignorant. I am aware of what can happen to a woman who makes herself vulnerable to a man as I did with you last night.”

  “I know not whether to rejoice that you think me such an honorable man or despair that you are certain I am one.”

  “You needn’t despair. I don’t know you well enough to be certain. I barely know anything of you at all, except what I have seen of you in your paintings.”

  “Do not mistake the art for the artist,” he said.

  “Even so, I know you are generous, if selfishly so—”

  “A contradiction.”

  “For you have done all of this for me for so little compensation. And you are . . . strong. In character. You live in a foreign land among those who probably understand you very little, and you have made a life for yourself here. That requires strength. And courage.”

  This required courage: pretending she did not affect him, that the night before he had not nearly grabbed her and done to her everything he had been dreaming of doing to her.

  “You are also physically strong,” she said. “I have noticed that before. But it was especially clear to me last night. Your body is
in extraordinarily good form.”

  He could not resist smiling.

  “Do I speak an untruth?” she said.

  “I should have anticipated this.”

  “Anticipated what?”

  “That you would say this. Aloud. To me. As though it were the most normal conversation between a man and a woman.”

  Her brow crinkled. “There is no woman here now.”

  Despite all, she had no idea that to him her whiskers and trousers might as well be ribbons and skirts.

  “You speak every one of your thoughts,” he said.

  Her perfect lips parted, then closed on unspoken words.

  “I see,” he said, smiling. “You are demonstrating that I am wrong about that.”

  “No. I am thinking that women must be happy with you.”

  “Women?”

  “With your physical strength. With your body. It is impressive, beautiful, as male bodies go. Your lovers . . . they must . . . enjoy it.”

  He said nothing in response, only stared at her, while Libby felt the heat climb into her neck and cheeks.

  He stood up, grasped his cane, and left.

  Flinging coins onto the table, she followed him. She caught up to him easily. On the peg he walked with only a minor limp, but by no means quickly.

  “Wait,” she said as she came side by side with him. “I—”

  He halted, and in the middle of the footpath with people passing by on either side he said, “What in the blazes sort of comment was that?”

  “What do you—”

  He set off again. It had begun to rain and the cobbles were glistening. Questions like the rain battered her.

  “I only wonder,” she said when she ascended the stoop of the house behind him.

  “Oh, do you?” he said between tight teeth, fitting the key in the lock and pushing the door open with such control she might think she only imagined his anger if not for the taut tendons and muscles in his jaw.

  He was waiting on the stoop for her to precede him, apparently forgetting that she was not a woman.

  “Yes,” she said, passing him by to enter. “I wonder everything. I know nothing about you, and you will not tell me. But here I am living in your house and where there is no information to supply reality my mind always invents scenarios. So, yes, I was wondering.”