She glanced down to find that the fine lawn of her nightgown was caught beneath her, pulling it tightly over her body. Her breasts were barely veiled, rosy nipples clearly visible. She tossed the cane to the side and folded her arms over her chest.
“You shouldn’t be ogling me like that,” she stated.
“You’re my fiancée.” His voice was husky and dark, without any of the usual mocking undertones that generally accompanied his every word.
“Not anymore,” she said, licking her bottom lip.
“You know,” he said, “I think we should explore this whole question of betrothal a bit more thoroughly. We might be tossing out the baby with the bathwater.”
He shifted closer once again. His hands were on her pillow now, his face just above hers.
“I’ve been kissed by a prince,” she told him. Her voice didn’t come out honey smooth like his; it squeaked.
“Competition,” he said, his eyes glittering even more brightly. “I’m fiercely competitive, did you know that?” He dipped his head and licked her bottom lip in one slick, sweet movement.
Linnet blinked at the wave of sensation that rushed through her body. “Prince Augustus wins,” she managed.
“But I haven’t even got started yet,” Piers said. “And do you know? I think we should leave it there for the moment. I should probably brush up on my technique. Read some books. Contemplate my strategy.”
Linnet’s breath was coming quickly and her eyes were half closed, waiting for his lips to descend to hers, for him to—
“What?” she squeaked. What was it about him that made her lose all her easy charm?
“You taste like chocolate,” he growled, his lips still hovering just over hers. Linnet could feel her eyes drifting closed. Yes . . . please . . . her stomach clenched as she caught his breath, chocolate and mint.
“If you were a bonbon, I would nibble you.” He bent his head and—nipped her? Bit her lower lip. Against all rational thought, it sent a jolt of heat down Linnet’s body.
Her eyes flew open. “I should think you do need to read a book or two,” she said. “Am I the first woman you’ve ever kissed? If you can call that kissing?”
Piers straightened up and tapped his chin with his finger. “Let me see . . . I seem to remember . . . No! You’re not the first woman. Do you find that disappointing?”
“It doesn’t matter to me either way.”
He stood up. “What in the devil did you do with my cane? Oh, there it is. Now could you please get yourself out of that bed and put on some clothes so that we can go swimming?”
But it was all different now. Piers may have looked precisely the same, as indifferent and sardonic as ever, but Linnet didn’t feel the same. She simply could not climb out of her bed and walk across the room in her nightclothes, not after that kiss. Or half kiss.
He looked over and saw what she was thinking. “Number one, I didn’t even kiss you. Number two, I couldn’t follow up a kiss—if I had gone that far—with a deflowering, if you remember. Number three . . . well, there’s no number three, but really I think that number two says it all, don’t you?”
Linnet cleared her throat. “I’ll get up if you sit over there.” She nodded toward the chair. “Facing the wall.”
“And just how am I supposed to swim? If I face the other way in the pool, you’ll drown,” he said flatly. “If that’s how you feel, I’m leaving. I have to swim every morning or my leg punishes me.”
“No!” she said. “I want to go back in the pool and learn how to swim.” She’d even taken out a dress, chemise and stockings the night before, in case he came.
“I thought you did. So get yourself bloody well dressed and let’s go down there before all the morning light is gone. I have to see my patients soon. They have a pesky habit of dying overnight.”
His eyes weren’t glittering anymore. In fact, he looked as uninterested as always, so Linnet scrambled out of bed and dashed behind the screen in the corner. “I’m reading one of the books from your library,” she told him. “A medical book.”
“Oh? Which one?” He sounded completely incurious.
“Dr. Fothergill’s Medical Observations and Inquiries. It’s very interesting.”
“It’s unmitigated rubbish. Don’t trust anything it says. In fact, don’t trust anything you read in any of those books you find in the library. Most of them were written by jabbering idiots.”
She popped her head out from behind the screen. “Do you mean that daffodil juice won’t cause a man to lose his potency? So disappointing!”
“I can see you’re planning ahead,” he said, raking a lock of hair from his eyes. “For the next man in your life, the lucky sod.”
“Well, would it work?” she asked, ducking back behind the screen.
“Highly unlikely. Do you want the stocking that just fell on the floor?”
“Yes, please,” she said.
A silk stocking flew over the screen and settled on her shoulder.
“Why are you bothering with stockings?” he asked. “You’re just going to take them off in five minutes anyway.”
She was already tying her garter. “I couldn’t go outside without stockings on!”
“In a minute you’ll be outside with nothing more than a scrap of fabric around your body.”
“I can’t be seen without my stockings.” But she had decided that she could be seen without her corset. It was just too bothersome to lace. “Can you help me again with the buttoning?”
She emerged from behind the screen to find Piers staring out the window. “The sun’s up already. I really should go upstairs.”
“No. Swimming,” she stated. “Button my dress, and let’s go.”
This time, the rush of freezing water past her body, past her face, was less unexpected, but no less brutal.
Piers hauled her back up and she clung to him, crying, “Oh God, oh God,” under her breath. His strong, warm arm wrapped around her body.
“Got your breath back?” he shouted in her ear.
She shook her head. She didn’t want to let go, but he ruthlessly pushed her back. “Float.”
She floated.
“Good. Now do the same on your stomach.” She stared at him, unbelieving, so he reached out and flipped her over.
She instantly sank, but he pulled her back up. “On your stomach,” he said in her ear. “I want you to close your eyes and float on your stomach. It’s just as easy as floating on your back.”
“Warm, warm me up-up first,” she said, her teeth chattering madly.
He pulled her over so her back was against his stomach, and wrapped one arm around her again. The arm was just below her breasts, and even in the middle of freezing water Linnet felt . . . something. A rush of hot blood that went down her body and all the way to her toes, that made her skin prickle, made it aware of the muscled body at her back—and the hard part of him that her mother—
But even thinking of her mother in the context of Piers didn’t seem right, so she pushed that thought away.
“All right,” she said, taking a deep breath. He dropped his arm, she pitched forward and floated, more or less.
“You’re almost swimming,” he shouted in her ear.
She opened her mouth to answer and took in sea water. “Ugh!” She spat. “Ugh!”
“Time for you to get out. Your lips are turning blue, not to mention your fingers. And important parts of me as well. I have to start moving.”
Shaking all over, Linnet stumbled to the pile of towels and swathed herself from head to foot. Then she walked back to the pool and sat down on the flat rock to watch Piers slash his way through the water, up and down.
The sun was even warmer than yesterday, and although she knew that freckles were practically a certainty, she couldn’t help raising her face to it and basking in the sunlight. Even, after a while, lying back on the warm rock so the sun could reach her neck and her shoulders.
The rock below her radiated warmth, so she unwound t
he towel around her head to allow her hair to dry. And then she eased the towel off her legs, so her chemise could warm as well.
By the time Piers pulled himself out of the pool, she was almost asleep, nestled in towels and sunshine. She blinked up at him. “Have you finished?”
“It looks that way. And once again, you have taken all the towels.”
She sat up. “I’m sorry. Here—take this one. She pulled the one from under her hair. “I’m afraid it’s a little damp.”
He took it without comment and started rubbing down his body and his hair, while she lay back and watched. She had no idea—no idea—that men could look like that. So, so intoxicating. So—
Maybe she was more like her mother than she had thought. The idea was distasteful, and she started to sit up.
“No, stay there,” he said. “Turn over.”
“I will not!”
“I’m going to teach you, on dry land, how to swim. It will be easier than trying to howl instructions in your ear while you shriek about the cold.”
“Oh.” She rolled over, wiggling to get herself comfortable on the nest of towels and warm rock. Then she looked over her shoulder at him. “All right, what do I do now?”
Chapter Thirteen
Piers looked down at the utterly delectable body of his fiancée—his supposed fiancée—and knew that he was in deep, dark trouble.
As dark as the crevice running between her utterly—
She was his father’s choice. He couldn’t have anything to do with her, not if she was the most beautiful woman in all of England.
Which she was, a small voice in his head pointed out. He’d never seen such an exquisite woman. Didn’t even imagine that one existed, to be truthful.
He knelt down beside her, savagely suppressing the part of him that wanted to stroke down that lovely plane of smooth back, up the rise of her bottom, down those sleek legs.
“Put your arms out to the side,” he said, his voice emerging from his chest sounding as gravelly as that of a man who’d smoked cheroots for years. He leaned over to show her the stroke. “See, on this side, and then on the other. And when you stroke on this side, you turn your head to the other to take a breath.”
Dutifully she turned her head and moved her arms. “That’s it,” he said, his eyes returning to her bottom. “Your legs should be straight and kicking gently.”
There was nothing wrong with looking, after all. It was just looking. Though another way of describing it would be to call it torment. He had seen hundreds of women’s bodies. Maybe even a thousand. They had bared their breasts, their buttocks, all their most private parts, and he had never blinked an eye.
But now his body was pulsing, literally raging, with passion. Piers pushed himself to his feet and pulled the towel punishingly tight around his waist. He’d be damned if he’d be manipulated by his father, his despicable and despised father, into accepting the bride he’d chosen.
He watched Linnet stroke, forcing himself to ignore her sensuality. She seemed to have a fair sense of rhythm.
Of course she has, a voice murmured inside him. He could teach her rhythm, and she would—
He thrust the thought away. “Time to go,” he said briskly, turning away. “I have a wing of patients waiting for me, some of them probably cadavers by now. Can’t keep those cadavers waiting. It’s not polite.”
She scrambled to her feet, and he could hear her pulling on her dress. “Wait,” she called, as he started toward the path. “I need you to button my gown, remember?”
He turned around. She stood there on the edge of the pool, red hair curling damply all over her shoulders, her cheeks pink from exercise. And she was grinning, properly grinning, not that patented smile that she used to mesmerize his poor students.
“I can’t go back to the house like this,” she said. “Granted, I have no chaperone. But unless you want my entire household to start believing that we’re naked together, you must button my dress.”
“Don’t be a fool. The servants know exactly what we’re doing. There’s nothing they can, or wish to, do about it.”
“Well, your father would be scandalized.”
He grunted, not wanting to get into a discussion of precisely how little he cared for his father’s opinion. “Come over here, then. I don’t want to struggle across that rock with my cane.”
She blinked, and scampered over to him. “I’m sorry. Watching you swim, you seem so powerful that I forget that your leg is damaged. How did it happen, by the way?” She turned her back and he began buttoning her gown.
A woman’s spine is a very delicate thing. Of course he knew it already, but his knowledge came from contemplating spines that had been injured. Linnet’s curved in a perfect exhibition of faultless design, one small bump following another, all the bones he’d learned in medical school looking so very different covered with pale skin.
“Where’s your chemise?” he asked abruptly.
“Oh, I took it off,” she said. “There’s nothing colder than wet fabric, you know.”
She had pulled her hair away so it didn’t get caught in her buttons, and her creamy neck bent before him, like the stem holding up a delicate flower. Her words sank into his mind rather slowly. She had taken off her chemise while he had his back turned. She had stood, naked in the open air, if only for a second.
“Piers?” she asked. “How did you hurt your leg?”
“It’s been so long I’ve forgotten,” he said, slipping the last button into its hole.
She made a little chuffing noise, but bent to scoop up a bundle of wet cloth, her chemise, and then took his arm. He didn’t even realize that he’d waited for her until her slender hand slipped beneath his arm.
“So did any new patients appear last night?” she asked chattily. “And can you tell me how you organize the patients’ rooms? Eliza told me that there are wards in both wings.”
“By what disease I think they have,” he said, still thinking about how civility, once bred into a man’s bones, stayed there for life.
“How?”
“Infectious fevers with infectious fevers. And they’re also segregated by sex. Women in one room, men in another. I can’t have the lusty ones leaping on each other in the middle of the night.”
“Are there more women than men or vice versa?”
“Women take the prize.”
“Why? Do we get sick more often?”
“No, but your sex is much more sensible about going for help. Men tend to keel over in the field, here in Wales. It’s a nice, clean way to go and I recommend it.”
“And children?”
“Sometimes. Influenzas tend to mow them down, so most of the young ones die before they get here.”
He felt her shiver right beside him. “That’s awful, Piers.”
“That’s life.”
“You have Gavan at the moment; are there any other children?”
“Two girls.” They were at the little house now. She didn’t say anything else, but he could practically feel her thinking. “Don’t,” he said warningly.
“Don’t what?”
“Whatever it is you’re planning. You’re getting a sort of Quakerish glow about you. Whatever it is, I’ll just find it annoying.”
“I don’t have anything to do,” she said, in the kind of reasonable tone that rang alarm bells. “I’m almost finished with Dr. Fothergill’s Observations, and you told me his observations were foolish anyway. I looked at your library, and you have no novels.”
“Is that what you generally do? Read novels?”
“There aren’t enough of them. I read travel guides too, and plays.” She shrugged.
He turned and looked at her, ignoring the creamy skin and curling eyelashes—well, not ignoring them, but trying to look past them. And finding all the signs of high intelligence.
How did his father do it? Where did he find her?
“One of the best physicians I ever met was a woman from Catalonia,” he said.
“How did she manage that?” Linnet asked. “Do they allow women into medical schools in Spain?”
“You know where Catalonia is?”
“I told you I read travel books,” she said with a trace of irritation.
“Her father is one of the best physicians in that country,” he said. “He taught her, and then he forced them to let her into medical school. My guess is that by the time she entered she already knew more than most doctors with a degree, but at least it gained her the credentials.”
She was silent as they climbed the steps to the castle door and Prufrock swung it open.
“Waiting for us, were you?” Piers asked.
“Three new patients are,” the butler said. “I put two of them upstairs and one of them in the gun room. The marquis and the younger doctors are there now.”
“The gun room?” Linnet asked.
“We got rid of the guns and do initial diagnoses there,” Piers said, dropping her arm. “If you don’t mind, you’re going to have to tramp up the stairs by yourself. I’ve got work to do. For one thing I have to get to the gun room before Sébastien kills my new patient.”
“If someone looks particularly ill, I put him there,” Prufrock explained. “If he might be infectious, I should say.”
“But how . . .”
The doors swung closed on the sound of her voice.
Chapter Fourteen
Gavan was sitting up in his bed when Linnet put her head in the door of the infirmary some time later. He smiled a big gap-toothed smile and shouted “Hey, miss!”
There was a groan from the bed next to him.
“Mr. Hammerhock, how are you feeling?” Linnet asked.
“His fever broke,” Gavan reported. “His face is still all mucky, though, and his tongue isn’t too good. The doctor came along and tried to get him to say yes a bunch of times ’cause he likes how he says it.”
“What?” Linnet asked, confused.
“He says weth, don’t you, Mr. Hammerhock?” Gavan said. “And that makes the doctor laugh. Me too.”
Mr. Hammerhock grunted.
“Anyway, he’s going to live, that’s what the doctor said.”