“For God’s sake, a grown man can’t spend his time catching insects and watching the waterwheel at the mill.”
No, she certainly could not imagine him doing either of those things.
“I don’t know how I am to devise a regimen when I have no idea what you might possibly find distracting. I suggest you consider the things you enjoy. The things that give you the most pleasure.” With any luck, the invitations would bear fruit and he would soon have company that would remind him very clearly of what those things were.
He watched her for a long, unsettling moment.
“I’ve got an idea,” he said slowly, glancing around at the herb garden. “I shall look to you as my guide. I shall carefully observe your daily activities and model myself after your example.”
“That is no solution, as you and I have very different—”
“Oh, Mr. Germain,” he said, smiling at her, “I think it will be the perfect solution.”
* * *
FOLLOWING MILES GERMAIN everywhere was not the perfect solution. She was too much of an unhelpful distraction herself. But it couldn’t hurt to see what more he could learn about his medic-turned-antagonist.
He observed her that afternoon from a window in the south wing as she made her way meticulously through the herb garden—so meticulously that he gave up after ten minutes.
Conducting a thorough examination of each and every plant in the garden was not an activity he ever planned to engage in.
Later he saw her heading toward the conservatory, and good God, only imagine how long it would take her to inspect every plant in there.
The next day he found her nosing through books in the library. From just beyond the doorway, he watched her study the shelves with the kind of intensity he could only aspire to.
She was deadly serious about...everything.
He wondered whether his library, vast as it was, included any medical volumes. If it did, there was little doubt she would find them. If he had half the resolution she clearly possessed, he bloody well wouldn’t be prowling around his estate like a caged animal.
What he really needed to do was visit Edward. And he would. He just needed a bit more time, a bit more to show for his efforts, so that when he did face Edward he could feel some measure of success.
That night, he turned to the stack of correspondence waiting for him. There was always politics. National affairs. But a man had to have some kind of pleasure in his life. He’d be damned if he was going to become one of those men who caused people to doze off at parties by theorizing about taxes.
He tossed a letter aside and wondered what Miles had been doing in the conservatory. Perhaps there was something of interest in there he was unaware of.
“Harris!”
Moments later, Harris appeared in the doorway.
“Ask Mr. Germain to come to the library, will you?”
“I would, Your Grace, but he has ordered a bath, and I believe it has only just been prepared. But of course, if you would like me to interrupt...”
“That won’t be necessary. I’ll speak to him tomorrow.”
“Very good, Your Grace.”
She’d ordered a bath.
The news and all of its implications lodged in Winston’s mind like a slow-moving pistol shot.
Waistcoat, shirt, breeches, stockings...all stripped away. Bagwig, gone.
He reached for another correspondence that had arrived while he’d been in Paris. Nothing urgent—something about the niece of a cousin getting married. He tossed it aside.
And his thoughts immediately took him upstairs, where surely by now Miss Miles Germain was preparing to step fully naked into a tub full of water. His imagination was only too ready with possibilities.
The reality would likely pale in comparison to the fantasy.
He returned his attention to the letters.
And imagined a pair of breasts, full and ripe and unbound from whatever concealed them beneath that waistcoat and jacket.
Oh, for God’s sake. He was acting as if seeing his medic in the altogether was the most erotic prospect he’d ever encountered, which was very decidedly not the case. He didn’t even have to witness it to be certain.
His gaze slid to the doorway, and he narrowed his eyes, contemplating a new possibility.
No. He shouldn’t do it.
He had more respect for her than that. And she deserved at least a modicum of privacy. And in any case, he wasn’t the kind of man who had to resort to peeping in on women.
He reached for another weeks-old correspondence.
She would never have to know.
But he would know.
You’d only be satisfying your curiosity. It’s not as if you’d walk in and offer to assist.
No, he certainly wouldn’t do that.
You’re paying her, after all.
But she wasn’t a harlot, for Christ’s sake. She was his medic. His brown-eyed, sharp-tongued, Greek-speaking temptation of a medic who was becoming more of a problem by the day—precisely because he’d never seen her nude.
In a very plausible way, that was the whole issue.
He needed to see her in her natural state. Once his curiosity was foiled, she would no longer be a distraction.
He looked at the doorway.
Pushed his chair back from his desk.
It wasn’t as if she was the kind of woman he preferred, anyhow. This wouldn’t be some kind of deviant titillation. It was necessary for business. His imagination would be quelled, and there would be no more episodes like this afternoon. She would truly be his medic, not his forbidden fantasy, and he could get on with becoming the kind of man Edward expected him to be.
CHAPTER SEVEN
MINUTES LATER, WINSTON let himself silently into the room on the other side of the dressing room Miles occupied. He shut the door behind him—slowly, quietly—and crossed the room.
Faced the bookcase, and smiled.
She’d had the right idea in Paris...only the wrong house.
The panel opened silently on well-oiled casters, and he slipped into the tiny room he occasionally used to escape obnoxious guests, leaving his candle behind. Only the faintest rays followed him inside, preventing his stumbling over a favorite old chair.
He put his hands on the opposite panel. Hesitated.
Applied just enough pressure to crack it open a fraction of an inch.
Her dressing room glowed with the light from a candelabra, flickering over the walls, the furnishings...
Over her.
She rested with her arms on the edge of the tub—head back, eyes closed...breasts, two perfect handfuls of them, peaked with rosebud nipples. The water lapped at their curves. Glistened on her pale skin.
His mouth went dry.
A shimmer of thick, mink-colored hair cascaded over the back of the tub, stopping short a foot off the floor.
Her knees were bent, rising out of the water smooth and sleek. And then she moved, and his breath froze in his lungs, and he watched her raise one shapely leg into the air...stretching...and slip it back into the water.
She reached for something—a towel—and he stepped back. Slid the panel shut. Listened to the sound of the water through the panel while his cock strained inside his breeches and guilt assaulted him and the truth pounded through his blood that he’d been wrong, that this wasn’t going to solve any problem, but that everything had just gotten worse.
No waistcoat and jacket were going to make him forget those breasts.
She was every bit as forbidden as before, but now she was ten times the fantasy. He wanted to catch the beads of water on her nipples with his tongue. Run his mouth along those legs. Discover what the water had concealed and taste it—taste her.
His curiosity was satisfied—oh, indeed, it was—but that was the extent of it.
No other part of him was satisfied. Not by a bloody mile.
* * *
MILLIE HAD JUST reached for her towel when she caught a movement out of the co
rner of her eye. She snapped her gaze to the left and clutched her towel, holding her breath, but—
She exhaled. It must have been the movement of her own arm.
She dried herself, stepped out of the bath, double-checked the lock on the door. Turned abruptly, stared at the wall again, with its bookcases and paneling.
And thought of Paris.
Padding barefoot across the floor, she peered at the wall, but it was difficult to see much detail in the low light. She moved to one of the panels that separated the bookcases. Tapped.
Moved to another. Tapped.
She was being ridiculous. If anyone in this household suspected her—including the duke—she would already know about it, because there wasn’t a soul under this roof who would keep his hands to himself if they knew the truth.
He never touches the help.
Millie went to the dressing table and paused. A man like Winston almost certainly availed himself of his servants. Didn’t he? Didn’t they all?
Healthful regimen, indeed.
She pursed her lips and brushed out her hair, running her fingers through it to help it dry. Why on earth would Winston suddenly be interested in healthful living when he so obviously had never been interested in it before?
He wouldn’t really start observing her. Would he?
She set the brush down, looked at herself in the glass and fluffed her fingers through her hair. It would have to be cut the rest of the way. It fell just below her shoulders now—barely short enough to stuff inside her wig, and even now it made the wig sit too far from her scalp. But she hadn’t been able to bear cutting it all off.
She pushed it back from her face, loving how thick and soft it felt.
But Miles Germain would not have thick, soft hair.
For now she let the towel fall away and pinned it up, reaching for her jar of salve, turning, straining to see her back over her shoulder. Scars. Great, pink weals—five of them—crisscrossed her back in long, ugly lashes. The weals were a few months old now, and healed, but the new skin was raw and pink and raised. The scars would last forever.
She thought of William. It was impossible to look at the scars and not think of him. But no matter how many times she relived the events in her mind, she could not change what she’d done—nor the punishment he’d meted out.
She dipped her fingers in the salve, stretching awkwardly to reach her bare back. She nearly had a method now—behind her left shoulder with her right hand, behind her right shoulder with her left hand, an extra stretch to reach between the shoulder blades...
She craned her neck to see in the glass. Hers was one nude figure that would send His Grace reeling backward with revulsion. But that was the least of her concerns. No man would ever see these scars, least of all Winston.
Every day she was proving that Miles Germain could hold his own in the world, undetected. Soon Millicent would be a figment of the past.
* * *
“WHAT THE DEVIL is this painting doing here?” The duke’s voice thundered from his bedchamber the next morning, carried through his anteroom and into the corridor, where Millie was just approaching his apartment for her routine check of his bandages.
She paused.
They’d done it. Harris and Sacks had returned the painting.
But the duke did not sound like a man overcome by a pair of magnificent breasts.
She considered whether to delay the examination a few minutes. Imagined him ordering the painting removed without anyone to reason him toward a different course of action, and continued forward.
“Good morning, Your Grace,” she said evenly as she entered the room to find him glaring up at a portrait of—
Well, yes. Harris had been right about the size of the princess’s breasts.
“I see you’ve added to your decor,” she said, setting down her medical bag, pretending she hadn’t heard his outburst. “An excellent sign that you’re feeling a bit more like yourself.”
“I’d ordered this removed,” he said sharply. “And now I’ve just returned from the library to find it hanging once again.”
“There must have been a misunderstanding,” she offered. “Someone must have thought you’d ordered it returned.”
“I haven’t said a word about it since we arrived.” And now he turned away from the painting, which wasn’t good at all. An image like that was supposed to snare his attention with hypnotic force.
“She’s a great beauty,” Millie said, to draw the duke’s attention back to the painting. “Who is she?”
“An acquaintance,” he said, still not turning. “Sacks!” he barked.
“You know her?” Millie asked, because it seemed reasonable that Miles Germain would be in awe of a beauty so far out of reach. “For God’s sake, man, why do you not have her here at your disposal?” Perhaps, if she could get him to talk about the princess, he would begin to remember how much he’d enjoyed the liberties she had so obviously allowed him.
Perhaps he would even invite her for a visit.
“Princess Katja is at no man’s disposal,” he said.
She looked like a woman who was at every man’s disposal—and exactly the kind of woman His Grace needed.
“If I had a painting like that...” she started. “If I knew a woman like that—”
“You’d what, Miles?” he demanded, facing her now—much closer than he’d been a moment before—and suddenly she didn’t feel like Miles at all, but some breathless creature, humming inside from his nearness. “What would you do?”
She moistened her lips, squared her shoulders. “I wouldn’t be spending my afternoons here alone, Your Grace.”
“No?”
“But I shan’t dishonor Your Grace’s acquaintance by specifying any particulars,” she said. “I’m sure your own experience can fill in the details.”
Her imagination was already filling in those very details, and an uncomfortable feeling tightened in her gut at the thought of him lavishing attention on the princess’s magnificent breasts.
And still he wasn’t looking at the painting—he was looking at her, angry, perhaps, at Miles Germain’s insolence. But it was making her think of the fact that she herself had lain nude, last night, only steps away from this very room.
“Your Grace,” came Sacks’s gravelly voice from the doorway. “You called?”
The duke backed away from her. “I ordered this painting removed,” he said, still looking at Millie as if she’d been the one to replace the painting. “I expect it to stay removed.”
“As you wish,” Sacks said.
The duke snatched a book off the table. “As I wish,” he muttered, and stalked out of the room.
* * *
MILLIE DIDN’T REALIZE how hard her pulse was racing until he’d gone.
“D’you see now?” Sacks asked in a low voice, approaching her. “What kind of man wants to remove that?” He gestured toward the portrait. “A man who’s lost his faculties, that’s who.”
He turned on his heel and returned to the antechamber, where she heard him calling for a footman.
She looked up at the princess, at those sly lips and huge, aristocratic eyes. Those breasts. She was everything a man should want.
So why had the duke ordered the portrait put away?
She picked up her medical bag and returned to the antechamber. “Perhaps he and the countess are at odds,” she said to Sacks, who was arranging the duke’s toiletries on his dressing table.
“Would you be at odds with bubs like that?” he said, yanking open a drawer. “Me, I’d be frigging ’er ’til my prick fell off.”
Millie made a noncommittal noise of agreement and left Sacks to his duties, skirting past a pair of footmen who had likely come to return the princess to the attic.
Winston was setting her nerves on edge following her about. As if he was really going to take up a serious study in the library? Or spend any amount of time in the conservatory?
He wasn’t finding himself a distraction. All he
was doing was distracting her.
She snuck out a quiet door in the farthest reaches of the house carrying a small basket borrowed from Mrs. Coombs and made her way to the woods on the other side of the drive, beyond the parklands. Just an hour or two without him... An hour or two to collect a few herbs and simply be herself.
She’d nearly reached the edge of the woods when his voice rang out behind her.
“Mr. Germain!”
Damnation.
“Ho, Mr. Germain!”
She stopped. Turned. Felt a quick little catch just below her ribs, because he was handsome. There was no denying it.
He caught up to her and offered a smile that made her very uncomfortable. “For a moment, I thought you were going to sneak away and deny me the opportunity to observe your activities,” he said, and looked past her to the woods. “What are you doing?”
“Just a short walk to look for herbs,” she said. “There won’t be anything to interest you here.”
“On the contrary,” he said again, still smiling. “What interests you, interests me.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
SHE WANTED TO play games? Winston thought as he followed her into the woods. He could play games.
Frustration roiled inside him—irritation about the portrait of Katja that he’d explicitly ordered put away, aggravation at Miles’s attempts to arouse his interest in it. Wouldn’t she be shocked to know that her untutored attempts had only succeeded in making him think of something very different from what she had in mind?
Her. And he wouldn’t have any trouble specifying the particulars.
She wanted to discuss sex? He could discuss sex.
The trees’ canopy and the overcast sky shrouded the woods with gray gloom as she walked a few paces ahead, basket in hand. He watched the back of her slim shoulders, feeling more than a little satisfied at the look of consternation on her face a moment ago. “In any case,” he said now, conversationally, as they picked their way through the woods along the stream, “you did suggest I should not spend the afternoon alone.”
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