More than a Mistress/No Man's Mistress Read Online Free PDF Page A

thought of the advice and interference of physicians, valets, secretaries, and servants in general. He threw back the bedcovers and swung his legs over the side of the bed—and grimaced.
    Then he remembered something else.
    “Where is that damned woman?” he asked. “That interfering baggage whom I seem to remember employing as my nurse. Sleeping in the lap of luxury, I suppose? Expecting breakfast in bed, I suppose?”
    “She is in the kitchen, your grace,” Barnard told him, “awaiting your orders.”
    “To attend me here?” Jocelyn gave a short bark of laughter. “She thinks to be admitted here to ply my brow with her cool cloths and titillate my nerves with her sharp tongue, does she?”
    His valet was wise enough to hold his tongue.
    “Send her to the library,” Jocelyn said, “after I have retired there from the breakfast room. Now fetch my shaving water and wipe that disapproving frown from your face.”
    Over the next half hour he washed and shaved, donned a shirt, and sat while Barnard arranged his neckcloth the way he liked it, neat and crisp without any of the silly artistry affected by the dandy set. But he was forced to concede that the wearing of breeches or pantaloons was going to be out of the question. If currentfashion had not dictated that both those garments be worn skintight, perhaps matters might have been different. But one could not fight fashion altogether. He did not possess breeches that did not mold his legs like a second skin. He donned an ankle-length dressing gown of wine-colored brocaded silk instead, and slippers.
    He submitted to being half carried downstairs by a hefty young footman, who did his best to look so impassive that he might almost have been inanimate. But Jocelyn felt all the humiliation of his helplessness. After he had sat through breakfast and read the papers, he had to be half carried again into the library, where he sat in a winged leather chair beside the fire rather than at his desk, as he usually did for an hour or so in the mornings.
    “One thing,” he said curtly to his secretary when that young man presented himself. “Not one word, Michael, about where I should be and what I should be doing there. Not even half a word if you value your position.”
    He liked Michael Quincy, a gentleman two years his junior who had been in his employ for four years. Quiet, respectful, and efficient, the man was nevertheless not obsequious. He actually dared to smile now.
    “The morning post is on your desk, your grace,” he said. “I’ll hand it to you.”
    Jocelyn narrowed his gaze on him. “That woman,” he said. “Barnard was supposed to have sent her in by now. It is time she began to earn her keep. Have her come in, Michael. I am feeling just irritated enough to enjoy her company.”
    His secretary was actually grinning as he left the room.
    His head now felt about fifteen times larger than normal, Jocelyn thought.
    When she came into the room, it was clear that she had decided to be the meek lamb of an employee this morning. Doubtless word had spread belowstairs that he was in one of his more prickly moods. She stood inside the library door, her hands folded in front of her, awaiting instructions. Jocelyn immediately felt even more irritated than he had already been feeling. He ignored her for a couple of minutes while he tried to decipher a lengthy, crossed letter written in his sister’s atrocious handwriting. She lived scarcely a ten-minute walk away, but she had written in the greatest agitation on hearing about the duel. It seemed she had suffered palpitations and vapors and other indecipherable maladies so serious that Heyward, her husband, had had to be fetched from the House of Lords.
    Heyward would not have been amused.
    Jocelyn looked up. She looked hideous. She wore yesterday’s gray dress, which covered her from neck to wrists to ankles. There was no ornament to make the cheap garment prettier. Today she wore a white bonnet cap. She stood