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

him. “Yet here you sit with your foot on the floor and obviously in pain. I can tell from the tension in your face.”
    “The tension in my face,” he told her with an ominous narrowing of his eyes, “is the result of a giant headache and of your colossal impudence.”
    Jane ignored him. “Is it not foolish to take risks,” she asked, “merely because it would be tedious to lie abed?”
    Men really were foolish. She had known several just like him in her twenty years—men whose determination to be men made them reckless of their health and safety.
    He leaned back in his chair and regarded her in silence while despite herself she felt prickles of apprehension crawl up her spine. She would probably find herself out on the pavement with her pathetic bundle of belongings in ten minutes’ time, she thought. Perhaps without her bundle.
    “Miss Ingleby.”
He made her name sound like the foulest curse. “I am six and twenty years old. I have held my title and all the duties and responsibilities that go with it for nine years, since the death of my father. It is a long time since anyone spoke to me as if I were a naughty schoolboy in need of a scolding. It will be a long time before I will tolerate being spoken to thus again.”
    There was no answer to that. Jane ventured none. She folded her hands before her and looked steadily at him. He was not handsome, she decided. Not at all. But there was a raw masculinity about him that must make him impossibly attractive to any woman who liked to be bullied, dominated, or verbally abused. And there were many such women, she believed.
    She had had quite enough of such men. Her stomach churned uncomfortably again.
    “But you are quite right in one thing, you will be pleased to know,” he admitted. “I am in pain, and not just from this infernal headache. Keeping my foot on the floor is clearly not the best thing to be doing. But I’ll be damned before I will lie prone on my bed for three weeks merely because my attention was distracted long enough during a duel for someone to put a hole in my leg. And I will be double damned before I will allow myself to be drugged into incoherence again merely so that the pain might be dulled. In the music room next door you will find a footstool beside the hearth. Fetch it.”
    She wondered again as she turned to leave the room what exactly her duties would be for the coming three weeks. He did not appear to be feverish. And he clearly had no intention of playing the part of languishing invalid. Nursing him and running and fetching for him would not be nearly a full-time job. Probably the housekeeper would be instructed to find other tasks for her. She would not mind as long as her work never brought her in sight of any visitors to the house. It had been incautious to come into Mayfair again, to knock on the door of a grand mansion on Grosvenor Square, to demand work here. To put herself on display.
    But it was such a pleasure, she had to admit to herselfas she opened the door next to the library and discovered the music room, to be in clean, elegant, spacious, civilized surroundings again.
    There was no sign of a footstool anywhere near the hearth.
    J OCELYN WATCHED HER GO and noticed that she held herself very straight and moved gracefully. He must have been quite befuddled yesterday, he thought, to have assumed that she was a serving girl, even though as it had turned out she really was just a milliner’s assistant. She dressed the part, of course. Her dress was cheap and shoddily made. It was also at least one size too large.
    But she was no serving girl, for all that. Nor brought up to spend her days in a milliner’s workshop, if he was any judge. She spoke with the cultured accents of a lady.
    A lady who had fallen upon hard times?
    She took her time about returning. When she did so, she was carrying the footstool in one hand and a large cushion in the other.
    “Did you have to go to the other side of London for the stool?” he asked