A Promise by Daylight. Alison DeLaine

aim at a woman’s exposed—

      “Read to me while I pour, will you?” He handed her the book.

      “Your Grace, you misunderstand the situation. I suppose it’s time for me to admit that I cannot stop you from such pursuits with any amount of healthful reasoning.” She put the book down—open, of course, to the plate he’d found, and facing his direction—and gave him what she hoped was a look of resignation. “Perhaps there is something healthful about a man’s happiness, even if it comes from...”

      He returned with two glasses and glanced down at the book. “From the wheelbarrow position?”

      “Precisely.”

      He held out a glass, and she took it, and her fingertips brushed his—warm, thick, solid.

      A quiet tingle found its way down her throat to her belly, and she swallowed before even raising the glass to her lips.

      “Let me assure you,” he said, “that I instructed every form of entertainment in the house to be locked away in the attic before our arrival. I have the utmost respect for your medical opinion, Mr. Germain.”

      Indeed. Now that he’d brought her to England. “You will tell me if you start to feel any adverse effects from the deprivation,” she said.

      His lips curved. “Consider yourself told. I have been feeling any number of...adverse effects since we left Paris.”

      “Well, then. That certainly explains why you couldn’t resist the need to...” She gestured toward the book. “Indulge.”

      Now he laughed, coming around the table and standing much too close to her—or he probably only seemed too close because the wicked light in his eyes was making her very, very uncomfortable. Her gaze fixed on his mouth, and suddenly she wondered what it might feel like to have a man’s lips—his lips—pressed against hers. What it might feel like to be kissed. By him.

      She pushed the thought away as quickly as it came.

      “Mr. Germain,” he said in a confidential tone, “surely, as a man, you understand all too well—and believe it that I confide in you only as my medical advisor and for no other reason—that my idea of indulging includes a great deal more than simply viewing a crude sketch of such a pleasurable activity.”

      “Indeed. All too well.” His scent filled the air around her, aristocratic and sensual, and if only she were taller she could look him more directly in the eye instead of having to look up at him. “But perhaps, until the opportunity presents itself, you will have to satisfy yourself with the sketches.”

      The corners of his mouth curved up, and his eyes brightened with a kind of pained amusement, and she watched him tip his head back and drain his glass.

      “Perhaps I will, at that. Enjoy your time in the library, Mr. Germain. I shall leave the Widow’s Adventures here for you—perhaps it will aid you in the study of anatomy.”

      * * *

      HIS OWN ANATOMY was bursting to conduct a study of its own, and three hours later when he lay on his stomach during her now-routine late-afternoon check of his injuries, he decided that it was a damned good thing his wounds were on his back and not his front.

      Her competent hands moved over him, arousing him in a way that suddenly presented a much bigger problem than it had seemed to in Paris.

      Especially if she was going to start calling his attention to erotic books.

      Perhaps—perhaps—a single book had been overlooked as the rest were being packed away, but for her to have found one straggler among an entire library full of tedious volumes...

      It defied the laws of probability.

      And it savored strongly of Harris’s and Sacks’s handiwork. He hadn’t missed the looks of alarm passing between his butler and valet when he’d ordered the company away in Paris. That was no surprise. But Miles...

      She was trying to divert his interest toward sex, and there could be only one possible reason: she imagined it would cause him to decide to go to Greece.