“I understand your point, Mr. Germain.” And he’d had more than enough of it. He pushed away from the door frame, and an arrow of pain shot from his shoulder to his left buttock.
“By all means, let us delay the examination.” He bowed. “Until later, then.”
* * *
HIS ENTIRE BODY ached as he returned to his rooms. It was tempting to toss everyone out and go to sleep.
He eased himself back onto his bed and replied to a ridiculous political assertion Favreau was making, laughed at a joke Perry tossed out from the card table, called to Seville in the other room to inquire whether Linton had arrived in Paris yet.
“Doctor’s a right young piece of stuff, isn’t he?” Perry said, wandering over from the card table. “You know who’d like him...Kern. Always did enjoy that sort of thing.”
“If Kern tries to distract my medic, he’ll answer to me.” And he would be very disappointed once he discovered that the protrusion at the front of Mr. Germain’s breeches was just for show. He smiled to himself, thinking of it now.
His woman doctor may not have any discernible breasts, but she was bloody well hung.
Just then, Harris came in and leaned close to his ear. “She has been found, Your Grace.”
The room seemed to fade, and Winston fixed his full attention on Harris. “Where?”
“A small house at the edge of town.” Harris hesitated. “It is my understanding that there are five children.”
Bloody hell. “You’re certain?”
“It’s been confirmed.”
Five children and a widow. Winston rubbed the back of his neck. “See that they receive a hundred pounds,” he murmured. “No. Five hundred.”
“Very good, Your Grace. I’ll see to it straightaway.”
Winston exhaled, leaned his head back and closed his eyes, but that only made the problem worse. That face was always there—those sightless eyes staring at him while the man lay lifeless, his head cracked open by a piece of masonry that could just as easily have struck Winston. He could hear the screaming, the chaos of those crazed moments.
Now, a female hand smoothed over his chest. “Ça va?”
For a moment the courtesan’s perfume cloyed nauseatingly in his nostrils, but then he opened his eyes, drew his finger lazily across the top of her bosom. “Oui.”
She smiled and eased a hip onto the bed next to him.
Everything was fine. Or it would be, as soon as they were under way to Greece. He imagined the heady taste of Mediterranean wine, the even more intoxicating distraction of Grecian women and the exotic fantasies they would bring to life.
You vowed to put an end to all that.
Indeed. That was the other part of this entire debacle that would not let him alone: his private vow to reform. By God, I’ll be the man Edward wants me to be. The vow had exploded through his mind as he lay there in fiery pain, while people ran frantically around him, and even more masonry broke loose from that blasted building, crashing to the ground.
As long as he lived, he would never forget the sound of stone hitting the street inches from his head.
He forced himself to smile when Hélène joined Marie on the edge of his bed, exchanged a few loaded remarks with the two of them, considered several possibilities for other ways they could entertain him.
Instead, he told them his side hurt. Told everyone he needed to rest. Instructed Harris to turn away any new visitors.
Ten minutes later, his rooms were empty. And now he lay there, irritated, wishing everyone back.
This was ridiculous. It was a freak accident—anyone could have been passing by that building when the facade fell. That falling masonry was not a sign from above. It was not a heavenly indictment of Winston’s life. The danger of those moments had gotten the better of him, that was all.
He’d made the kind of vow sailors made in a hurricane. The kind soldiers made on the battlefield.
They weren’t the kind of promises a man was meant to keep.
He was being superstitious. His best friend had been admonishing him since school days. Little surprise there, given that Edward was a vicar and couldn’t be expected to know about real life—the pleasures to be had that were just pleasures, nothing more, but made life worth living.
Consider your ways, Winston. That’s what Edward had always said. For God’s sake, what did that even mean?
Only a saint could live up to Edward’s standards.
He ought to have Harris summon his company back. Now, before he could change his mind again.
Instead, he called Sacks. “Bring Mr. Germain,” he said irritably. “I want my bandages checked.”
He thought of those pursed lips and almost smiled. Perhaps there was entertainment to be had, after all.
* * *
BY THE TIME the duke’s valet came to tell her that His Grace required her assistance, Millie had decided that if the mere mention of an incision knife was all it took to make the duke recoil, it would be a simple matter to keep the advantage over him for the remainder of her employment.
Mr. Sacks, the valet, was a short, brawny man with giant hands and dark bushy brows, and he stood expressionless as he waited in the doorway. Millie gathered up her medical bag and followed him to the duke’s rooms.
Where—unbelievably—the duke was alone.
Wearing nothing but his shirt.
“Mr. Germain, Your Grace,” Mr. Sacks announced unnecessarily.
“Excellent.” Reclining against his pillows, with a glass of liquor in his hand and the tails of his shirt covering him only to midthigh, the duke smiled. “That will be all.”
Mr. Sacks withdrew, and Millie plunked her medical bag on the card table by the window and reminded herself that the duke was just a man like any of the sailors she’d doctored aboard the Possession—no more, no less.
“A number of cuts and an immobilized arm that isn’t broken,” she recounted briskly from their earlier conversation as she dug through her bag for heaven knew what except a few moments to delay the inevitable. “Is that the complete list of your complaints?”
“Hardly,” came his cognac-roughened voice from the bed. “Among other things, there isn’t a single comfortable method of copulation.”
She paused for only a second. And, for that, she deserved a medal.
“I shouldn’t think there would be a single comfortable method of eating, sleeping, defecating or any of the body’s other natural functions, either, in your condition,” she said matter-of-factly. If he thought the young Miles Germain would be startled by the duke’s excesses, he would soon learn otherwise. “But I was asking about your injuries, Your Grace.”
“Forgive me—when you said complaints, it was my most pressing grievance that came to mind.”
“As well it should.” She turned from the card table. Hardly a surprise that he considered slaking his lust a more serious issue than an immobilized arm.
“Bad enough that a woman has two breasts while I only have one good hand,” he complained.
She smiled, tight-lipped, because a man would smile at such an idiotic statement. And she approached the bed, hoping that if she didn’t encourage him further they could be finished with talk of copulation and breasts.
One of his legs was severely bruised—black and purpling, wrapped in two places with bandages.