Читать книгу A Promise by Daylight - Alison DeLaine - Страница 13

CHAPTER SIX

“READING.” HARRIS SCOWLED, then narrowed one eye. “Well, if it’s reading he wants, then I know just the thing.”

Ten minutes later, Millie stood with Harris in an attic room packed with erotic art. “He ordered it all stored away up here,” Harris said, and led her through the statues and paintings to a set of trunks, which he opened to reveal a large collection of books. “If he wants to read, let him read these.”

And so as evening fell, and His Grace was safely upstairs resting, Millie snuck into the library. Tidal flats, indeed. If he was going to change his mind about Greece, he would not change it because of any feces-eating lugworm.

Millie finished slipping the seventeenth potential motivation onto the bookshelves in His Grace’s library—thank you, Harris and Sacks—and stepped back. In a library this size, he might not even find these books. Perhaps...

She glanced at the desk, where three books sat together in a stack. If it wouldn’t be too obvious, she would plant one there. But he had certainly set those books aside himself, and he would know immediately if someone had added a title—especially a title as eye catching as A Widow’s Adventures, being the Story of a False Virgin Unmasked.

She narrowed her eyes at a shelf near the floor by the window, where a book had fallen over. Hmm. She glanced over her shoulder, went to the bookcase, crouched down. Added A Widow’s Adventures on its side next to the other fallen book—A Beekeeper’s Guide—and stood up. Nudged the widow’s adventures a bit to the right with her toe.

There. That stood a good chance of catching his attention. Except...

She frowned at a space on the next shelf up. Would he ever notice a book lying so close to the floor?

She picked it up. Spent a moment second-guessing the new location—

“Looking for any book in particular, Mr. Germain?”

Devil take it.

The book felt coal-hot in her hands. She didn’t dare put it down, didn’t dare keep it—

“Not I, Your Grace,” she said accusingly, turning, holding the book out, “but I see that you have been doing a bit of reading—and exactly the sort you should not be doing. This is precisely the kind of thing I advised you against,” she preached, tapping the book’s cover. “And here I find it within easy reach of your desk. How do you expect to make any sort of quick recovery when you’re exciting the senses with—” she leafed quickly through the book and stopped at the first image she came to “—with this.”

Which turned out to be—dear God—an engraving of a man fondling the merry widow’s breasts.

The duke glanced at it, at her, and raised a brow. “How indeed.”

“I can’t think why you hired me if you didn’t plan to follow my recommendations.” Millie’s cheeks flamed hot. She pretended it was indignation.

“You needn’t be embarrassed in front of me,” he said. “I am all too sympathetic to a man’s weaknesses.” He reached for the book, took it from her hands. “Let us see what you’ve been entertaining yourself with, shall we, Mr. Germain?”

“Your Grace, I assure you—” That I was not entertaining myself.

“Mmm, yes,” he murmured, paging through it, glancing at the images, skimming. He looked up. Offered a little grin that she felt in her knees. “Do let us peruse it together, shall we? Perhaps with a bit of snuff and some brandy?”

Because that, apparently, was what men did?

“There’s nothing healthful about snuff,” she said. And I don’t wish to peruse that book with you. Except there could be no assurance that he would peruse it on his own if she made her excuses.

“Just the brandy, then. Ah—here’s a fun one.” He turned the book around and held it out so she could see the image.

She nearly choked, and he had yet to call for the brandy. “Exceedingly fun,” she said. If you enjoyed images of a man’s exposed organ taking 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.