But it was difficult not to be herself—as she had discovered at great cost almost a month ago. Her stomach lurched and she withdrew her mind firmly from those particular memories.
“I beg your pardon?” he said now, lowering his glass to his chest again.
A rhetorical question. He did not, she guessed, suffer from defective hearing.
“You were told to stay in bed for at least three weeks and keep your leg elevated,” she reminded 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 herself as 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.
JOCELYN WATCHED HER GOand 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 sharply. “And then have to wait while it was being made?”
“No,” she replied quite calmly. “But it was not where you said it would be. Indeed, it was not anywhere in plain sight. I brought a cushion too as the stool looks rather low.”
She set it down, placed the cushion on top of it, and went down on one knee in order to lift his leg. He dreaded having it touched. But her hands were both gentle and strong. He felt scarcely any additional pain. Perhaps, he thought, he should have her cradle his head in those hands. He pursed his lips to stop himself from chuckling.
His dressing gown had fallen open to reveal the bandage cutting into the reddened flesh of his calf. He frowned.
“You see?” Jane Ingleby said. “Your leg has swollen and must be twice as painful as it need be. You really must keep it up as you were told, however fretful and inconvenient it may be to do so. I suppose you consider it unmanly to give in to an indisposition. Men can be so silly that way.”
“Indeed?” he said frostily, viewing the top of her hideous and very new cap with extreme distaste. Why he had not dismissed her with a figurative boot in the rear end ten minutes ago he did not know. Why he had hired her in the first place he could not fathom since he blamed her entirely for his misfortune. She was a shrew and would worry him to death like a cat with a mouse long before the three weeks were over.
But the alternative was to have Barnard fussing over him and blanching as pale as any sheet every time he so much as caught sight of his master’s bandage.
Besides, he was going to need something to stimulate his mind while he was incarcerated inside his town house, Jocelyn decided. He could not expect his friends and family to camp out in his drawing room and give him their constant company.
“Yes, indeed.” She stood up and looked down at him. Not only were her eyes clear blue, he noticed, but they were rimmed by thick long lashes several shades darker than her almost invisible hair. They were the sort of eyes in which a man might well drown himself if the rest of her person and character were only a match for them. But there was that mouth not far below them, and it was still talking.
“This bandage needs changing,” she said. “It is the one Dr. Raikes put on yesterday morning. He is not returning until tomorrow, I believe he said. That is too long a time for one bandage even apart from the swelling. I will dress the wound afresh.”
He did not want anyone within one yard of the bandage or the wound beneath it. But that was a craven attitude, he knew. Besides, the bandage really did feel too tight. And besides again, he had employed her as a nurse. Let her earn her keep, then.
