He did believe her. A lending library for spinsters? Not even a champion liar could weave such a preposterous tale from nothing.
“Very well. I apologize,” he said. “I misjudged you.”
“You apologize?” She looked at him, shocked. “Those aren’t words I expected to hear from your lips.”
“Then you’ve misjudged me.” His faults might be legion, but no one could say he didn’t admit them openly.
“Maybe.” She folded her bottom lip and sipped on it. “Well, then. While we’re talking . . . perhaps you could suggest a book. What do you read, your grace?”
“I don’t read much of anything besides estate correspondence. Never seem to find the time.”
In demonstration, he lifted a newspaper from a side table and cast it aside. He felt a small twinge of guilt. Each morning, Higgs went to the trouble of ironing the thing, page by page. Griff seldom gave it a glance.
Instead, he moved to the room’s large desk and lit a pair of candles. There was a broken clock there he’d been meaning to tinker with—one of the Viennese curiosities his father had collected. Really, he should have been a tradesman’s son. He always felt more comfortable, more capable, when his hands were occupied.
Her questions followed him. “But if you did have time to read, what would you choose?”
“Plays,” he answered. For no particular reason, other than to have the question gone.
“Oh, plays. Those would be good for the library. The Spindle Cove ladies are fond of staging theatricals.” Clutching the counterpane about her shoulders with one hand, she used the other to pull the rolling ladder toward another bank of shelves. “Do you go often to the theater?”
“Not lately.”
“But you did in the past, then.” Genuine interest warmed her voice. “Why did you stop? How long has it been?”
His grip tightened on a screw he’d been loosening. No one questioned him about this. Not even his mother. He felt the unexpectedness of it first, like a cold splash of water to the face. But once the initial affront wore off, he was left feeling oddly relieved. Almost grateful.
Griff’s peers, associates, friends from the club . . . they must have noticed his retreat from society this past year. But if they wondered at the reasons and speculated amongst themselves, not a one of them had directly asked him why. Whether they lacked the courage or the interest, he didn’t know.
Pauline Simms had the courage. And the interest, it seemed. Her innocent question warmed a place inside him that had long gone cold.
For a moment he was tempted to answer.
But then he dismissed the idea. There was no way for a man of his wealth and rank to relate his personal trials to a serving girl without sounding completely insufferable. Miss Simms had been raised in poverty, with a simple-minded sister to protect and a violent father she couldn’t escape. Despite it all, she retained her pride and a sharp sense of humor. Was this girl supposed to pity him for missing the Theatre Royal’s spring season, when she’d never attended the theater for even one night?
She would chide him for his whinging, and justly so. He could hear it now: Dukes and their problems.
He worked another tiny screw free of the clock’s back facing. “I don’t see that it should be any of your—”
“Any of my concern,” she finished for him. “I know. You’re right. It’s not my business, but I couldn’t help asking. It’s the oddest thing, your grace. Even amid all the ancient, moldering volumes in this library . . . I find you the most unreadable book in the room. Just when I think I understand you, you confound me again.”
“Simms, I’m a man. I’m not that complex.”
He set aside the clockwork, intending to call an end to this literary interlude and send her upstairs to her chamber. But when he looked up, he saw her.
All of her.
And his voice ceased to function.
She stood perched on the second highest rung of the ladder. The counterpane had slipped to a downy cloud on the floor, and she floated above it—just a wisp of woman, wreathed in the thinnest, most fragile linen shift he’d ever seen. The thing had been worn and washed and mended so many times, it was like a lace of cobwebs rather than proper fabric. And when she swung her body in front of the shining oil lamp?
The shift was utterly transparent.
He could see everything. She didn’t have a boyish figure at all. No, she was all woman. Her small, apple-round breasts were capped with dark nipples. Her belly was sleek. When she perched on the ladder, stretching on tiptoe for another book, the curve of her silhouette called to him like a familiar melody. Arched foot, slender calf, sweetly flared thigh . . . and a rounded, graspable bottom.
True, hers wasn’t a Rubenesque, buxom figure. No artists would paint her lolling about in white sheets. There was something wild and elemental about her. They’d be inspired to depict a dancing nymph or chasing dryad. Hers was a body that would always show to its best advantage in motion.
And bare.
Brilliant. Now his imagination rioted with thoughts of her naked and moving.
She turned on the ladder, facing him.
Eyes, he told himself. Stay focused on the eyes. She had lovely eyes, with that startling leaf-green hue and her impossibly long eyelashes. He needn’t let his gaze wander anywhere else.
Not to her spritely breasts.
Nor the enticing, dark triangle nestled between her thighs.
Damn.
He was a man, as he’d told her. Not that complex. The reaction in his groin was pure, simple, and about four extra inches of straightforward. Surely she didn’t realize how she appeared. She couldn’t realize, or she’d jump down from that ladder at once and cover herself.
“Where are the novels?” she asked, matter-of-factly propping her elbow on the ladder’s nearest rung.
An insidious thought occurred to him. If she didn’t realize why he was staring, he could safely stare as long as he liked. He could drink in every bit of her, store up enough glimpses to fuel his fantasies for months.
“I think the novels are there,” he answered brusquely.
He motioned to the wall in question. Then he positioned the dismantled clock like a shield, blocking her from his view. Behind it, he briefly rolled his eyes heavenward. Someone up there had better be adding a hash mark to his “Good Deeds” tally. Perhaps now his lifetime total came to five or six.
“Do you have any favorites to recommend?” she asked.
“No.” He sighed with gruff impatience. He wished she would cease being so blasted friendly when he was striving to stop mentally undressing her. In his mind’s eye she was two buttons from complete ruination.
“I don’t read many novels, either,” she said. “The few I’ve tried were like forests to me—I got lost. I prefer verses, when I can find them. Little posies of pretty words, easy to grasp and keep with you. There was a woman in Spindle Cove one summer who fancied herself a poetess. Her own poems were horrid, but I liked the books she left lying about. I committed my favorites to memory, so I could share them with my sister.”
“And which ones were your favorites?” he asked, happy to let her speak so she’d cease asking questions.
She was silent for a moment. “I like this one. ‘The maiden caught me in the wild, where I was dancing merrily. She put me into her cabinet and locked me up with a golden key.’ ”
Griff had the panel almost freed now, but his fingers slowed.
She went on, her voice gaining a dreamy, velvet texture. “ ‘The cabinet was formed of gold, and pearl and crystal shining bright. And within, it opens into a world, and a little lovely moony night. Another England there I saw. Another London with its Tower. Another Thames and other hills. And another pleasant Surrey bower.’ ”
He stared at the gutted clock before him. It didn’t seem to be a clock anymore, but a cabinet. One with a secret window onto a little lovely moony night. A different London, a different England. An entirely different world.
He was enchanted, just a little.
“The story goes all wrong from there,” she said regretfully, “but I loved that bit. A cabinet of gold and pearl and crystal, with a little secret world inside. It’s something beautiful to picture when I’m washing up glassware at the tavern. Or, you know, when I’m elbow-deep in a mare.”
He looked up from the clock a fraction. Just enough to receive the mischievous, fetching smile she cast his way.
“What do you think?” she asked. “Could it ever work?”
No.
No, you bewitching creature. It could never, ever work.
“You mean the circulating library, I assume.”
She nodded. “I have it all planned out, you see. There’s an empty shop front on the village square where the old apothecary used to be. It’s all shelves already, with a sturdy counter. Only needs a bit of sunlight and wood polish. Lace curtains maybe, and a chair or two for those who’d like to sit.” Her mouth pulled to the side. “But the prettiness is all for naught, if it isn’t a sound business idea.”
“And you want my opinion?”
“If you’re paying me a thousand pounds, I’d think you wouldn’t want to see it squandered.”
He chuckled. “You can’t know how many thousands I’ve squandered on my own.”
“Just give me your honest judgment. Please.”
He squinted, easing a bit of clockwork loose. “Honestly, I’m the wrong person to ask. No doubt the spinsters will queue up for your verses and novels. The only books I ever went looking for were the naughty ones.”
She clutched the ladder rung. “Oh, your grace. You’re brilliant.”
Griff sat back in his chair, amazed. Never in his life had anyone said that to him. Not outside of a bed, anyway. “What’s so brilliant about me, precisely?”
“A lending library full of naughty books. That’s exactly what I need. I mean, not every book would necessarily be scandalous. But a good many of them should be. At home, the ladies can acquire all the boring, proper books they like, can’t they? They come to Spindle Cove to break the rules.”
Griff had a memory of the young ladies in that tavern, merrily ripping pages from an etiquette book to make tea trays. Yes, he could imagine torrid novels and radical pamphlets would do a brisk business in such a place.
And in making the inadvertent suggestion, he’d now be responsible for debauching-by-proxy an entire village of spinsters. This surely represented some sort of zenith or nadir of his life. He wasn’t sure which.
“Where are the naughty ones?” She tilted her head back, peering into the farthest upper recesses of the room. “I suppose they’d be on a high shelf. Or did you have a locked cabinet somewhere?”
He laughed. “If I did possess a secret section of my library that consists entirely of books inappropriate for young ladies, you could hardly expect me to direct you to it.”
“Why not? I’m no lady. Not that innocent, either.”
Don’t say that.
“It’s very late, Simms.”
“Very early, more like.”
“Suffice it to say, it’s very dark. And you’re very unclothed, and we’re much too alone.” For the two of them to begin a perusal of erotic literature atop it . . . ? That fragile shift of hers wouldn’t survive the hour. “I’ve no noble impulses, remember?”
Her cheeks flushed. “At least help me make a list?”
He drummed his fingers on the desk. “Moll Flanders, Fanny Hill, The Monk, a good translation of L’École des Filles. Those are a start.”
She closed her eyes. “Done.”
“You don’t want to write them down?”
“I don’t need to. I have a good memory.”
She leaned heavily to one side as she scanned the shelf, seeming to float above him. Griff was nearly reduced to panting by the nubile shadow of her silhouette and the swirled-brandy fall of her hair. Yes, he’d perused his share of naughty books. None of them had affected him like this. He was hard as the mahogany desktop.