Dutifully she turned her head and moved her arms. “That’s it,” he said, his eyes returning to her bottom. “Your legs should be straight and kicking gently.”
There was nothing wrong with looking, after all. It was just looking. Though another way of describing it would be to call it torment. He had seen hundreds of women’s bodies. Maybe even a thousand. They had bared their breasts, their buttocks, all their most private parts, and he had never blinked an eye.
But now his body was pulsing, literally raging, with passion. Piers pushed himself to his feet and pulled the towel punishingly tight around his waist. He’d be damned if he’d be manipulated by his father, his despicable and despised father, into accepting the bride he’d chosen.
He watched Linnet stroke, forcing himself to ignore her sensuality. She seemed to have a fair sense of rhythm.
Of course she has, a voice murmured inside him. He could teach her rhythm, and she would—
He thrust the thought away. “Time to go,” he said briskly, turning away. “I have a wing of patients waiting for me, some of them probably cadavers by now. Can’t keep those cadavers waiting. It’s not polite.”
She scrambled to her feet, and he could hear her pulling on her dress. “Wait,” she called, as he started toward the path. “I need you to button my gown, remember?”
He turned around. She stood there on the edge of the pool, red hair curling damply all over her shoulders, her cheeks pink from exercise. And she was grinning, properly grinning, not that patented smile that she used to mesmerize his poor students.
“I can’t go back to the house like this,” she said. “Granted, I have no chaperone. But unless you want my entire household to start believing that we’re naked together, you must button my dress.”
“Don’t be a fool. The servants know exactly what we’re doing. There’s nothing they can, or wish to, do about it.”
“Well, your father would be scandalized.”
He grunted, not wanting to get into a discussion of precisely how little he cared for his father’s opinion. “Come over here, then. I don’t want to struggle across that rock with my cane.”
She blinked, and scampered over to him. “I’m sorry. Watching you swim, you seem so powerful that I forget that your leg is damaged. How did it happen, by the way?” She turned her back and he began buttoning her gown.
A woman’s spine is a very delicate thing. Of course he knew it already, but his knowledge came from contemplating spines that had been injured. Linnet’s curved in a perfect exhibition of faultless design, one small bump following another, all the bones he’d learned in medical school looking so very different covered with pale skin.
“Where’s your chemise?” he asked abruptly.
“Oh, I took it off,” she said. “There’s nothing colder than wet fabric, you know.”
She had pulled her hair away so it didn’t get caught in her buttons, and her creamy neck bent before him, like the stem holding up a delicate flower. Her words sank into his mind rather slowly. She had taken off her chemise while he had his back turned. She had stood, naked in the open air, if only for a second.
“Piers?” she asked. “How did you hurt your leg?”
“It’s been so long I’ve forgotten,” he said, slipping the last button into its hole.
She made a little chuffing noise, but bent to scoop up a bundle of wet cloth, her chemise, and then took his arm. He didn’t even realize that he’d waited for her until her slender hand slipped beneath his arm.
“So did any new patients appear last night?” she asked chattily. “And can you tell me how you organize the patients’ rooms? Eliza told me that there are wards in both wings.”
“By what disease I think they have,” he said, still thinking about how civility, once bred into a man’s bones, stayed there for life.
“How?”
“Infectious fevers with infectious fevers. And they’re also segregated by sex. Women in one room, men in another. I can’t have the lusty ones leaping on each other in the middle of the night.”
“Are there more women than men or vice versa?”
“Women take the prize.”
“Why? Do we get sick more often?”
“No, but your sex is much more sensible about going for help. Men tend to keel over in the field, here in Wales. It’s a nice, clean way to go and I recommend it.”
“And children?”
“Sometimes. Influenzas tend to mow them down, so most of the young ones die before they get here.”
He felt her shiver right beside him. “That’s awful, Piers.”
“That’s life.”
“You have Gavan at the moment; are there any other children?”
“Two girls.” They were at the little house now. She didn’t say anything else, but he could practically feel her thinking. “Don’t,” he said warningly.
“Don’t what?”
“Whatever it is you’re planning. You’re getting a sort of Quakerish glow about you. Whatever it is, I’ll just find it annoying.”
“I don’t have anything to do,” she said, in the kind of reasonable tone that rang alarm bells. “I’m almost finished with Dr. Fothergill’s Observations, and you told me his observations were foolish anyway. I looked at your library, and you have no novels.”
“Is that what you generally do? Read novels?”
“There aren’t enough of them. I read travel guides too, and plays.” She shrugged.
He turned and looked at her, ignoring the creamy skin and curling eyelashes—well, not ignoring them, but trying to look past them. And finding all the signs of high intelligence.
How did his father do it? Where did he find her?
“One of the best physicians I ever met was a woman from Catalonia,” he said.
“How did she manage that?” Linnet asked. “Do they allow women into medical schools in Spain?”
“You know where Catalonia is?”
“I told you I read travel books,” she said with a trace of irritation.
“Her father is one of the best physicians in that country,” he said. “He taught her, and then he forced them to let her into medical school. My guess is that by the time she entered she already knew more than most doctors with a degree, but at least it gained her the credentials.”
She was silent as they climbed the steps to the castle door and Prufrock swung it open.
“Waiting for us, were you?” Piers asked.
“Three new patients are,” the butler said. “I put two of them upstairs and one of them in the gun room. The marquis and the younger doctors are there now.”
“The gun room?” Linnet asked.
“We got rid of the guns and do initial diagnoses there,” Piers said, dropping her arm. “If you don’t mind, you’re going to have to tramp up the stairs by yourself. I’ve got work to do. For one thing I have to get to the gun room before Sébastien kills my new patient.”
“If someone looks particularly ill, I put him there,” Prufrock explained. “If he might be infectious, I should say.”
“But how . . .”