“But surely you’ve heard of Welsh weather? It’ll be over in two or three hours, I should think. Does your maid have any idea you came swimming?”
Linnet nodded.
“Prufrock will tell her not to worry; this happens frequently enough that I’ve instructed him not to send out a search party. My patients will have to get by with the tender ministrations of Sébastien.”
“Your Ducklings will help him,” Linnet said, over the noise of a renewed hammering, as the wind flung more hail against the house. She became aware she was shivering, in reaction and cold. “Do you suppose there might be some clothes here, or a blanket?” she asked, her teeth chattering.
Piers turned around and leered in an appreciative kind of way. “Forgot your towels?”
“I’m freezing,” Linnet said, wrapping her arms around herself. “Blankets?”
He pointed with his cane to a door to the left of the fireplace.
“Make a fire,” she implored. “Please.”
“As you command,” he retorted. But he put his cane to the side and took a flint from the mantelpiece. Thankfully, it was already laid with shreds of kindling and a few logs.
Linnet pushed open the door to find a small bedchamber. It had nothing other than a big bed, with a window that looked inland so the shutters weren’t being buffeted by hail.
She found a cupboard next to the door, and pulled open the doors. The shelves were empty, but for a heap of cloth bundled into one corner. She pulled it out, her fingers shaking with cold, and saw that it was a man’s shirt. It wasn’t a shirt of the kind Piers wore, made of fine linen. It was homespun, thick freize.
She sniffed it cautiously and discovered to her relief that it was clean, if rumpled. Her freezing, wet chemise was off in a second. But she was still damp, so she poked her head out the door. “Piers, may I use—”
Only to see what she unaccountably had overlooked. Piers Yelverton, Earl of Marchant, was stark naked.
He was squatting in front of the fireplace, banging the flint against a firestone.
“Your towel?” she asked.
“The wind took it.”
“It took your smalls too?”
“I must have forgotten to leave them on. I’m used to swimming naked.” He looked up at her, his eyes as warm as French cognac. Just as if she’d drunk that cognac, warmth slid down her throat, to her breasts, her stomach, lower. She couldn’t help looking. His body was all heavy muscle, his legs, back, shoulders . . .
“Want me to stand up so you don’t miss anything?” His voice was amused, but there was a strain of something feral in it, deep and male and dangerous.
Linnet’s whole body responded to it. The gentle glow, the brandy-like cheer, turned into a kind of desperate heat, pooling in her legs. “No!” she gasped. “If you don’t have a towel—never mind.” She saw him start to move, and pure instinct whipped her back inside the bedchamber, door closed.
The door’s wood was rough against her back and bottom. I’m naked, she thought. I’m naked, and I’m in a house with a naked man, and I need—
Linnet had the shirt over her head in two seconds. It fell to her knees, which was scandalous enough. The thick fabric concealed her figure fairly well, though her breasts strained the buttons a trifle. It seemed to have been made for a man with a slender chest, which solved the dilemma of whether she should allow Piers to have their only garment. His chest was most decidedly not slender.
She turned back to the bed. It was covered by a rough blanket; she pulled it back to find a coarse sheet. It would cover that huge expanse of naked man out in the front room, and that was all that mattered.
She pulled the sheet from the bed, opened the door and pushed it through without looking.
Piers’s voice came around the wooden door perfectly clearly, even over the wind. “What’s this?”
“Put it on,” she shouted.
“No need.”
“Yes, there is a need.” The door moved under her hand. “And don’t come in here without that sheet around your body!”
The door opened, pushing her backward. “I found a tablecloth.” Sure enough, he had a blue cloth tied around his waist.
“The sheet would be better,” Linnet said, her eyes instinctively sliding over Piers’s broad chest. She looked lower and gasped. “That’s indecent!”
The tablecloth was knotted in a jaunty sort of way over Piers’s right hip, but even so it barely covered the—that— “You can’t wear that!”
“Well, I can’t wear the sheet, unless you want to sit on that blanket,” he said, an odd grin playing around his lips. “It looks as if it might harbor as many fleas as Rufus, which is really saying something.”
Linnet glanced with horror at the bed. “I’m not sitting there.”
“There’s nowhere else to sit,” Piers said. “There’s an unaccountable lack of furniture in the house. My guess is that it was borrowed by neighbors. Very thrifty, these Welshmen. I suppose they didn’t think the house needed a table or chairs, since no one is living in it. We’re lucky the bed is still here.”
Sure enough, Linnet peeped around his shoulder and realized that the front room was empty but for a heavy sideboard. She looked back at the bed.
“My understanding is that fleas can’t live without a blood meal of some sort for more than a few weeks,” Piers said, tossing the sheet back on the bed. “Could you put the damned thing back on? My leg didn’t take to that jaunt we had up the hill, and I am going to either sit down or fall down. At the moment my cane is the only thing holding me upright.”
Linnet scrambled back to the bed and started trying to tuck the sheet in on all sides. “This is harder than it looks,” she said, vainly making idle conversation so that she didn’t look at Piers again.
“Should I give the maids an extra truppence per bed?” He sounded bored.
Linnet gave up on the foot of the bed. She must have put too much sheet under the top, because it wouldn’t stay tucked. “Sit down,” she said, waving at the bed.
He sat down with a groan.
“Better?” Linnet asked. After a moment, she perched on the end of the bed, giving him plenty of space. She could hardly remain standing for the duration of the storm, improper though this was.
Piers was digging his fingers into his right leg, giving it a rough massage. “Anything’s better than standing on it after that run,” he said, not looking up.
“Have you had the injury a long time?” Linnet asked.
“Almost my whole life.”
“Why doesn’t it heal?”
He shook his head. “I won’t know until I autopsy myself.” She blinked. “Stupid joke. I think the muscle died, inside. I’ve found patients who seem to have experienced muscle death following a traumatic injury. In some cases the pain goes away. In others . . . it doesn’t.”
“Is there no chance?” She watched his fingers for a moment. “You don’t even have a scar, that I can see.”
He turned his leg slightly to the outside, and she gasped, seeing a wicked, jagged scar, extending from his upper thigh down past his knee on the inside. “How did you survive?”