More than a Mistress/No Man's Mistress (5 page)

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.

J
OCELYN WATCHED HER GO
and 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.

“What are you waiting for?” he asked irritably. “Permission? Is it possible that you deem it necessary to have my
permission
to supersede one of London’s most eminent physicians and to maul my person, Miss Ingleby?” It annoyed him that he had not insisted upon calling her Jane. A nice meek name. A total misnomer for the blue-eyed dragon who looked calmly back at him.

“I do not intend to maul you, your grace,” she said, “but to make you more comfortable. I will not hurt you. I promise.”

He set his head back against the headrest of his chair and closed his eyes. And opened them hastily again. Headaches, of course—at least the caliber of headache that he had been carrying around with him since he regained consciousness a couple of hours before—were not eased when experienced from behind lowered eyelids.

She closed the door quietly behind her, he noticed, as she had done when she had gone in search of the footstool.
Thank God for small mercies. Now if only she would keep her mouth shut.…

F
OR THE FIRST TIME
in a long while Jane felt as if she were in familiar territory. She unwound the bandage with slow care and eased it free of the wound, which had bled a little and caused the bandage to stick. She looked up as she freed it.

He had not winced even though he must have felt pain. He was reclined in his chair, one elbow resting on the arm, his head propped on his hand while he regarded her with half-closed eyes.

“I am sorry,” she said. “The blood had dried.”

He half nodded and she set about the task of cleansing the wound with warm water before applying the balsam powder she had found among the housekeeper’s supplies.

She had nursed her father through a lingering illness until the moment of his death a year and a half ago. Poor Papa. Never a robust man, he had lost all his will to live after Mama’s passing, as if he had allowed disease to ravage him without a fight. By the end she had been doing everything for him. He had grown so very thin. This man’s leg was strong and well muscled.

“You are new to London?” he asked suddenly.

She glanced up. She hoped he was not going to start amusing himself by prying into her past. It was a hope that was immediately dashed.

“Where did you come from?” he asked.

What should she say? She hated lying, but the truth was out of the question. “From a long way away.”

He winced as she applied the powder. But it was necessary
to prevent the infection that might yet cost him his leg. The swelling worried her.

“You are a lady,” he said—a statement, not a question.

She had tried a cockney accent, with ludicrous results. She had tried something a little vaguer, something that would make her sound like a woman of the lower classes. But though she could hear accents quite clearly, she found it impossible to reproduce them. She had given up trying.

“Not really,” she said. “Just well brought up.”

“Where?”

It was a lie she had already told. She would stick with it since it immediately killed most other questions.

“In an orphanage,” she said. “A good one. I suppose I must have been fathered by someone who could not acknowledge me but who could afford to have me decently raised.”

Oh, Papa
, she thought. And Mama too. Who had lavished all their love and attention on her, their only child, and given her a wondrously happy family life for sixteen years. Who would have done their utmost to see her settled in a life as happily domesticated as their own if death had not claimed them first.

“Hmm” was all the Duke of Tresham said.

She hoped it was all he would ever say on the subject. She wrapped the clean bandage securely but loosely enough to allow for the swelling.

“This stool is not high enough even with the cushion.” She frowned and looked around, then spied a chaise longue adorning one corner of the library. “I suppose you would rain down fire and brimstone on my head if I were to suggest that you recline on that,” she said, pointing. “You could retain all your masculine
pride by remaining in your library, but you could stretch your leg out along it and elevate it on the cushion.”

“You would banish me to the corner, Miss Ingleby?” he asked. “With my back to the room perhaps?”

“I suppose,” she said, “the chaise longue is not bolted to the floor. I suppose it could be moved to a place more satisfactory to you. Close to the fire, perhaps?”

“The fire be damned,” he said. “Have it moved close to the window. By someone considerably more hefty than you. I will not be responsible for your suffering a dislocated spine even if there would be some poetic justice in it. There is a bell rope beside the mantel. Pull on it.”

A footman moved the chaise longue into the light of the window. But it was on Jane’s shoulder that the duke leaned as he hopped from his chair to take up his new position. He had flatly refused, of course, to allow himself to be carried.

“Be damned to you,” he had told her when she had suggested it. “I shall be carried to my grave, Miss Ingleby. Until then, I shall convey myself from place to place even if I must avail myself of some assistance.”

“Have you always been so stubborn?” Jane asked while the footman gawked at her with dropped jaw as if he expected her to be felled by a thunderbolt in the very next moment.

“I am a Dudley,” the Duke of Tresham said by way of explanation. “We are a stubborn lot from the moment of conception. Dudley babes are reputed to kick their mothers with unusual ferocity in the womb and to give them considerable grief while proceeding into the world. And that is just the beginning.”

He was trying to shock her, Jane realized. He was looking at her intently with his black eyes, which she
had discovered from close up were really just a very dark brown. Foolish man. She had assisted in the birthing of numerous babies from the time she was fourteen. Her mother had raised her to believe that service was an integral part of a life of privilege.

He looked more comfortable once he was settled and had his foot resting on the cushion. Jane stood back, expecting to be dismissed or at least to be directed to present herself to the housekeeper for further orders. The footman had already been sent on his way. But the duke looked at her consideringly.

“Well, Miss Ingleby,” he said, “how are you planning to amuse me for the next three weeks?”

Jane felt a lurching of alarm. The man was incapacitated, and besides, there had been no suggestive note in his voice. But she had good reason to be distrustful of gentlemen in their boredom.

She was saved from answering by the opening of the library door. It did not open quietly, as one might have expected, to admit either the butler or Mr. Quincy. Indeed, its opening was not even preceded by a respectful knock. The door was thrown back so that it cracked against the bookcase behind it. A lady strode inside.

Jane felt considerable alarm. She was a young and remarkably fashionable lady even if she would never earn full marks for good taste in dress. Jane did not recognize her, but even so in that moment she realized clearly the folly of being here. If the visitor had been announced, she herself could have slipped away unseen. As it was, she could only stand where she was or at best take a couple of steps back and sideways and hope to melt into the shadows to the left of the window curtains.

The young lady swept into the room rather like a tidal wave.

“I believe my instructions were that I was not to be disturbed this morning,” the duke murmured.

But his visitor came on, undaunted.

“Tresham!” she exclaimed. “You are alive. I would not believe it until I had seen it with my own eyes. If you just knew what I have suffered in the past day, you would never have done it. Heyward has gone off to the House this morning, which is bothersome of him when my nerves are shattered. I declare I did not get one wink of sleep last night. It was most unsporting of Lord Oliver actually to shoot at you, I must say. If Lady Oliver was indiscreet enough to let him discover that she is your latest amour, and if he is foolish enough to proclaim his goat’s horns to all the world with such a public challenge—and in Hyde Park of all places—then
he
is the one who should get shot at. But they say that you shot gallantly into the air, which shows you for the polished gentleman that you are. It would have been no more than he deserved if you had killed him. But of course then they would have hanged you, or would have if you had not been a duke. You would have had to flee to France, and Heyward was provoking enough to tell me that he would not have taken me to Paris to visit you there. Even though all the world knows it is the most fashionable place to be. Sometimes I wonder why I married him.”