Page 23 of The Good Duke
“You are off by a floor.”
She frowned. “Surely not.” Granted, it’d been twenty-plus years since she and her father had visited the earl’s residence.
“I assure you, I’m well aware of the layout of my residence,” he drawled.
Now,thissounded like Simon. Simon who’d stammered, but whose speech had almost always been steady with her.
At that familiar glimpse of her friend from long ago, her horror receded.
How had she failed to realize just how massive his property was?
“The third floor is the guest quarters,” he volunteered when she said nothing more.
“Off by a damned floor,” she muttered.
He let out a bark of laughter.
She’d always been useless with directions. It was a wonder she’d found her way to London without incident.
Though in fairness, one wouldn’t necessarily call stumbling upon Simon while he was naked in a tub without incident.
Which brought her back to the fact that she, even now, stood speaking with a naked Simon. Simon with a broad, soap-covered chest, and whose legs hung over the opposite end of the tub.
Only…they weren’t really Simon’s legs. Simon’s legs had been shorter. Thinner. Scrawnier.
Reflexively, she glanced down once more to study him.
These limbs were ever more muscular and long. They were that too. They were very much a man’s limbs.Muchhad changed physically about Simon Broadbent in the time since she’d last seen him—and seen him in a vastly similar state—naked. Though, at that point, he’d only been partially naked, and not even fully so. Certainly not as he was now.
Persephone peered more closely at Simon. He still possessed those same luscious shoulder-length golden curls he always had. With his hair now slick with water, however, she couldn’t determine whether those strands were now looser and darker merely because of his bath, or whether time had changed them.
His cheekbones were still sharp, his square jaw solid and hard but for the slight cleft at the center of it.
Her gaze slipped a fraction.Look away. Look away.Alas, she remained as unable to tear her gaze from the matting of tight blond whorls upon his well-muscled chest as she had been unable to look away from the massive length of his manhood decades earlier.
Persephone swallowed wildly.
Yes, he was different inthatregard as well.
One area, however, in which he remained unchanged—his politeness.
Not shouting or ordering her out, as he was well-within his rights to do, but issuing clearer directions to the area of his household she’d been in search of. No, rather he was taking this…very well. Very well indeed.
And for the first time since she’d been sacked, Persephone began to feel that mayhap everything would be all right after all.
She shook her head and forced her eyes back to his blue bemused ones.
“I expect it is something of a shock finding me here,” she said. When he merely stared at her in silence, she frowned. “That is unless you are in the habit of having women in your chambers?”
“No.” He grinned. “At least not in those of my personal residence, love.”
Persephone frowned. She didn’t like this roguish side of him. Alas, given after all these years, she’d arrived in his household with her hands out, seeking a favor, a lecture didn’t seem the wisest course.
She’d save that for later.
She opted to take him to task for altogether different reasons. “Sweet? Love?”
He couldn’t even be bothered to use her given name?
