Page 42 of The Duke
It was unlike Cole to be self-conscious, and yet he couldn’t comprehend why the thought of her gazing upon his mangled arm incited a new bout of hesitance. “Handling an amputated limb is entirely different than fluffing the pillows of the elderly.” He tossed her a severe look, warning her away.
She returned it with that steady, mysterious gaze of hers. “I know. I dealt with you and your limb from the moment you entered St. Margaret’s. You threw a teacup at me.”
Heat suffused his face. “That was you?”
“You don’t recognize me?”
He could summon a vague recollection of a frail, freckled woman in a black uniform, but that was all. “I was just coming out of a delirious fever and opiates,” he pointed out. “I barely recognized myself.” He still couldn’t claim to, he thought bitterly.
“Nevertheless, I was the one who discovered the infection in your limb, I was there for the surgery, and I saw to your recovery. Aside from Dr. Longhurst, I’m the person most familiar with your case, so give it over.”
Cole’s brows drew down at the brusque hint of authority in her voice as she opened her palm and gestured for him to comply. He wasn’t used to following orders, but had somehow placed his smarting forearm in her grasp before his pride decided against it.
Then the enormity of her words slammed into him with all the force of a frigate at full speed. She’d been the nurse who’d correctly diagnosed him with septicemia rather than typhus. It was because of her that he’d survived.
Heowedthis woman his life.
Did that mean anything to him? Did it to her? She certainly hadn’t mentioned it before now. Not that he’d given her the chance to. Not that he’d been particularly grateful. She’d given him his life back. This lonely existence full of waking nightmares and rage. That was why he’d thrown the teacup, because before he’d regained consciousness, Ginny had been holding him, soothing him.
When he woke, there had been only pain.
Without any decorum, Lady Anstruther rested his arm in her lap and slowly, gently pushed his suit coat and shirtsleeve up to the elbow.
Until this moment, he’d allowed no one but Dr. Longhurst and the prosthetic engineer anywhere near his arm. He’d thought such an intimacy impossible with someone he rather liked, let alone someone he—he… Somehow, he couldn’t seem to identify a word that would properly express his ever more opaque feelings for the indomitable woman. He owed that bit of witlessness partly to the proximity of his arm to her thighs. His wrist rested on the crest of her leg, the outline tantalizing through her petticoats and skirts. His prosthesis, however, dipped into the delightful crevice between. Yetanotherreason to lament the loss of his hand, he realized. Had he fingers that worked, that still registered sensation, they’d perhaps be close enough to feel the intimate heat between her thighs.
However, had he fingers, he’d likely not get them half so close as they were.
Cole didn’t care to see the expression on her face, so he watched the veins in his own arm struggle to pulse blood past the tightly strapped prosthesis. His jaw clenched so forcefully, it ached.
The moment was surreal enough to be a dream. The woman he’d deemed his nemesis ran slim, elegant fingers across the fine hairs of his tense forearm, learning the mechanisms of the prosthetic structure. He felt the ripples of that brush of flesh blossom over the entirety of his being.
“How ingenious,” she marveled to herself, as though he weren’t even present. “These straps are interwoven to incorporate a harness.” Deftly, she undid the buckle he’d struggled with, drawing a frown from him.
“I’m aware of that,” he said dryly. “I designed the piece, myself.”
“Did you?” she mused. “Well, that’s impressive. Why the harnesses?”
“I had it fashioned in New York by an engineer,” he explained. “I’d been invited on a spelunking expedition to South America, and needed a way to secure the hook I planned to use should I require it to support my weight. The harness is buckled here, and then is secured around my torso and opposite shoulder.”
“How marvelous.” She peered at his chest, as though trying to see through his clothing to the topography beneath. Was it only clinical curiosity knitting her brow? “And then I assume you have different attachments you fasten to the metal base here?” She gestured to the currently empty, flat steel apparatus at the end of his wrist and the dip into which his several attachments threaded securely.
“Don’t touch that,” he ordered as she flirted with the release lever of his hidden blade. “Lest it stab you.”
“How clever,” she remarked, but left it alone.
His head buzzed and his mouth felt as dry as grit. Certainly an effect of his smoking, and not at all the intoxicating scent of the woman who’d somehow slid closer to him. Christ, did she always smell like this? Like lavender and lilacs? Probably not. They were in a garden after all; the fragrance of night-blooming buds shamelessly baring themselves to the moon like beckoning wantons was enough to smother a fellow. And yet he couldn’t deny the pleasantness of it. The… peaceful quality of it all.
“I was glad to hear that you became quite the adventurer after your recovery,” she said conversationally, returning to work on the buckle of the second strap. “I read about your hunting grizzly bear in the American West, and climbing the Tetons. Then you navigated the Amazon, didn’t you? Working with that cartographer, what was his name? Morton… Morgan something? Is that where you went spelunking, in South America?”
“Callum Monahan,” he recalled. “A fearless man.” He regarded her intently. “Have you been following my travels, Lady Anstruther?” He’d almost forgotten that she was about to uncover his stump, focused only on the fact that his arm crept ever higher on her thigh.
She glanced up sharply. “Not at all, though my husband did. Dear Edward thought so very highly of you, and he had me read the articles of your many exploits. He said you were a particular favorite of his late wife.”
“Lady Sarah Millburn,” he said fondly. “I fell in love with her when I was but seven years old. No offense to your husband, but I used to wish a rather tragic and early end for him as a boy of ten or so, fantasizing that his wife would seek solace in my open and ready arms. She was the only female of warm disposition I’d met until…” He stopped himself, not wanting nostalgia to heat the current moment. To make more of it than it was.
Not wanting to think of Ginny just now.
Odd, that. Odder still that he revealed so much. She was neither confidant nor confessor. She was the real Lady Anstruther’s inadequate shadow. A grasping pretender. A usurper. He had to remember that.
