When Beauty Tamed the Beast

Suddenly she could understand what he was saying. “I don’t want to let go of you,” she said, shaking the wet hair back from her face because she didn’t want to unwrap even one arm from his body. “I’ll freeze. Or drown. You’re w-warm.”

“Swimming, remember?” he said. His teeth were clenched, which seemed to suggest he was as cold as she was. But wasn’t he used to it?

“I know we’re here to swim,” she said. “Tell me how to do it, and I’ll—I’ll consider it.” In fact, she wasn’t going to let go of him until they were out of the pool altogether.

But he ruthlessly pried her body away from his. She gasped at the loss of warmth and her teeth instantly started chattering again.

“You need to learn how to float,” he snarled. There was something awfully grim about his tone.

She picked up floating instantly. “I’ll just die like this, shall I?” she said, her face surrounded by freezing water, her teeth clicking together like castanets.

“I think you’d better get out now,” he said, sounding exasperated.

“Wa-warm me up first,” she said.

With a muffled curse, he jerked her against him. It was just as wonderful as the first time. With a sigh of relief, she put her head on his shoulder and let the incredible furnace of his body seep into her pores. But a second later, strong arms were around her waist, hoisting her straight in the air and depositing her on the side of the pool. She drew up her toes.

“Towels are over there,” he barked.

She looked down at him, so bemused that at first she didn’t register what he was saying. Piers was at home in the water, in his element. As she watched, he pivoted and pushed off from the rock wall, surfacing halfway across the pool. First one arm and then the other came out of the water, and then he was shooting away from her, bubbles churning behind him.

There were three towels. Linnet took one and wrapped it around her shivering torso, then she took another and wrapped it around her hair. She returned to the rock and watched Piers slice through the water, length after length. He showed no signs of stopping, so she went back, took the third towel and, once seated at the edge of the pool, wrapped her feet and ankles in it.

After that she sat, entirely swathed in toweling except for her face, and watched the broad planes of Piers’s back and shoulders as he tore up and down the pool.

Slowly her body warmed as she sat cocooned and the morning sun poured down on her. Mrs. Hutchins would faint to see her. Faint? She would have an apoplectic fit. Not only was Linnet sitting next to the water, dressed in nothing more than a drenched chemise, but there was a nearly naked man not much farther than an arm’s length away.

In this situation, a few freckles didn’t seem to matter so much, so she tilted her head back and drank up the sunshine and the clear blue sky. It went so far above her head that she couldn’t imagine the top of it. Far, far up a seabird was lazily circling, looking for a fish perhaps.

***

Piers touched the edge, counted fifty lengths. He didn’t stop, just flipped over and swam back the other way. His body was dealing with a feverish kind of energy that didn’t require a medical degree to diagnose. Sixty lengths. He was exhausted, but still there was a river of molten lava running under his skin.

Finally he pulled himself out of the water, his eyes going directly to Linnet. Her head was tilted back and her neck was pale cream in the sunshine. The towel had slipped from her hair, which lay in dark red coils all over the white cloth.

As he was trying to gather together the shards of his wits, she straightened up and opened her eyes. “I’m so sorry about nearly drowning you,” she said, her eyes giving him that secret smile that he—

Well, that he liked to see.

“I truly didn’t mean to,” she continued. “You’re just so much warmer than I am.”

He was when a luscious female body wrapped around him, clinging like seaweed on a rope.

“You look warm enough now,” he said, hearing the grating tone in his own voice. Well, it wasn’t as if she would guess why he sounded so angry. Thank God for his reputation.

She blinked. “I took all the towels! You must be freezing.” She scrambled to her feet, which made all her towels fall to the ground.

It would be sacrilege to refer to those breasts as mammary glands. They were glorious, plump, yielding . . . Her chemise was translucent with water. It clung to her thighs, to a beautiful, dark place between her legs.

“Here, take one of these,” she was saying. She threw him a towel and he just managed to catch it and wind it hastily around his waist.

“You know?” She glanced at him, and a little flare of color rose in her cheeks.

“What?” he said, rearranging himself discreetly and then rewrapping the towel more tightly.

“You’re going to laugh, being a doctor and all, but my mother said something once . . .”

“What?” He had always had control over his body. Always. This was an aberration.

“She told me once that men hung.”

“Hung?” he repeated. If he looked just at her face, then he wouldn’t see the way thin linen clung to her breasts, to her hips. He wouldn’t think about the deep hunger flaring in his groins. It was just a biological urge, nothing more.

“Hung,” she said, giggling again. “In front. You don’t hang, do you?” She waved a hand in the general vicinity of his waist. “You don’t mind my saying that, do you? I formed this disgusting vision of—of a hanging thing and—well, you don’t hang at all. You stand straight up.”

He burst out laughing.

“I know,” she said, laughing too. “I’m a fool.”

But he had an uneasy feeling that he was the fool.

Chapter Ten

Linnet lingered in a bath for an hour, drinking hot chocolate and finishing Miss Fanny Burney’s Camilla. But finally there were no more cans of hot water, and she’d finished the book, so she stood up.

“I wonder if this castle has a library,” she said to her maid, Eliza. “I only brought five novels, and I read them all in the carriage on the way here.”

“Couldn’t you just read them again?” Eliza suggested, handing her a towel. “It seems a waste to look at them just the once. Better to buy a ribbon that you can use over and over.”

“I might reread that one,” Linnet said, nodding toward Camilla. “It was quite good. I already read Miss Butterworth and the Mad Baron twice. Actually, three times.” She sat down at her dressing table.

“It’s funny, miss, how you do all that reading,” Eliza said, starting to comb through Linnet’s wet hair. “If the gentlemen in London knew you were such a bluestocking!”

“What difference could it possibly make?”

Eliza pursed her lips. “Nobody likes a girl with more wit than hair, but on the other hand, I never heard of a lady who reads the way you do. It would shake them up, all those foolish types who jumped to thinking the prince trifled with you.”

“I doubt it,” Linnet said. “I expect it’s far more interesting to talk about my purported royal baby than my reading habits.”

“Well, I do know that there is a library here. Mr. Prufrock mentioned it last night at dinner.”