When Beauty Tamed the Beast

“You’re deluded,” Sébastien said.

“A glass of fashion,” Piers repeated patiently. “Without me, you would hardly shine with the glory that you do currently, would you?”

“A particularly strained metaphor,” Linnet observed. “But I take your meaning. A mongrel always makes a greyhound look more regal, does it not?”

“Or a poodle more absurd,” Piers retorted.

“Insult me all you wish,” Sébastien said. He was looking down at Linnet with an utterly fatuous expression on his face. She had apparently seen that look on men’s faces so often that it hardly registered; there wasn’t a trace of triumph about her.

“You two couldn’t be more different in your dress,” she said.

“You should have seen us as boys,” Piers said. “I could hardly walk, of course, so Sébastien used to run twice as fast. And then as we grew older, he started dressing twice as elegantly, to compensate for my slovenly ways.”

“But you were both interested in medicine,” Linnet said. “How on earth were you able to pursue your interests? Not a single gentleman I know in London has any skills of that sort.”

“Or of any sort?” he asked, eyebrow raised.

“They can dance,” she offered.

“Perhaps that’s why: I couldn’t dance, so I turned to cutting people up.”

“And he couldn’t cut people up all that well, so I had to do it for him,” Sébastien chimed in.

Linnet laughed. Her laugh . . . it was far more enticing than that practiced smile of hers. It was both husky and sweet, like warm brandy with honey.

“He’s not joking,” Piers said, taking another gulp to fortify himself against that laugh.

“I thought you were the famous doctor,” she said.

“I’m good at figuring out what’s wrong with people. The trouble is that I do that best when they’re already dead. Sébastien, on the other hand, is good at the tidy sort of surgery, the kind where the patient is living and would prefer to stay that way.”

Linnet gave Sébastien another smile, and Piers fancied he could actually see the poor man buckle at the knees. “It’s very reassuring to think that you’d be here if I were to need surgery,” she cooed.

“Yes, if you want a leg lopped off, he’s the man to do it,” Piers said.

“That would be a crime,” Sébastien said, his voice as soft as a dove’s.

Damn it, Piers was starting to feel a bit guilty. Sébastien had no idea what sort of temptress he had hanging onto his arm and his every word. He’d end up getting his heart properly broken if this kept up.

“Stop it,” he said to Linnet.

She gave him the smile.

“And don’t ever smile at me like that again,” he ordered. “It makes me want to vomit, and given that your slippers appear to be sewn with pearls—an inordinate waste of money—gastric acid would not be good for them.”

Sébastien frowned at him. “Is this your idea of proper conversation, cousin? If so, you’re worse than I thought. Miss Thrynne is a delicate flower, who should be treated with the utmost respect. Instead you’re talking about lopping her legs and vomiting on her toes.”

Piers raised an eyebrow at Linnet. She sighed and patted Sébastien’s arm. “I’m sorry,” she said. “His lordship has quite correctly noticed that I am as adept at flirtation as he is at its opposite.”

“Nice,” Piers said, with genuine appreciation. “Damned if you aren’t one of the nastiest conversationalists I know. Especially given the extra ammunition you carry.”

“You mean the smile?” she asked. “I find it very useful. You should try it sometime.”

Sébastien was scowling now. Likely it was starting to dawn on him that Linnet was not merely a delicate flower.

“You’re not up to her weight,” Piers told him. “She’s a master. No wonder all of London thinks she had a prince under her thumb.”

“It runs in the family,” Linnet said. She looked almost bashful for a moment. “I would really like to hear more about your surgical practice,” she told Sébastien. “You said that you can’t avoid infection. What sorts of things have you tried?”

Piers often thought his cousin was a bit of a dolt, but he never underestimated him when it came to surgery. Sébastien was the finest surgeon he’d ever seen, his concentration unyielding, his fingers quick and impossibly deft.

“If we didn’t have a problem with infection,” Sébastien was saying, “I think it would be possible to intervene in ways that we can’t even imagine now. For example, up in the west wing we have a woman with a swelling in her stomach. It’s almost certainly some sort of cancer causing a tumor, a kind of growth. It’s probably around the size of an apple, or even larger.”

“I’m certain of the tumor,” Piers put in. “I won’t know the size for sure until a few months from now, of course.”

Linnet blinked, but to her credit, she didn’t flinch or squeal, the way most ladies did once faced with the exigencies of medical practice, and his own fascination with dissection.

“If we had something that could control infection, I could open up her stomach and cut out the tumor,” Sébastien said. “She could go back home and live out her life.”

Piers had to concede that his cousin was particularly appealing when he was talking about surgery. A lock of hair had fallen over his forehead, and his eyes were bright.

Maybe he should steer the subject somewhere else. Linnet was obviously enthralled.

“Doesn’t alcohol work?” she asked. “I’ve read that soldiers in the field pour brandy over their wounds, and it limits the risk of infection.”

“Not good enough,” Piers said. “When we were younger and less morbid, we tried everything we could. But our patients died with distressing frequency.”

“Almost all of them,” Sébastien said. Now his face took on the sort of sweet distress that women found so appealing. Piers couldn’t make an expression like that if his own life depended on it. Of course, Sébastien really meant it. He was genuinely distraught when his patients died.

“So we stopped,” Piers said. “Sébastien couldn’t take the body count.”

“Limbs are one thing,” Sébastien said. “But the interior of the body is just too much of a risk.”

“That poor woman,” Linnet said.

Piers had forgotten whom they were talking about. “Ah. Well, at least she came here. We put her on so much opium that she feels no pain.”

“Is she awake?”

“Almost never. Which, for her, is by far the best situation. Stomach cancer—if that’s what she has—seems to be particularly painful.”

“What about her family?”

He shrugged. “I wouldn’t know about that. Perhaps she hasn’t got any.”

“Don’t any of the patients have families? No one seems to have any visitors.”

“That’s Nurse Matilda’s domain. I really wouldn’t know.”

Linnet’s eyes narrowed. “Mrs. Havelock seems to have very decided opinions. It’s possible that she’s told your patients that they aren’t allowed to have visitors.”