Then he said, “This way,mon petit chou,” and brought her to the servant door placed discreetly in a corner of her room.
She tensed as they passed through it. “Where are we going?”
He pulled her close to whisper, “My bedchamber, through the servant passage.”
“Are you not worried about running into servants?” she whispered back as he maneuvered the passage, the way he’d done so often as a boy.
“Not right now. They’re all still dealing with guests downstairs. We merely have to avoid your mother … and Zack, who was sent up to bed a while ago.”
After that, she remained quiet until they had slipped into his room. Then she stood staring about her as he walked into the adjoining dressing room and dismissed his valet for the night, making sure the fellow went out the servant door and not through his bedchamber.
When Heathbrook went back in to join her, half-afraid she might have fled like a nymph disappearing into a mirrored pool, he was relieved to find her still rooted to his Aubusson rug, though barefoot now, looking more like a dryad than a naiad.
Of course. Because she was a creature of the earth and plants and gardens, not of the water.
“I would not have expected this.” She swept her hand to indicate his room. “All the simplicity. You seem so comfortable with the elaborate French decor in your town house that these furnishings of walnut and rosewood and all the blues in your bedclothes and rugs surprise me.” A teasing smile crossed her lips. “No ormolu clocks? No gilded chairs and curved settees? No fur rugs?”
“My father’s tastes were different from my mother’s. He liked showy and ostentatious. Mother liked … simple. This is Mother’s room. I moved into it thinking I would redo Father’s in time. But I’ve grown to like this one.” His heart racing, he walked up to take her in his arms. “Especially with you in it.”
She lifted an eyebrow. “You, sir, are too ready with lavish compliments.”
“Aren’t lavish compliments generally preferred by women?” He reached up to tug off her nightcap, bringing her gorgeous chocolate-brownhair cascading down over her shoulders and making him itch to have it spread on a pillow beneath him.
Apparently ignoring her own quickening breaths, she answered saucily, “I do not know about other women, but I prefer honest to lavish any day.”
“And I don’t see why compliments can’t be both.” He buried his hands in her hair, marveling at the shimmer and glorious excess of it. “For example, you,ma chérie,have the most luscious head of hair I’ve ever seen on a woman. It should be in a painting.”
She opened her mouth, and he put his finger to it. “Before you chide me, I must point out that my compliment is perfectly honest … not to mention, lavish, since your hair itself is lavish.”
“You are ridiculous,” she protested, clearly trying not to smile.
He untied her wrapper and pushed it off her shoulders, then caught his breath to see so much of her at once, barely veiled by her paper-thin linen nightgown. “And you are the loveliest thing ever to grace this bedchamber. Is that honest enough for you?”
“Honestandlavish,” she teased.
“Perhaps not all of the overwrought feelings have been wiped out of me, Miss Practical.” He skimmed the back of his hand over one breast through the linen, exulting when her nipple beaded up beneath it and she blushed crimson.
“Will I get to seeyouwithout your clothes, sir?” she asked.
“If you wish.”
“Oh, I definitely wish.” She pushed his coat off his shoulders, then folded it primly and carried it to a chair where she centered it on the seat.
When he chuckled, she returned and went to work on unbuttoning his waistcoat. “What do you find so funny, my lord?” she asked, sounding missish.
“You and your careful ways. I would have tossed my coat aside willy-nilly. Like this.” He wriggled out of his waistcoat and sent it flying.
“Your valet will not appreciate that,” she said, clearly biting back a smile.
“I pay him well enough not to care.” He slipped off his shoes,then tore at his cravat so unsuccessfully that she said, with laughter in her voice, “Stop that! All you are doing is knotting it more.” She took it over and had his cravat unknotted in no time.
“This is why I never wore elaborate cravats in Verdun or Bitche,” he said, working the buttons of her nightgown loose, now desperate to see her without it. “I’m not good at being my own valet.”
“Clearly,” she said in a throaty voice that notched up his arousal. “But you excel at being a lady’s maid.”
“At the moment, I’m well motivated to be so.” Just the sight of her breasts thinly veiled was rousing his blood.
When she went to work on his shirt buttons, he was too impatient to wait. Catching a hank of her nightgown, he began to raise it up her legs, then sucked in a breath to find them long, shapely, andbare.