And like a good lad, he did.
Chapter Eight
They’d lit thefire in the hearth as a courtesy. Jasper knew that. And, to their point, it was drafty and brisk tonight outside of Starling’s Rest.
But damned if that fire wasn’t entirely too enthusiastic for its required function.
By the second hour on the chaise, he’d removed his shoes, his socks, his jacket, cravat, waistcoat, and eventually his shirt as well, and that still wasn’t enough. He ended up perched on the sideboard by the windows, propping them open to let in some of the sea air to alleviate the suffocating temperature, and only then was he able to start to doze off.
He tossed the blanket on the floor, threw his arms up over his head, and for a time, did find oblivion, sleeping with his mouth hanging open and a bag of ice over his bruised eye.
Then the fire started to go down, and the opposite problem began to arise.
Luckily, there was a blanket on the floor.
At one point, shortly after he’d pulled the thing over him and poked at the fire a bit to get it to perk back up, he’d caught sight of Lady Selwyn floating about the halls with a plate piled high with midnight snacks in one hand and a small, fat pig under her other arm.
In any other house, that would likely have scared the absolute piss out of him. But this was Starling’s Rest.
And he was relatively certain it wasn’t even midnight yet.
The next time he opened his eyes, it was to yet another spectral woman in the archway, hovering and staring. He did yelp. Just a little, but it was only Libba.
“Must you?!” he hissed once she’d stepped into the light.
She raised her eyebrows, tilting her head, which was turbaned in some sort of molten silver fabric, and gave an amused twist of her lips. “Evidently.”
He threw the blanket off and sat up, gesturing impatiently at the empty spot next to him. “I just saw Hattie, I think,” he told her. “She was carrying a pig.”
“Yes, she does that,” Libba said with a shrug, pulling a vibrant-pink dressing gown closer around her body and considering the seat he’d just offered her with a tightening of her lips. Her dark eyes flicked over him, lingering on his chest. “Why are you naked?”
“I’m not!” he replied, crossing his arms over his bosoms like a bathing nymph who’d just been caught. “It was hot.”
She bent at the waist, squinting at the swell of muscle under his collarbone. “You’re cut,” she observed. “Did someone have a knife?”
“‘A knife’? God, no,” he said, looking down and touching the little scrape. “One of them was wearing a cheap ring, I think. It’s nothing.”
“It’snotnothing, Jasper,” she replied, softly but firmly, looking around and choosing to sit opposite him on an armchair rather than on the offered end of the chaise. “Rhys told me what happened.”
For a moment, Jasper just stared at her. “Why’d he do that?”
She only smiled, sharp and glinting in the night.
And suddenly, he was very, very aware that they were alone together and that his clothes were mostly off.
He blinked, shifting and pulling the blanket up around his waist, his cheeks heating. Damned fire.
It didn’t help that she kept scraping her eyes over his bare torso with a leisurely quirk of her head, reaching up to toy with the one rogue curl that had escaped that slinky wrap of fabric around her head.
It was absurd and he knew it was absurd. He had seen this woman in every season of her life. In a thousand scandalous costumes and personalities, rouged and fitted and deliberately seductive. He had seen every member of this household in their nightclothes more times than he could count.
But for some reason, seeing her there, lit only by firelight in that absurd pink robe, which was perfectly modest and knotted appropriately at the waist, was distressing him something fierce.
Maybe it was the silver turban.
Perhaps it was that.
He hadn’t been lying, exactly, when he’d told her, some weeks ago, that he was half in love with every woman he met. It was more that Jasper thought there was something to admire in most women, especially the beautiful ones. It was simply the part of him that was a man. And it was long how he had coped with noticing anything particularly alluring about this one.
