Page 10 of How the Earl Entices

With resolve, she left the bedroom. “I’ll be right back.” Then she tossed wryly over her shoulder at his unconscious form, “Don’t go anywhere!”

When she returned a few minutes later, she carried everything needed to patch him up—cloth for bandages, hot water, scissors, needle and thread. Because it wasn’t enough to let him remain until the storm broke. In the condition he was in, he wouldn’t make it very far down the road before he collapsed again, and she had to make certain that he could get as far away as possible.

The cut on his arm needed stitches, no doubt of that. But the wound on his leg worried her more. A long deep slash, most likely from a sharp knife. Had he gotten into a bar fight? Had he cheated at cards or attempted to trick a group of local sailors—was that what he’d meant when he’d said he’d committed a crime?

No. Gentlemen didn’t gamble with sailors, and they certainly didn’t appear out of the dark of night in Sea Haven. It wasn’t a bar fight; neither was it an attack by a footpad. He wouldn’t be hiding from either of those, or have so many harsh cuts and bruises.

A chill spiraled down her spine. Something worse had brought him here.

“Got yourself into a mess, did you?” She sat on the edge of the bed and eyed him grimly. “Now you’ve left it to me to clean up.”

Her eyes darted to sneak a glance at his chest. But she certainly didn’t need a reminder of how broad and muscular it was, how the dusting of hair trailed over the hard ridges of his abdomen and disappeared beneath his waistband. Or that she couldn’t very well sew up his leg with his trousers in the way.

“Well, you’re alreadyhalfnaked.” As she looked once more at his left leg, she gathered her nerve and reached for the fall of his trousers. “And you’ve nothing I haven’t seen before.”

Despite that reassurance to herself, her hands shook as she unbuttoned his trousers, then wiggled them down, careful not to jostle his leg and make it bleed more. She averted her eyes as she stripped off the wet material. Down over his hips, along his hard thighs, over muscular calves, and off, to drop them onto the floor.

Thunk.

She glanced at the pile of wet material and saw a small bulge sewn into the left cuff. Tiny, not much bigger than her thumb, yet definitely not part of any tailor’s handiwork she’d ever seen. Frowning with curiosity, she reached—

An unconscious groan came from him.

Straightening, she glanced at him and gasped, unprepared for the sight of him, lying sprawled across her bed. Completely naked.

She rolled her eyes and blew out a mouthful of air. Just her luck. Of all the men she should finally have naked in her bed after nearly a decade of chaste widowhood, it would have to behim. A Carlisle. Not just any Carlisle, either, but the one who’d claimed her first-ever society waltz, only to have it stolen away by the man who very shortly afterward became her husband.

Ross hadn’t remembered her, but then, why would he? The ball had been a masquerade and only her second society outing, and at sixteen, she was unknown to the rest of theton, even without her mask. They’d not spoken more than a handful of words when he requested the waltz, then none ever again after David took her into his arms and whirled her around the floor, stealing both the waltz and her future.

Moreover, she certainly wasn’t the same person now as before. During the past decade, she’d gone from being London’s Incomparable to a widowed mother in a fishing village. Whatever aspects of her previous life that her new identity, time, and age hadn’t managed to hide, the scar on her cheek successfully concealed.

She repeated in an unconvincing mutter as her gaze traveled over him, “Nothing I haven’t seen before.”

Her face heated when her gaze strayed beneath his waist. Well, she might have seensomethinglike that before…but apparently there were things the cold rain didn’t shrink.

As she let herself take a good long look, the heat in her cheeks changed from embarrassment to something intense, something unexpected that tickled at the backs of her knees and stirred in her core. Hot and achy. Oddly urgent. She couldn’t help but stare.

He was beautiful. The strangeness of that realization struck her, that a man could be beautiful. But he was. She’d seen naked men before, had been married for nearly two years. Yet she’d never seen one like him. The sculpted panes of his chest that gave way to the chiseled muscles of his abdomen, the long and graceful stretch of muscles in his thighs…He reminded her of a Greek sculpture, one of those gods from Lord Elgin’s marbles, except fashioned in warm flesh and blood that had her longing to run her hands over him, to touch him and prove he was real. To simplyfeelhim.

Her hand reached toward him of its own volition—

No.She snatched it back. What on God’s earth was she thinking, losing her control like that? And losing of her mind, too, apparently. She simply couldn’t touch him beyond tending to his wounds. Couldnot!A whole new ocean of trouble would drown her if she did.

So she focused her attention on the gash that sliced across his thigh and set to cleaning and sewing it. “A knife did this to you.”

The cut was too smooth, too clean to be anything else. She’d tended to the wounds of enough sailors over the years when she’d helped Alice at the apothecary shop to recognize the slash of a blade when she saw one. Her hands trembled, not from each unconscious flinch he gave when the needle popped sickeningly through the skin and the thread pulled through after, but in fearful worry. Why had someone done this to him? They’d meant to hurt. Possibly even to kill.

Dear God, what had he gotten himself into?

She finished her gruesome sewing and sat back with a ragged sigh of relief that it was over. Then her gaze dropped to the cast off trousers on the floor.

Well, there was no way to put those back on. Not as wet as they were, not over damp skin. And certainly not as large and unwieldy as his muscular body was. So she picked up the throw from the back of her rocking chair and spread it over him. Faint disappointment panged inside her that his beautiful body was now covered.

“The worst is over.” She sat on the side of the bed and frowned guiltily at the beads of sweat that had blossomed across his forehead at her handiwork. “Should I distract you from the pain the same way I distract Ethan whenever he skins a knee, with a spoonful of sugar?”

She wiped gently at his forehead with the towel, careful to avoid the small cuts and bruises at his brow and cheek.Thosemarks had been made by fists, as had the bruises on his chest and ribs. “Perhaps you’d prefer to change your mind and accept that jug of whiskey after all?”

After several ragged breaths that moved his bare chest up and down in small spasms, she saw his brow relax as the pain eased from him. His heavy body seemed to soften into the mattress, and his breathing grew deep and steady. Finally calm.