Page 79 of The Seduction of an English Scoundrel

“Then you can hardly expect me to help,” he said in bewilderment.

“There’s nothing you can do anyway,” she muttered.

“Are you certain? Jane, you—you aren’t with child?”

“Oh, Simon.”

“Well. It’s not that bad then, is it?” he asked in a hopeful voice.

“I have dug my own grave,” she said. “It is beyond bad.”

“Sedgecroft is a powerful man. Perhaps he has a solution.”

“Don’t you understand anything? It is Sedgecroft who is my problem. He wants me to be his mistress. Yes, Simon, he asked me this afternoon.”

He glanced down at the floor, a flush of anger suffusing his face. “I suppose this is all Nigel’s fault,” he said awkwardly. “I could kill the fool for this. What are we going to do?”

What Jane wanted to do was hide under the covers and pretend she had never started this whole debacle. “You’re my brother,” she said in desperation. “You know what Papa would do in your place. Make him leave.”

For a moment Simon looked so appalled at the prospect of confronting a personage like Sedgecroft that Jane might have laughed. Had she not wanted to die.

Then Simon’s gaze slid away from hers, and she knew she had lost her last defender. “That’s the problem,” he said, swallowing hard. “As much as I’d like to plant the marquess a facer, Papa left me explicit instructions that I was not to interfere in this courtship. Strange, now that I think of it.”

“Courtship?” Jane cried. “This is not a courtship. It is Wellington taking Toulouse, the French peasants storming the Bastille, the . . .” The color drained from her face. “Do you mean to say that Papa has no objection to my becoming Sedgecroft’s mistress?”

“Ah,” said a deep voice from the doorway. “Our patient is well enough to argue. There is hope for her then.”

Jane shrank beneath the covers even as that velvet baritone seemed to penetrate into her bones. “Grayson, this is most unseemly. What are you doing in my room?”

He came up to the side of the bed, his masculine face a mask of oversolicitous concern. “Simon had been gone so long, I began to fear you’d taken a turn for the worse. I must say you look better than I expected, Jane.”

“I thought so, too,” Simon said, throwing another clod of dirt on Jane’s self-dug grave. “In fact, I never would have believed there was a thing wrong—” His voice cracked at the frown she shot him. “Except for the fever, of course.”

“Let me check.” Grayson leaned down and pressed his cool hand to Jane’s forehead, his blue eyes boring into hers. “Oh, dear.”

She felt a traitorous glow of pleasure at his familiar touch. “ ‘Oh, dear’ what?” she asked suspiciously.

“You are rather warm.” He leaned down a little lower, his voice a teasing murmur. “Is it really the fever, or are you thinking about what we did last night?”

“Go away,” she whispered. “My brother is watching.”

“Shall I ask him to leave?” he whispered back.

“You’re the one who should leave,” she managed to choke out. “Simon?”

Simon cleared his throat. “What did your physician say about her condition, Sedgecroft?”

“Well, without a complete examination, his best advice was either a bloodletting or a holiday by the sea.”

“I am not submitting to a bloodletting,” Jane said with a shiver of repugnance.

Grayson straightened, his gaze moving over her huddled form. “And so I told him. Which is why I have made arrangements for a stay at my villa in Brighton. We leave first thing in the morning.”

“Well,” Simon said, missing his sister’s frantic looks. “There’s nothing like the sea air to revive one’s spirits.”

“Except that we are going to meet the family at Belshire Hall,” Jane said in a shrill voice. “An unplanned holiday really is tempting but impractical.”

Grayson stared down at her, his eyes glittering with unholy determination. “Where your health is concerned, Jane,” he said in dulcet tones underlaid with iron, “we will not take risks. I insist you stay at the seaside. I refuse to allow you to go to the country.”