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A large breakfast and then the doctor to come and look at her—make certain she had done no damage to her hips and joints. She was his now, and he was going to look after her.
Eleanor stirred again, shifted, and climbed onto him as though he was a large bolster in the bed. Her head was on his stomach now. One hand was clenched and jammed against his armpit and the other draped across his ribs. Her breath tickled and he found himself smiling. Then he felt the flutter of eyelashes against the sensitive skin of his belly.
‘Your stomach is rumbling,’ she said, her voice muffled.
‘I am hungry. My wife was cross with me, and then seduced me so I missed my supper.’
She gave a little snort and then kissed him, shifted, found his navel and kissed that too, then opened her eyes properly. ‘Oh, my goodness. Is it always like that?’
Blake levered himself up on his elbows to look over her body. ‘No. It is all your fault, and now you will have to help me subdue it before we can have any breakfast.’
‘Are you sure?’
He nodded and reached down, pulled her up for a kiss, then tumbled her over. ‘Do you remember what to do?’
‘Of course—but I expect we will have to practice.’
She was laughing at him. He could see the gilt flecks in her eyes sparkling as they always seemed to when she was amused. He recalled one young lady confiding in him that it was fatal for anyone with pretension to beauty to laugh because it made lines, and lines led to wrinkles. She had lowered her voice on the word, as though it was an obscenity, or perhaps a contagious disease. He hadn’t thought anything of it, but now, looking down at Eleanor’s smile, he thought how sad it was…that girl denying herself the expression of happiness.
Surely sex was safe enough? Keep her happy in bed and perhaps she would not notice the things he could not give her?
‘Oh, yes. Practice is absolutely compulsory,’ Blake said, and proceeded to demonstrate.
*
‘Blake, you are making me feel like a Périgord goose being stuffed for foie gras,’ Ellie protested as he refilled her cup with chocolate.
He glanced around the room, saw it was temporarily empty of staff, and smiled. ‘I worry that you will blow away like thistledown at any moment.’
‘You will just have to keep me pinned down,’ she whispered, delighted when colour came up over his cheekbones. Making Blake blush was delicious. The fact that she could make a joke about being pinned down was almost as good.
‘I have sent for Dr Murray,’ he said as he handed her the strawberry conserve. ‘I want him to make certain no damage was done yesterday by that shoe.’
He could have said, make certain that you did no damage, Ellie thought, biting back her immediate response that she did not need to see a doctor. She had to admit he would have been perfectly justified. The thought made her keep silent.
‘He is very good,’ Blake assured her. ‘Young, trained in Edinburgh. A Scot. You will like him.’
Liking a doctor was a new concept. Her only encounter with the medical profession had been over her broken leg, when there had been numerous ham-fisted and agonising attempts to set it, and it had not left her feeling very kindly towards it.
‘Yes, Blake,’ she said obediently, and was rewarded by a very suspicious look.
Dr Murray turned up so soon after they had finished breakfast that Ellie suspected Blake had summoned him at some ungodly hour before she was dressed, and that even if it had been two in the morning, with the intelligence that the new countess had a mild head cold, the doctor would have hastened to Berkeley Square.
Her faint irritation with Blake vanished when she found Dr Murray was cheerful, sensitive and did not talk down to her—all novelties in her experience of the medical profession. He examined her dispassionately through her shift while chatting of the difference between London and Edinburgh, the weather, the latest ludicrous fashions—all interspersed with questions.
‘How does it feel if I press this joint? Could you lean as far to the right as possible? Had you ever tried a raised shoe before?’
While she was behind the screen, dressing again, he said, ‘There are two options. You can persist with the raised shoe and everything will gradually but painfully adjust, or you can go back to ordinary shoes and accept the limp. As it is, there will be soreness for some days, but you have done no damage.’
‘If I learn to walk with the raised shoe then whenever I do not wear it—?’
‘You will be worse off than you are now,’ he finished for her. ‘You will be reliant on the shoe.’
‘In that case there is no question. I will go back to how
I was before,’ Ellie said as she came out from behind the screen. ‘I could always walk with very little discomfort, whether I was barefoot or wearing shoes. Now, there is something else I want to ask you.’
She smiled inwardly as she sat down and gestured for the doctor to take a chair. He was bracing himself for a new bride’s blushing enquiries about some intimate matter, she was certain.
