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“Would you like some help, Frances?” he called, balancing himself on his elbows.
“What I would like you to do is have Grunyon prepare that damned potion!”
He sighed deeply. “All right,” he said, and rose. “I did promise, didn’t I?”
He gazed hopefully toward the screen, sighed again, and took himself to his own bedchamber.
It was only another ten minutes before Agnes entered, bearing the potion. “Mr. Grunyon said you would like to have this, my lady,” she said.
Frances downed the entire glass without pause. “That was awful,” she said. She sat back in her chair, leaned her head back, and closed her eyes.
It was nearly an hour later before hunger drove Frances downstairs to the breakfast room. To her chagrin, Hawk sat at the table, his plate in front of him, the Gazette in his hands. Why couldn’t he have been long gone by now? It wasn’t fair.
He smiled at her, seeing her hesitate, and slowly folded the paper. “Do you feel better?”
“Yes,” she said, succumbing to a fickle fate and seating herself, “it was truly dreadful, but I feel somewhat back to myself again.”
He took a bit of toast piled with raspberry jam. He met her eyes, licked the jam from the corner of his mouth, and said, “I wonder if your breasts taste as good as the rest of you.”
She felt her eyes begin to cross.
“Don’t worry, my dear, only you and I are here,” he said in a soothing voice. “Would you like me to serve you? You doubtless have a ravishing hunger.”
She said nothing to that drawing comment, served herself, her movements sluggish. He waited until she had a mouth of scrambled eggs, and said, “Your scent is most delightfully, uniquely you. And I do believe that your taste is more invigorating than Cook’s jam here. In any case, it drove me wild.”
“Shut up,” said Frances, her mouth still full of egg.
“Pardon me, my dear? Did you say something?”
Frances finished chewing her eggs, swallowed, and said in a very clear, carrying voice, “I said shut up.”
“Ah. How very disheartening. A great lover expects to hear cooing, delighted little sighs the morning after.”
She shot him a scowl replete with silent recriminations and focused all her attention on her bacon.
He watched her attack her food with a vengeance. He wondered with a silent laugh if she pictured him as the bacon as she poked and prodded it with her knife.
“I shall meet with Marcus now, I believe,” he said, rising. “I imagine that it will take me a while to wrest the reins of management from your white hands.”
To his surprise, his jest was met with a distressed look. He said, his eyes narrowing a bit, “Surely, Frances, you don’t expect me to be a lapdog of no account?”
She swallowed, seeing everything taken from her, seeing herself alone and of no worth at all.
“It is my estate, you know.”
“Why don’t you return to London,” she said evenly. “Surely I must be pregnant after last night.”
“If howling pleasure on a woman’s part was a sign of conception, I just might in all good faith assume that you would give birth to twins at the very least.”
Her fork clattered to her plate. She rose from her chair and faced him, her hands on her hips. Hawk eyed her heaving breasts with a good deal of interest.
“I really can’t wait, my dear, to caress your breasts. They look utterly inviting this very minute. Is that what you wish, with that pose of yours?”
Frances hurled her empty teacup at him. He ducked it, laughed, and gave her a leering, knowing look. She picked up her plate, only to quietly set it down again upon the entrance of Otis.
Hawk said to his butler, his voice showing his high good humor, “Well, man, what is it? Her ladyship and I were enjoying a most invigorating morning conversation.”
“A letter, my lord,” Otis said. “It followed you from London. It is from your father, my lord.”
