Her resolve not to say more than a polite greeting to him was forgotten on a rush of words. “What happened to you?” She was not conscious she’d moved until she stood right before him, and his heady masculine scent invaded her, but she could not will herself to move away.
He raised a gloved hand to his right cheek. “Is the damned thing bleeding again?”
She nodded. “What happened?”
“More training. But I was distracted with other thoughts.” His gaze locked on her, smoky blue and intense.
“You’ll be the death of him,” his aunt murmured as she gave him a kiss and swept out of the room with her lady’s maid behind her. From the hall came Helen’s impatient voice. “Come, Lady Madelaine,ifyou still are departing.”
A sense of vital desperation clung to Grey as a faint, sardonic smile curved his lips. “You don’t have to avoid me. You’ve made clear your wishes.”
It had been on the tip of her tongue to say goodbye, but his words changed everything. He’d completely misinterpreted why she was avoiding him, and his misunderstanding was entirely her fault. She needed to be truthful with him. Her stomach rolled and heat crept up her chest and face. She had to be brave. Shehadto tell him, or risk losing him to another woman, as his aunt had so bluntly pointed out. “Lady Helen, I’ll be staying if your lady’s maid can still act as chaperone.”
Helen’s silent answer was to send her maid scurrying back into the room. Louisa bobbed a curtsy to them. “Where would you like me?”
“Yorkshire,” Grey responded with a scowl toward the door where Helen’s laughter trickled back to them from the hall.
Madelaine pressed her lips together on her amusement. “Why don’t you take the settee? It’s the most comfortable chair in the room and you can spread out your knitting.” Not to mention it was the only place she and Grey would have been able to sit close together. Putting Louisa there took care of the problem of her and Grey possibly touching. Even an inadvertent caress could crumble her defenses.
As Louisa shuffled over to the settee, a faint smile curved Grey’s lips. “Why do you need another chaperone? My sister is here. And she’s on the mend.” Grey swept his hand toward the bed where Elizabeth slept so soundly that her snoring filled the room.
Madelaine arched an eyebrow. “Yes, a fine chaperone she’d make.”
Grey grinned lazily, his gaze sweeping down the length of Madelaine’s body. “She seems the perfect chaperone to me.”
“You mustn’t say such things.”
“What did I say?” He looked utterly innocent and handsome.
She laughed as she recounted his words. “You said nothing. But it’s thewayyou say nothing.”
“I promise to say everything in the most monotone voice I can muster the entire time we’re together.” He motioned toward two chairs under the window that faced Elizabeth’s bed. “We can sit there, talk and keep an eye on Liz at the same time.”
Madelaine nodded and started toward the chairs, startling when Grey took her hand. “Lord Grey,” she chided, addressing him formally because of Louisa’s presence. She tried to pull her hand away, but he held tight.
“Just leading you safely to your seat,” he said in a voice so lacking intonation that she chuckled.
“How very kind of you, Lord Grey. I’ve been walking on my own two legs for twenty years now. I’m quite the expert.”
“Yes, but this floor is treacherously bumpy.” He made a show of tapping his foot on the floor.
Once seated, he released her hand, but not without trailing his fingers along the inside of her palm. Delicious tingling sensations ran from her palm, up the length of her arm and sent her heart into a faster beat. Tongue tied with how he made her feelandnervous over how to start her confession, she settled on an obvious task. “Shall I clean your cut for you?”
“If you’re not afraid to touch me.” A provocative challenge rang in his words.
Madelaine narrowed her eyes in warning even as her body responded to the subtle change of his tone. She rose, wet a rag, and came to sit beside him. “You’ve forgotten yourself.” She dabbed at his cut.
“I’m terribly sorry.” He grinned sheepishly, and she could just imagine him young, full of mischief, and grinning precisely that way to his nanny.
After she wiped the last traces of blood away, she returned the rag to the wash stand and settled back beside Grey. “I bet you were never spanked as a child, were you?”
“Of course not.”
She suddenly recalled the last spanking her mother had given her. A neighbor had come to call and Madelaine had tromped through the house in a pair of breeches she’d stolen from one of the servant boy’s rooms. Later, after the neighbor had left, her mother had come to Madelaine’s room, shut the door, and whipped her until welts covered Madelaine’s bottom. She’d forgotten the moment until just now.
“Madelaine,” Grey said lowly, his voice so razor-sharp that it snapped her from her recollection, and she glanced automatically to Elizabeth’s bed to see what was the matter. But Elizabeth lay still, her snoring filling the room.
“What’s the matter?” The dark look on his face puzzled her.
