Looking frazzled, the woman stopped and delivered her report. “The earl requested that I tell you that the first course is getting cold.” She looked at Brooke, and her throat bobbed with a nervous swallow. “His lordship requested your presence as well, Brooke.”
Lady Lemons blinked in surprise.
“Did he now?” Nick would take the victory. The old man had folded like a cardboard box. He didn’t bother to hide his smile as he held out an elbow to Brooke. “Well, we can’t disappoint Earl Cold Soup now, can we?”
Chapter Thirteen
Brooke lay awake staring at the canopy above her bed and counting the petals on the pink flowers by the light of the full moon streaming in from her window. Dinner had been awkward, but not nearly as much as walking up the stairs with Nick to their connecting rooms.
That thing between them had started off as a quiet hum in the back of her mind but had steadily grown into a thrum between her legs. She clenched her thighs together and fisted her hands in her sheets. Damn it. That wasn’t allowed. She would not get herself off to the earl’s heir, and that’s how she’d think of him. As. The. Earl’s. Heir. Not as the man with an eight-pack and a slow smile that made her mouth go dry. Her traitorous brain immediately began to wonder just what he could do with that mouth. A lot more than her last few boyfriends, not that any of them had been recent enough to be memorable. The last time she’d orgasmed from something other than her fingers had been a year ago when she’d still been in Manchester, failing spectacularly to make it in the city.
For not the first time since she’d moved back home, she wished getting laid in Bowhaven without having the entire village know was a little easier—or possible at all.
“Ow! Shit.” Nick’s startled cry from the other side of the closed connecting door boomed in their quiet wing of Dallinger Park. A hard bang and a thunk followed it. “Fuck me.” Then nothing.
Bloody hell. Silence had never sounded so dangerous.
Brooke was out of her bed and through the connecting door before she had a chance to second-guess herself, which usually happened as soon as she’d had the first thought, so that was saying something.
“Motherfucker!” The loud curse came from inside the still-dark en suite bathroom.
She beelined it to the door and pressed the light on. Water streamed from the sink’s hot faucet, a cloud of steam rising up from the basin. Nick sat on the edge of the clawfoot tub across from the sink in only his pants with the heel of his hand pressed against his forehead, his face a pissed-off grimace. Yeah, she shouldn’t have gotten caught up in what he was—or really wasn’t—wearing, but it was hard not to follow the honey-brown happy trail down his lower abs until it disappeared behind the waistband of his boxer briefs.
“Are you okay?” she asked, her heart speeding. “What happened?”
“What is wrong with this country? Why do you people not have a single water faucet like the rest of the world instead of separate taps for hot and cold water?” he all but growled, flexing his left hand that had a soft flush to it.
Snapped back from the edge of the imagined discovery of what lay beneath his boxer briefs, Brooke hustled forward and shut off the tap. “Did you burn yourself?”
He looked up and winced, then pointed at the part of the wall that jutted out near the sink to form a high shelf that just happened to be forehead-level for someone who was six feet, three inches tall. “Not really, but I clocked my head on the wall when my half-awake self forgot there was one tap for hot and another for cold.”
Hands on her hips, she started toward him. “Let me see.”
He didn’t move, not even a twitch. “It’s just a scratch. “
Ignoring his pronouncement, she stepped between his legs and peeled his hand away from his forehead. There was an angry red circle with a white line in the middle bisected by a small cut. There wasn’t much blood, but…
“You should probably go to hospital to make sure you don’t have a concussion or need stitches.”
“I’m not going to the hospital. I don’t need stitches—I’ve been told on good authority that chicks dig scars—and I don’t have a concussion. Been there, know the symptoms. Not worried.”
Well, now she had proof that bullshit macho stubbornness crossed easily over international waters. “Don’t be as thick as mince; you need to get it looked at.”
He craned his head around her, taking a peek at his reflection in the mirror above the sink. “A Band-Aid and I’ll be fine.”
“You can’t be this stubborn,” she said, shaking her head.
He grinned up at her. “Can and am. So unless you’re planning on hefting me over your shoulder and toting my ass to the hospital, then it looks like I win.”
She hated that he was right, but he was, because there was no way she could force him. “You’re insufferable.”
He shrugged his broad, bare shoulders. “So I’ve been told.”
Okay, that was too distracting. Keeping her gaze locked on his when every instinct in her was screaming for her to take in every hard plane and muscled curve so she could commit it to memory to enjoy for later tonight when she was alone in bed. Ugh. What are you doing, you git? He is injured. He is the earl’s heir. He is hot as a fireplace poker…and wouldn’t it be nice to see his poker? Why did her brain go there and why did her body only encourage her lusty thoughts by going soft and tight and wet and achy all at once? It wasn’t fair.
“Fine,” she said as she backpedaled toward the door before she gave in to the call of his pheromones and her out-of-control hormones. “I’ll be right back, then.”
Heart fluttering and stomach filled with champagne bubbles, she practically sprinted out of there and back into her room. Her emergency kit was in the bottom of her suitcase, under her panties where she always kept it. It had become habit when she was in Manchester and she’d thought those late-night calls from Reggie were spontaneous and romantic instead of what they really were—lazy and entitled. Somehow she’d thought her little kit with its safety pins, bandages, stain stick, condoms, and other you-never-know-what-could-happen things made her more cosmopolitan, changing her from being the village girl far from home who hadn’t realized until it was too late what it felt like to be taken in and chewed up by a city that couldn’t care less about her.