All About Seduction(86)

Jack caught her hand, and a jolt of energy ran through her.

“Are you all right?” He blinked at her, although his heavy breathing still echoed in the room.

Not trusting her voice, she nodded and pulled her hand away. She needed to get him back before an early servant discovered them. She picked up his underclothes and held them out to him.

He grunted and let his hand drop to the bed, fisted around his smalls. He turned to his side and closed his eyes.

She shook his shoulder.

His eyes were glassy and unfocused when he opened them, then his lashes shuttered down.

“Jack.”

“Mmm.”

“You have to get dressed.” She tugged on his arm trying to get him to sit.

“Prefer wearin’ you,” he mumbled. He broke her hold and grabbed her arm in an effortless maneuver. He dragged her down beside him and curled his arm around her. “I can hold you now.”

“That doesn’t even make any sense.” The softening and tensing reaction she experienced didn’t make sense either. She pushed his heavy arm away and slid off the bed. Leaning over him, she begged him to see reason, “Please. You cannot be caught upstairs, naked.”

He put his hand on her cheek. “All right, two minutes.”

Startled by how much she wanted to linger and feel his caresses, Caroline backed away from him. His arm fell heavily to the bed. She stood to see the mantel clock.

It was nearly a quarter till. Panic threatened to choke her. They still had to make it through the darkened service stairs before anyone else thought to use them.

“We don’t have two minutes, John Applegate,” she whispered as sternly as she could.

Pulling down the covers, she lifted his good leg and pulled his drawers over it. When she made it to the cast on his other leg, she gingerly worked the material over it. He rolled to his back and lifted his leg to make it easy on her.

She looked up to find him regarding her intensely. Had the sleep been a pretense? But then Mr. Broadhurst had often rolled over after intercourse and almost immediately begun snoring.

She averted her head and pulled the material up. She refused to think of how less threatening his manhood looked now, less full and glistening with moisture. He dug his foot into the bed and lifted his hips. She opened his undershirt and held it out.

Jack groaned and sat up. Her gaze was drawn to the ripple of muscle under his skin.

Hesitating, she reached for the hem of his nightshirt.

“You would take that off now.” He sounded mildly aggrieved.

Had he wanted her to take it off earlier? Would it have been faster if she had? Jack tugged on the nightshirt, pulling it down where she had lifted it up to her thighs.

“Much as I would like you to take it off, you should keep it on until you get back to your room. I can guarantee no man would want to let you get away wearing that negligee.”

He buttoned the undershirt. The coals provided little more than a faint orange glow in the predawn darkness, and his breath formed mist in the air. “You’ll need it,” she protested. “I’ll just wrap up in the bedspread again.”

“I need your help getting down the stairs, and if I trip on that damn thing . . .” He watched her intently. “If I had regular clothes, I could dress and tell my morning minder I was up early.”

Caroline closed her eyes. She’d refused to let him have clothes for fear he’d leave before he was adequately healed.

Jack reached for his crutches. “Go. If you can’t return the nightshirt to me, then I’ll tell whoever comes I spilled upon it and you took it to be laundered—or better yet, I was sick upon it.”

“Do lies come so easy to you?”

He stood. “Only when I need to protect a lady’s reputation. Let’s go, Mrs. Broadhurst, before the servants catch you consorting with a millworker.”





Chapter 17



Caroline sneaked back up the servants’ stair, into the dressing room attached to Lord Langley’s former room. She shed Jack’s nightshirt and stuffed it in a dresser drawer before checking the main hallway. When she saw no one, she slipped out of the empty bedchamber. Breathing a sigh of relief, she scurried down the hall to her room.

The door was locked. She rattled it. Fearing she might be trapped in the hallway, apprehension scuttled down her spine. No response. On her toes, she skittered down the hall to Mr. Broadhurst’s room. Her husband’s door was locked too.