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now and I will let him know.”
    “But I would so love to choose everything myself,” she said. “May I, please? It is a man who is to furnish the house? Men invariably have poor taste and never think of coordinating colors and styles.” She smiled impishly at him. “Some men, anyway. I do not necessarily include present company.”
    He ran one hand through his hair. “Is not a bed a bed and a sofa a sofa?” he said.
    “You see?” She laughed at him. “I rest my case, sir.”
    “Priss,” he said, “if you are to be my mistress, I think it would be as well to drop the ‘sir,’ don’t you? You had better call me Gerald.”
    “Gerald,” she said, and smiled at him.
    Before they left the house to return to Miss Blythe’s, he agreed to send her shopping the next day with Mrs. Wilson, the housekeeper he had engaged for her. He had also agreed to allow her to interview and hire the remaining two servants he wished her to have.
    “If they do a poor job,” she said with a smile, “I will have only myself to blame since I will have hired them myself. Are you sure you are willing for me to have four servants, Gerald? It seems an excessive number.”
    “You are my mistress, Priss,” he said. “I don’t want anyone to be able to say that I don’t know how to treat you right.”
    He was glad the house was unfurnished and there was no opportunity to consummate their new relationship. She somehow looked different from the Prissy he had been calling on and bedding for all of two months. She looked prettier and daintier and more childlike.
    She looked like more of a person. He had only ever seen her engaged in her profession. He had not expected that she would be interested in the house and its furnishings or in its staffing. He had expected thatshe would be interested only in the performance of her duties and the earning of her salary.
    He knew nothing whatsoever about her, he realized suddenly. Except her body, of course. He knew that quite intimately—and liked what he knew.
    He did not want to know her as a person. He would be glad when she was in residence and he could visit her, as he had at Kit’s, purely in order to satisfy his appetites. Except that he would no longer have to make an appointment and his visits would no longer be limited to one hour.
    She was his. His personal possession. He liked the thought despite all his earlier reluctance to keeping a mistress.
    But he was glad he could not make love to her that day. She was out of her milieu and he was a little uncomfortable with her. Besides, there was that bruise and the reminder it gave him that she had been regularly possessed by many other men apart from himself. It was a knowledge that he had carefully suppressed until the night before when he had seen the physical evidence.
    He did not like the thought.
    “I do like it, Gerald,” she said as she tied the strings of her bonnet in the hall and he picked up his hat and cane. “Thank you and for the offer you made me this morning. I will try my very best to please you for as long as you choose to employ me.”
    “You always have pleased me, Priss,” he said. “You are good.”
    “Are you not leaving town after all?” she asked.
    “Not just yet,” he said. “I’ll go into the country for the summer. But you will be able to stay here, Priss. I have leased the house for a year.”
    She smiled at him and preceded him through the door.
    T HE E ARL OF S EVERN was laughing—again. He had seemed to do nothing but laugh since his return to town, Sir Gerald thought.
    “So you have set her up in a love nest, Ger,” the earl said. “She must be something, this Prissy of yours. You must take me to meet her before I return to the country next week. Will you?”
    “I suppose I could arrange that,” Sir Gerald said. “But I have told her it is her house, Miles. I would have to have her consent first.”
    “Of course,” the earl said. “Your timing was poor, though, Ger. I was going to come to