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hitch, perhaps she would gasp in surprise as she rolled her fingers over the hard nub nestled in the puffy flesh there. In his mind, she moaned and clutched the pillow above her head. Her legs rubbed against each other restlessly, finally opening so she could slip a fingertip inside her aching channel. She groaned his name as her crisis took her, a flood of wetness covering her hand.
    His own climax took him by surprise. He spilled over his hand like a randy youth, panting with the exertion. Immediately, guilt assailed him. Joséphine wasn’t in his home for his pleasure. She was here to learn how to please Philipe, so that she could have a better life than she would have at the hands of her incompetent father and horrid stepmother.
    Cursing under his breath, he went to the pitcher and bowl beside the bed and washed himself. He undressed, kicking his clothing aside, and was about to go to his books for comfort when he caught sight of himself in his looking glass. When had the years robbed him of his youth? It must have been a gradual process, so why did it catch him by surprise now? He wasn’t fat, like Henrí had become, or bony with his skin hanging like wet paper over his frame like a truly old man. But where was the hard muscle he had earned from hours of hunting and sport? Now, his broad shoulders seemed a bit weary, his stomach a bit less tight than it had been in days past. He was no longer the man who inspired desire in women the very moment he threw aside his shirt.
    What would Jospehine have thought, faced with such a man? Her fantasies weren’t filled with men old enough to have fathered her, pathetically unaware of how truly old they had become. She deserved some rock-hard, vigorously rutting youth. Like Philipe.
    Though he’d never been jealous of another man a day in his life, Julien hated his friend now. “He should bestow another castle on me, the bastard.”
    The problem he faced now was somehow banishing that innocence that he found so charming, remove it from Joséphine’s demeanor entirely. She needed to be a master seductress. And he needed the strength to mold her into that role.
    The first task he would have to undertake was training her out of her shyness. The slow, timid way she had revealed herself to him tonight had been the most sensuous torture he’d ever endured. Philipe would have been bored in a minute.
    In the morning, the seamstress would come to tailor the new dresses. Marie was a better seamstress than one could hope to find at court, and just as talented with those nimble hands in the bedroom as she was with a needle. Julien had learned that from experience in the backroom of her little shop a few years prior, when he’d gone to have a new coat made. The memory of her bold sensuality made him smile, but his interest now lay elsewhere—down the corridor, to be exact.
    Marie would help him. All he had to do was say the word, and he fully intended to.
    * * * *
    True to her nature, Marie was enthusiastic about the role Julien asked her to play. He gave the seamstress her instructions and sent her off to work on the dresses, and after an hour he strode into Joséphine’s room.
    Joséphine gasped and held a hand to her bosom, though she was fully clothed in a green silk dress that practically drown her form in a sea of ruffles.
    “Good morning,” he responded pleasantly. “Did you sleep well?”
    Outrage painted cherry red circles on her face, and she snapped, “I slept well enough!”
    Marie stepped from behind the towering pile of silk. Slender as a reed, with an olive complexion and dark hair piled messily atop her head, she looked more like a mermaid than a seamstress. “Off,” she ordered, and when Joséphine was reluctant to disrobe she admonished, “I can’t sew with it on your body.”
    “Of course,” Joséphine said, flushing further. “Julien, privacy, please.”
    “It is nothing Julien has not seen before,” Marie scolded.
    With an outraged look at Julien,