Read More than a Mistress/No Man's Mistress for Free Online

sharply. “And then have to wait while it was being made?”
    “No,” she replied quite calmly. “But it was not where you said it would be. Indeed, it was not anywhere in plain sight. I brought a cushion too as the stool looks rather low.”
    She set it down, placed the cushion on top of it, and went down on one knee in order to lift his leg. He dreaded having it touched. But her hands were both gentle and strong. He felt scarcely any additional pain.Perhaps, he thought, he should have her cradle his head in those hands. He pursed his lips to stop himself from chuckling.
    His dressing gown had fallen open to reveal the bandage cutting into the reddened flesh of his calf. He frowned.
    “You see?” Jane Ingleby said. “Your leg has swollen and must be twice as painful as it need be. You really must keep it up as you were told, however fretful and inconvenient it may be to do so. I suppose you consider it unmanly to give in to an indisposition. Men can be so silly that way.”
    “Indeed?” he said frostily, viewing the top of her hideous and very new cap with extreme distaste. Why he had not dismissed her with a figurative boot in the rear end ten minutes ago he did not know. Why he had hired her in the first place he could not fathom since he blamed her entirely for his misfortune. She was a shrew and would worry him to death like a cat with a mouse long before the three weeks were over.
    But the alternative was to have Barnard fussing over him and blanching as pale as any sheet every time he so much as caught sight of his master’s bandage.
    Besides, he was going to need something to stimulate his mind while he was incarcerated inside his town house, Jocelyn decided. He could not expect his friends and family to camp out in his drawing room and give him their constant company.
    “Yes, indeed.” She stood up and looked down at him. Not only were her eyes clear blue, he noticed, but they were rimmed by thick long lashes several shades darker than her almost invisible hair. They were the sort of eyes in which a man might well drown himself if the rest ofher person and character were only a match for them. But there was that mouth not far below them, and it was still talking.
    “This bandage needs changing,” she said. “It is the one Dr. Raikes put on yesterday morning. He is not returning until tomorrow, I believe he said. That is too long a time for one bandage even apart from the swelling. I will dress the wound afresh.”
    He did not want anyone within one yard of the bandage or the wound beneath it. But that was a craven attitude, he knew. Besides, the bandage really did feel too tight. And besides again, he had employed her as a nurse. Let her earn her keep, then.
    “What are you waiting for?” he asked irritably. “Permission? Is it possible that you deem it necessary to have my
permission
to supersede one of London’s most eminent physicians and to maul my person, Miss Ingleby?” It annoyed him that he had not insisted upon calling her Jane. A nice meek name. A total misnomer for the blue-eyed dragon who looked calmly back at him.
    “I do not intend to maul you, your grace,” she said, “but to make you more comfortable. I will not hurt you. I promise.”
    He set his head back against the headrest of his chair and closed his eyes. And opened them hastily again. Headaches, of course—at least the caliber of headache that he had been carrying around with him since he regained consciousness a couple of hours before—were not eased when experienced from behind lowered eyelids.
    She closed the door quietly behind her, he noticed, as she had done when she had gone in search of the footstool.Thank God for small mercies. Now if only she would keep her mouth shut.…
    F OR THE FIRST TIME in a long while Jane felt as if she were in familiar territory. She unwound the bandage with slow care and eased it free of the wound, which had bled a little and caused the bandage to stick. She looked up as she freed