Tied With a Bow

forced herself to gather her scattered thoughts and emotions, to form a plan. “Lady Basing has asked me to supervise the decorations for the house and ballroom.”
    Lucien watched her carefully. “So?”
    “So”—she exhaled—“tomorrow after breakfast I will go into the woods to collect what I need.”
    It was considered bad luck to bring greenery into the house before Christmas Eve. But there were few flowers available in England in wintertime. She would need to store the boughs in the potting shed and bring them in to decorate the day before.
    “You want me to find you in the woods.” Disbelief edged his voice.
    In the cold, in the snow, where they could be private. Safe. Fully dressed.
    She nodded. “There are a number of fine holly trees in the oak-wood beyond the orchard. Near the gamekeeper’s cottage,” she added, in case he needed further direction.
    His gaze searched hers before he bowed curtly. “Until tomorrow, then.”
    She moistened her lips. “Tomorrow.”
    The word hung between them like a promise. She felt committed to far more than a mere meeting.
    Which was pure spinster foolishness, concocted of nothing more than loneliness and imagination. Surely by tomorrow she would be herself again. She had too much sense—didn’t she?—to lose her head or her heart or her virtue to a man who was courting her cousin.
    She met Lucien’s heavy-lidded gaze and flushed.
    However much she might want to.

     
    The door clicked shut behind her.
    “It’s not like you to have a woman in your room,” Martin observed.
    “I did not have her,” Lucien said.
    Damn it all. He didn’t know whether to curse his luck or bless his escape. He must have lost his mind. He knew better than to take advantage of a gently bred virgin in his bedchamber, no matter how lovely or willing.
    Aimée’s blue eyes, shining with trust and desire, seared his memory. You would never hurt me.
    God.
    If Martin had interrupted them only a few minutes later . . . Lucien broke into a cold sweat just thinking about what he had almost done.
    What he’d lost the chance to do.
    Martin snorted as he laid out scissors and gauze on the dressing table. “And I suppose you didn’t arrange to meet her for a little romp and tumble in the woods tomorrow, either. Let me see that hand.”
    Lucien scowled. The skate blade had cut from the fleshy side of his palm to the knuckle of his little finger. Not deep, but painful. “A proper servant would pretend not to have heard that.”
    Martin pressed a pad to the wound. “Likely so,” he agreed. “But a proper servant would be nagging for proper wages.”
    Guilt and frustration roiled inside Lucien. He gritted his teeth. “You know I cannot afford to pay you now. If you prefer to return to Maiden Lane—”
    “I’m not going back to that henhouse.” Martin wrapped the pad with gauze. “Anyways, you ain’t never abandoned us, and I’m not abandoning you. A gentleman needs a valet.”
    “I’m not a real gentleman,” Lucien reminded him. As far as this world was concerned, he was the Earl of Amherst’s bastard.
    “You’re as much a gentleman as I am a valet,” Martin retorted. “Pretend to be something long enough, and it comes true.”
    Lucien had never been any good at pretending. Perhaps that was why he had so much trouble feeling truly human.
    There was no pretense in Aimée at all. Circumstances may have forced her to play the drudge, yet her essential spirit was not dimmed by her role in her cousin’s house.
    Could he say the same about his life with Amherst?
    Lucien shut the thought away. “You could do better for yourself elsewhere.”
    Martin shrugged. “Maybe. But I got a bed and three squares a day now, which is more than I had before you pulled me out of that gutter.”
    Less than a year ago, Lucien had stumbled over Martin’s body in an alley behind Covent Garden, where he had been beaten half to death by a client who had used him thoroughly and then claimed outrage at being tricked into paying for a boy. After Fanny had nursed the boy back to health, Martin had attached himself to Lucien as his manservant.
    “But we’re running short of the ready,” Martin continued, tying the bandage into a neat knot. “Here and at Fanny’s place. This girl, she’s not the one we came for, is she? The rich one.”
    “No,” Lucien admitted.
    No money, no family, no other acquaintance in England, she had said.
    It didn’t matter. She was in his head and in his blood, a