Read Online My Lady, My Lord by Katharine Ashe - Free Book Online Page B

moral right and intellectual strength. Hadn’t the Roman moralist Seneca said something like that?
    The trouble was, the more she thought about it, the larger it seemed to grow. She stared at her lap, the fine linen nightshirt tenting at her hips, and groaned in frustration.
    Men were disgusting brutes, and Ian Chance was the worst of the lot. She wished she could convince herself he’d planned this. But that was ridiculous.
    Probably.
    He was capable of the worst sort of unpleasantness, after all.
    But she knew enough about human anatomy to have some idea of what was going on. She only wished she understood why it was going on at this particular moment, with no woman in sight. And she wished she knew how to stop it.
    A discreet knock sounded at the door. Corinna threw herself onto her side and bunched the bed linens around her waist.
    “Come in.”
    “A message just arrived for you, my lord,” the valet said, placing a calling card dish on the bed table and withdrawing to the dressing room. The interruption seemed to have deflated her problem slightly, and she shimmied to the edge of the mattress and reached for the envelope.
    Her own writing paper stared up at her. She tore the envelope open.
     
    West end of the Serpentine. 9:00 A.M.
     
    “Barbarian.” He could have at least written please. And in full sentences. If he knew how.
    “Ah, um,” she called toward the dressing room. “Excuse me?” The day before she should have thought to ask Ian the names of his servants. It was excessively inconvenient addressing them as “you” all the time, though of course she knew Simmons, the butler.
    The valet came from behind the door. “My lord?” He was a neat little man dressed in impeccable clothing, with calm, wise gray eyes. At least Ian hired respectable servants, even if his friends and mistresses were despicable.
    “I should like to get dressed, and to have my barouche brought around.”
    “The barouche, my lord? Are you traveling a great distance this morning? If so, I shall instruct the cook to pack a picnic for you.”
    “No. I am only going to the park.”
    “Then may I suggest your phaeton, my lord? Mr. Wigsby has just had it repainted and it looks splendid.”
    Corinna was a perfectly good horsewoman, but she could not drive a phaeton if her life depended on it. And, although she’d ridden astride a several times in private, she didn’t know that she trusted herself on one of Ian’s saddle horses, not after that incident all those Christmases ago.
    “The barouche will do well enough for me today.”
    The valet looked skeptical. She gestured him away to the dressing room. Impertinent servant, probably much smarter than Ian and accustomed to pushing his master around.
    She swung her legs over the edge of the bed and sighed in relief. An uncomfortable tightness lingered in her groin, but the swelling had decreased. Perhaps if she distracted herself with some other activity it would go away completely.
    But she could not resist the temptation to experiment. A person interested in science never could.
    She closed her eyes and imagined Amabel Weston the last time she’d seen her at a ball, her half-naked bosom spilling out of the tiny bodice of her nearly translucent gown.
    Nothing. No reaction from below.
    Corinna opened her eyes and looked down. The thing was almost entirely flat now beneath the nightshirt. Fascinating. Here was clear evidence for the situational disassociation of mind and flesh, just as the ancient physician Galen had suggested, in conversation with Aristotle’s even older tract on human anatomy. It was unfortunate that no scientist currently alive could duplicate the experiment, except of course upon Ian at the present moment. But Corinna didn’t know precisely how that could be tested given the anatomical characteristics of the female body.
    Her lips twisted. Ian would probably have an idea of how to test it. The libertine.
    Warmth stirred in her foreign appendage. It