Read Online The Lady’s Secret by Joanna Chambers - Free Book Online Page B

things to eat and drink, and his preferred activities and companions. They knew him. Or at least, they knew certain details of his life. And Georgy knew more than most. The hours she spent with Harland were intimate ones, even if his attention was always elsewhere.
    While he barely noticed her, Georgy’s knowledge of Harland grew and grew. He was known as a man of wit, the longed-for guest every hostess hoped to tempt to her entertainment. He was renowned for his fine clothes, excellent stable and incomparable wine cellar. His opinion on matters of fashion was highly sought after and he was considered an authority on all the accoutrements of aristocratic living—horseflesh, tailoring, fast women. But he was not the vain, self-satisfied fop she had expected.
    She had watched him and seen that he loved beauty.
    He had a framed sketch in his bedchamber that she had noticed on her first day in the house, a sketch portrait of a man’s head. The subject was looking down, as though reading or working at something, completely absorbed in whatever it was. His dress was antique, Elizabethan. His hair looked soft and touchable, the charcoal strokes lovingly rendered; she could imagine how it would feel in her fingers. He’d been drawn, she felt, by someone who loved him. In one of his more loquacious moments, Harland told her it was a Carracci. He looked at the sketch every day. Sometimes for just a few moments, sometimes for minutes on end.
    It was just one of his treasures. His home was full of such things, pictures and silver and porcelain. Fine furniture and old books and manuscripts. They were symbols of wealth to be sure, but they were things he loved too. She saw it in the way he looked at them and held them. She recognised that pleasure, had felt it herself.
    To her shame, thoughts of Harland consumed her waking hours. Even when she retired at night, in the precious few hours that were not professionally devoted to him and his desires, she thought of him, lustful feelings surging.
    Was she an immoral woman, to want him with no care for the lack of a ring upon her finger? But she couldn’t help these desires; they came whether she willed them or no. Nor did she trouble herself to feel any guilt over the regularity with which her hand dipped between her legs to touch her own flesh, stroking herself until she managed to summon the secret shuddering pleasure of her night-time isolation.
     
    Since the day he’d seen Fellowes kiss Lily in the park, Nathan had avoided looking him directly in the eye. But it was impossible to be unaware of him, and sometimes he found himself staring when Fellowes’ attention was elsewhere. He was now intimately familiar with the tender whorls of bright hair that graced the fine indentations at the nape of his valet’s pale neck.
    It wasn’t, he told himself, that he found Fellowes attractive. He was not that way inclined. But he felt a pull, a draw that he was powerless to resist. He simply wanted—to look.
    He fought this helpless fascination, for a servant of all people, with every bit of resistance he had in him. He was convinced it was not sexual interest but it still made him uncomfortable and he was scrupulous about hiding it, most especially from Fellowes himself. The trouble was that he couldn’t explain the phenomenon away to his own satisfaction. Instead, he worried at it almost constantly, growing more disturbed each day.
    It was with some relief then, that Nathan stumbled upon an excuse for his interest in his valet.
    One evening, Nathan rushed back home from an unexpectedly long session at the House. He had barely half an hour to dress for dinner at Lady Hillington’s and was irritable that he wouldn’t have time to bathe. As soon as he entered the house, he tossed his hat at the approaching footman and made for the stairs, taking them two at a time. He burst into his rooms with an impatient stride and stalked through to the dressing room, where Fellowes sat, comfortably