With an exclamation of annoyance, Mina started squirming and wriggling, only to find herself abruptly rolled beneath him. “Nye!” she squealed in alarm.
He reared back at that and blinked down at her, looking confused.
“Let me up!” she huffed. “It’s gone eight in the morning.”
Nye ran a hand down his face and groaned. “It can’t be.”
“Well, it is. You fell asleep again!”
Grudgingly, he rolled his weight off her to let her up. Mina scrambled out of bed and started gathering slamming drawers and gathering her outfit together. Nye slowly propped himself up on one elbow to watch her.
“Aren’t you going to get up?” she asked pointedly.
“All in good time,” he answered, shoving her pillow behind him and lolling back against it. His eyes followed her with lazy appreciation.
Mina lowered her handful of underclothing with a glower. “I’m not putting on a show here,” she huffed. “I can hardly dress with an audience!”
“That act would never make it on the music hall,” Nye pointed out reasonably. “They’d want to see you take them off, not put them on.”
Only by supreme strength of will did Mina stop herself from bristling like an old schoolmarm. “I wouldn’t know about that,” she said loftily. “I’ve never been to the music hall.”
He gave a slow smile. “You don’t say.”
This talk of music halls made her think of the covered screens she had used previously, which were decorated with flyers and advertisements for similar acts. “If we’re to share this bedroom, I could do with some screens,” she mused. “Maybe I should bring those ones up from the scullery.”
“That tatty old thing,” Nye objected. “It’s not fit for anything but the rubbish tip.”
“Someone clearly went to a lot of trouble to paste those advertisements all over it,” she pointed out. “Who made it?”
He was silent a moment. “My mother,” he said finally. She waited a moment, but nothing more was forthcoming.
“Oh, well, I expect it could be restored with some work.”
He made a rude noise. “It’s hardly worth the bother.”
Mina pulled her drawers on underneath her billowing nightgown. “Maybe I should strip it down and re-decorate it with your news clippings,” she said, then wondered why she was provoking him. He clearly hadn’t wanted her to see those articles. She shot an uneasy look at him, wondering if she had gone too far.
Nye’s eyes glinted at her, despite his relaxed pose. “Well, this is unexpected. Are you teasing me, Mina?”
For some reason, her face filled with hot color. “No,” she burst out vehemently.
“It sounded like you were.”
Was she? Mina shifted from one foot to another. “I just—spoke without thinking, that’s all.”
“Maybe you should do that more often.”
She bit her lip and tied the drawstring at her waist. “Now you’re teasing me,” she said flatly. He didn’t answer but when she sat on the edge of the bed to pull on her stockings, she felt his arms close about her from behind.
“I was in earnest,” he said gruffly, then nuzzled his face to her neck. Mina gasped feeling the rasp of his stubble up and down her sensitive skin. “Don’t be so starchy.” Before she could make any reply to that, he released her with a kiss to her pulse point and ringing slap to her backside that was hard enough for her to feel despite both layers of cotton.
“Nye!” she gasped in reproach as he sauntered across the room to where his clothes lay across a chair back. He just smirked.
“Are those your clothes in the wardrobe?” Mina asked on impulse. “The red silk cravat and the black dress trousers?”
He looked across at her as he drew his collarless shirt down over his bare chest. “Aye, they’re my fancy town clothes,” he said with a wink. “You should see me rigged out in them, I’m a sight to behold.”
“Now you are teasing,” she answered, but looking at him, found she believed him. Will Nye would be a striking figure in that scarlet striped waistcoat and flashy silk tie. Even when clothes covered his rippling physique, they showed his shape was built of solid muscle over an impressive frame.
He did not possess the polite good looks which graced a ballroom or a tea party, Mina realized. But while he did not have the smooth address of his half-brother, Lord Faris, he had something infinitely more disturbing. A sort of earthy, sensual attractiveness. Dressed in his best, he would not cut a respectable figure, but instead the brash kind of figure her father would have crossed the street to