it uncommon among their class.
“Let me see!” Prudence lunged over Amanda’s lap to peer out the carriage window as they clopped in beneath the mews. “Holy Moses! You’re right. A man’s legs are sticking out from beneath as if the structure landed right on him. What if he drowned in that puddle of muck he’s in? Someone should do something, Nora! Oh…no…wait. The legs are moving. All is well. At least, I think it is.”
“I’m glad our welcome party isn’t a corpse.” Secretly pleased that her sister Pru still used the nickname she’d gleaned at finishing school, Nora marked her page and closed her book. She’d never liked the name Honoria. It was stolid and plain, belonging more to a nun or a suffragist than a debutante. Nora sounded much more sophisticated, she thought. Tidier, even.
Though Amanda Pettifer was Nora’s age at twenty, she and Prudence—almost three years their junior at seventeen—were thick as thieves. Likely, because they both shared a penchant for mischief and misbehavior.
They’d all bundled into the carriage from the Green Street Station, anxious to arrive home. Nora’s coming out ball was in three days, and there was so much to be done. She couldn’t help but become almost overwrought with anxiety at the thought.
The carriage trundled to a stop in their Mayfair courtyard as she swept aside the curtains to see what all the hullabaloo was about.
Along the wall of their extensive stables, tucked into the square behind their grand row house, Mrs. Fick’s glass and wrought-iron greenhouse glinted with the colors of the setting sun.
Indeed, sprawled in a shallow mud puddle from a pit dug beneath the foundation, were two long male legs clad in filthy trousers. As the girls all watched, the legs bent and splayed indecently as mud-caked hands appeared and clasped the underside of the structure. Then, with a serpentine struggle, the entire body of a man shimmied on his back from beneath.
Before sitting up, he reached back under and retrieved several work tools.
“Good lord, Nora, he’s all but naked,” Prudence gasped.
The young man hauled himself to his feet and smoothed his muddy hair before scraping some of the muck from his torso and flicking it onto the ground.
Amanda’s buttercream lace fan snapped open with a frenetic rip. “My,” she exclaimed huskily. “He’s built exactly like that statue of Ares in the Louvre.”
Nora barely heard their remarks, so arrested was she by the sight of him.
Amanda had the right of it. His figure could have been sculpted by the hands of a master. His jaw chiseled granite and his smooth sinewy torso shaped from marble. He was long-limbed and slender, his shoulders round and his arms corded with lean muscle. The flat discs of his chest gave way to grooved ribs and an abdomen so defined she could count the individual muscles, six in all.
She’d never seen a man like this in the flesh. Sculptors were a talented lot, to be sure, but they worked in clay and stone. A cold, lifeless modality in comparison. It could not begin to capture the jaw-dropping glint of golden skin. The line of intriguing hair disappearing into his trousers. Nor the peaks and shadows created by the grooves of muscle as he moved and flexed beneath the disappearing sunlight.
The moment the footman opened the door, Amanda accepted his hand and all but leapt out of the carriage to whistle at the workman. “You seem to have lost your clothing, sir,” she taunted.
His head snapped up as Prudence followed Amanda out of the carriage and tittered, “Mr. Fick will have to turn the garden hose on you, before all that mud dries you into a statue.”
“Let it dry, I say.” Amanda made a show of leering over at him, assessing him from head to toe. “Store him in a museum. I’d pay admittance to see that work of art regularly.”
“Amanda! What if someone heard you?” Prudence put a lace-gloved hand over her friend’s unruly mouth, though they were both giggling uncontrollably.
“What do I care?” Amanda grappled her hand away and flounced toward the door, her cream ruffled skirts fanning out behind her. “I’m to marry a short, pudgy lord who owns half of Cheshire, but I will always be an appreciator of excellent artisan workmanship. They don’t make men like that in our class, do they? More’s the pity.”
Nora was about to deliver a sharp word of reprimand when Mr. Fick, the spindly, white-haired stable master tossed a balled-up cotton shirt at the lad, hitting him