My Last Duchess (The Wildes of Lindow Castle #0.5) - Eloisa James Page 0,81

of that polite daylight conversation and observance of convention melted away in the soft glimmer of moon and candle. It was as though the obscurity of the night gave them sanction to be their true selves. The way he looked at her was nothing like the way Rodney used to look at her. Oh, Wick desired her. She could see a demand in his eyes, a hunger that he couldn’t mask.

But more than that . . . he liked her. He thought she was funny. He actually enjoyed listening to her. It was intoxicating, it was bewitching, it was everything Rodney had never demonstrated and never could.

Philippa turned around to see Wick walking toward her, his step unhurried. He was smiling, that lopsided grin that made her feel warm all over.

“How do you manage to always look so impeccable?” she asked, when he was near. “Do you never sleep?” She wore a nightdress and a wrapper, and her hair tumbled down her back every which way. After the first night or two, when the baby had cried all night long, she’d stopped worrying about what she looked like at night.

“I don’t sleep in my livery, if that’s what you mean,” Wick said. “How is our princeling tonight?” He peered at the baby’s little head. Seeing that he had a new audience, Jonas let out a howl but quieted again.

“I think he’s better,” Philippa said, rubbing the baby’s back. “He won’t let me sit down, though, or even stop walking.”

In the last nights, they had talked about everything from Shakespeare (she liked Romeo and Juliet; he thought Romeo was a tiresome melancholic) to lawyers (she thought they ought to donate their time to poor widows; he thought that was unlikely) to dissections (she found the idea disturbing; he was of the opinion that it was the only way to really identify the kind of illness a patient had suffered from).

Now he picked up their conversation directly where they’d left it the night before.

“I thought of another reason that dissection is important. How else are we to learn of the body’s systems if we don’t investigate them thoroughly?”

“I wouldn’t want to learn about the body if it required cutting one open,” she said with a shudder.

“Why not? I think it would be fascinating. I wouldn’t want to be a surgeon; I don’t like causing pain. But if the person has already left his body, why not try to find out how he died, and why?”

“All those blood and guts,” she said. “Obviously.”

“Entrails,” he said, almost dreamily. “Back when I was at university, I read that there are enough entrails in the human body to stretch all the way down an average street. I can’t imagine.”

“Don’t listen to him,” Philippa told Jonas, who had woken. “You’ll feel queasy and start crying again.”

Jonas burped and closed his eyes once more.

“I’m going to stop walking and sit down, Jonas,” she told him. “Just for a little while.” Then she sank carefully into the sofa that Wick had ordered placed in the portrait gallery after it became clear it was prime walking-Jonas territory.

“Why don’t you go and dissect some dead bodies, then?” she asked, trying to ignore the fact—and utterly failing to do so—that Wick had sat down beside her. Her pulse instantly quickened. For one thing, his leg was touching hers. For another, as soon as they sat down, it felt as if the world drew in and became as small as the three of them. As if she and Wick and sleeping Jonas were utterly alone in the whole castle.

“Me?” He seemed startled for a moment. “Nonsense.”

“Why nonsense? My uncle told me that there’s a terrible shortage of doctors in England. You told me the other night that you’d been at Oxford; did you take a degree?”

“Of course.”

“A good degree?” she persisted.

“A double first. Is that good enough for you?”

“Goodness. Well, then, all you have to do is attend the university in Edinburgh for a year,” she said. “I suppose it would be better to go a little longer, but my uncle told me that many doctors attend for only a year.”

“I couldn’t do that.”

“Why?”

“Well, because Gabriel and I—because I’m here.”

“I can see that it’s quite nice for your brother to have you as his majordomo,” she acknowledged, “but if you wish to heal people, I think every sick person would feel that you should forfeit the butler’s pantry.” She heard her own voice and winced with embarrassment. It was something about him. He