she was sitting back on her heels, staring at him, her eyes wide. “What’s the matter now?”
Her gaze darted between him and his empty bed, the coverlet trailing on the floor. “I…nothing, my lord.”
No doubt she was stunned he’d left his bed to help her gather up the spilled coal. “There’s no need to look so shocked. I’d do the same for any of my servants.” That is, he assumed he would. He’d never known Amy, his other housemaid, to drop so much as a single piece of coal, never mind the whole scuttle.
Gideon tossed the last piece into the bin and rose to his feet. He was dusting off his hands when he realized Cecilia had gone still. He glanced down at her, and found her staring up at him, her cheeks flaming. “What is it?”
“You’re, ah…” She made a vague gesture toward him. “Your…”
Gideon looked down at himself. He was dressed in the same breeches he’d been wearing when he came upon her in the courtyard yesterday, but before he’d fallen into his bed, he’d shed his boots, stripped off his coat and loosened the buttons at his neck. His white linen shirt gaped open from his throat to his mid-chest.
It was his bare skin that had flustered her. At least, Gideon thought it must be that, because she couldn’t seem to look away from it. Even as her cheeks went scarlet with embarrassment, her avid gaze slid from the notch in his throat to the long lengths of his collarbones, then down, down, down, her pink lips parting on an indrawn breath as she took in the smattering of dark hair on his chest.
As her dark eyes moved over him like a caress, touching skin so long neglected Gideon had nearly forgotten it was there, he became uncomfortably aware he’d also loosened the buttons at the waistband of his breeches before he’d climbed into his bed last night. Thankfully, the long tail of his shirt covered him to mid-thigh, otherwise Cecilia would have been witness to some unexpected, unwelcome, and ungentlemanly…
Twitching.
It wasn’t anything to do with her, specifically. Nothing at all. He was betrothed, and to an undisputed beauty. It was just that it had been so long since he’d had a woman in his bedchamber, and longer still since a woman had looked at him with anything other than suspicion or horror. His body was confused. It would have reacted the same way to any woman.
But that didn’t stop heat from sweeping over him, blazing across every inch of his skin. He must have made a sound—a sigh, perhaps, or a choked gasp, but not a groan, certainly not that—because her gaze shot from his chest to his face and lingered there. Their breaths quickened as moment after moment unfurled, and neither of them was able to look away—
“I…please, my lord, there’s no need for you to, to…” Cecilia made a frantic dive for the scuttle, and stumbled to her feet. She dragged an arm across her forehead, leaving a black smear on her pale skin.
Gideon frowned at it, his fingers twitching with an odd urge to rub it away. “Wait, Cecilia, you have a mark on your—”
“I apologize for my clumsiness, Lord Darlington. It won’t happen again.” Then she was gone in a whirl of skirts and coal dust, before Gideon could utter a single word.
* * * *
Cecilia flew down the corridor as fast as a lady could fly with a full coal scuttle tripping up her every step. She didn’t stop until she rounded the corner, then she dropped the scuttle—again—and fell against the wall at her back.
That…hadn’t gone well.
The sick plummeting of her stomach when she realized the bucket was slipping from her fingers—that she was, in fact going to drop it, just as he’d predicted she would—then the deafening crash when the overflowing bucket hit the floor, and the shocked look on Lord Darlington’s face…
Each torturous moment of it had felt like a waking nightmare.
It hadn’t occurred to her until that deafening crash Lord Darlington might be right—that she did lack the physical strength to make a proper housemaid. Cecilia had never been a lady of leisure, but teaching children their numbers and letters was far less taxing than hauling buckets of water and coal up dozens of stairs.
She hadn’t been prepared for him to rise from his bed and cross the room to help her pick up the coal. Even now, she couldn’t make sense of it. He hadn’t hidden