The door clicked shut behind her.
“It’s not like you to have a woman in your room,” Martin observed.
“I did not have her,” Lucien said.
Damn it all. He didn’t know whether to curse his luck or bless his escape. He must have lost his mind. He knew better than to take advantage of a gently bred virgin in his bedchamber, no matter how lovely or willing.
Aimée’s blue eyes, shining with trust and desire, seared his memory. You would never hurt me.
God.
If Martin had interrupted them only a few minutes later . . . Lucien broke into a cold sweat just thinking about what he had almost done.
What he’d lost the chance to do.
Martin snorted as he laid out scissors and gauze on the dressing table. “And I suppose you didn’t arrange to meet her for a little romp and tumble in the woods tomorrow, either. Let me see that hand.”
Lucien scowled. The skate blade had cut from the fleshy side of his palm to the knuckle of his little finger. Not deep, but painful. “A proper servant would pretend not to have heard that.”
Martin pressed a pad to the wound. “Likely so,” he agreed. “But a proper servant would be nagging for proper wages.”
Guilt and frustration roiled inside Lucien. He gritted his teeth. “You know I cannot afford to pay you now. If you prefer to return to Maiden Lane—”
“I’m not going back to that henhouse.” Martin wrapped the pad with gauze. “Anyways, you ain’t never abandoned us, and I’m not abandoning you. A gentleman needs a valet.”
“I’m not a real gentleman,” Lucien reminded him. As far as this world was concerned, he was the Earl of Amherst’s bastard.
“You’re as much a gentleman as I am a valet,” Martin retorted. “Pretend to be something long enough, and it comes true.”
Lucien had never been any good at pretending. Perhaps that was why he had so much trouble feeling truly human.
There was no pretense in Aimée at all. Circumstances may have forced her to play the drudge, yet her essential spirit was not dimmed by her role in her cousin’s house.
Could he say the same about his life with Amherst?
Lucien shut the thought away. “You could do better for yourself elsewhere.”
Martin shrugged. “Maybe. But I got a bed and three squares a day now, which is more than I had before you pulled me out of that gutter.”
Less than a year ago, Lucien had stumbled over Martin’s body in an alley behind Covent Garden, where he had been beaten half to death by a client who had used him thoroughly and then claimed outrage at being tricked into paying for a boy. After Fanny had nursed the boy back to health, Martin had attached himself to Lucien as his manservant.
“But we’re running short of the ready,” Martin continued, tying the bandage into a neat knot. “Here and at Fanny’s place. This girl, she’s not the one we came for, is she? The rich one.”
“No,” Lucien admitted.
No money, no family, no other acquaintance in England, she had said.
It didn’t matter. She was in his head and in his blood, a distraction he did not need, a temptation he could not avoid.
“What do you want with her, then?” Martin asked.
“I don’t know yet,” Lucien admitted. He had Fallen for her once. He was prepared to sacrifice for her again. But how much this time? “She wants my help.”
Martin clipped the bandage ends. “Seems to me you got enough strays counting on you already.”
“Then one more should make no difference.”
But Aimée was different. She always had been.