Royally Seduced - By Marie Donovan Page 0,69
who wouldn’t see anything but the exterior. If Jack weren’t a doctor, or count or just plain wealthy, Nadine wouldn’t be caught dead with a man who wore the T-shirt equivalent of a tube top.
Lily stared at them for any signs of lingering affection and only saw disgust on his face and desperation on Nadine’s. She tried to reach up to kiss him on each cheek but he backed away, a deliberate rejection in a culture where people regularly kissed casual acquaintances.
Nadine snatched the ticket from his hand and turned her back on him. The train doors opened and she climbed aboard. Jack, gentleman to the last, handed her luggage after her. Then he came back to Lily, not waiting to see the train depart.
He focused straight on her and the noise of the train and all the passengers receded. “Walk with me, Lily.” He took her backpack and pulled her suitcase behind him as they left the station.
“Where are we going?”
“Turn left here.” They were in the village square and he chose a seat underneath the giant plane tree. This one was much older than any New World specimens, its low, wide branches reaching fifty feet across and with gently peeling gray paper bark.
“I know how I feel about you, Lily, and this is how I feel about myself.” He took a deep breath. “When I was sick in Myanmar, I lost my authority, my dignity, everything. I wasn’t Dr. Jacques Montford, Count of Brissard. I was just another body lying on a cot, unable to move to even care for myself.”
“That’s horrible.” Lily couldn’t imagine the conditions he’d been under.
He made an impatient gesture. “It was, but it humbled me. I was used to striding through the camps, stopping to help almost as if I were a Greek god descending from Mt. Olympus to help the mere mortals below.”
“Hubris.”
“Exactly—overweening arrogance.” He shrugged sadly. “But I didn’t see it in myself until my outer pretensions were stripped away. I had come to Myanmar to help the people there, but they helped me. Several of them took turns nursing me, giving me spoonfuls of clean water and rehydration salts, changing my bedding, bathing me.
“I had had everything, but I only gave crumbs of myself to them. They had nothing, but they gave everything of themselves to me.” He blinked rapidly. “How could I have gone so many years and not seen what a failure I was? What a sham?”
Lily took his hand. “You were not a failure. When you are in a terrible situation trying to help people, you cannot give your whole self away. You’d break down, experience burnout, despair even. You must conserve yourself so you can go on to the next disaster in one piece.”
“But the arrogance,” he protested.
She squeezed his hand. “Stop the presses. Who ever heard of an arrogant doctor? Hey, that reminds me of a great American joke. What’s the difference between God and a doctor?”
“What?” he muttered. She could tell he had a good idea of the punch line.
“God doesn’t think he’s a doctor.” Lily raised her eyebrows. “Add to the fact you’re a hereditary nobleman whose family has ruled over a large chunk of France for the past thousand years and it’s a wonder you haven’t tried parting the Mediterranean off the coast of Nice and walking to Corsica.”
“Lily!” She’d startled a laugh from him.
“It’s true.” She plopped her hands on her hips. “I grew up with a lot of rich people who only thought they were nobility, but there was nothing noble about them. I can spot an arrogant phony ten miles away, and you, milord, are about the farthest from being an arrogant phony that there is.”
“Then you do care for me.”
She still wasn’t ready to say it, but she forced herself to anyway. “I guess you could say that because I love you, Jack.”
His face lit up. “You do?”
“Yes,” she muttered. “That’s what made this whole situation so painful. I thought you were this sweet, save-the-world kind of guy, and then you wound up having all this baggage.”
Instead of being insulted, he threw back his head and laughed. “Oh, Lily, Lily, only you would call it baggage. That’s what I love about you.”
She lifted her eyebrow. “That didn’t count. What do you love about me?”
“I love everything about you,” he clarified. “I love how you want to know everything about everybody. I love how you love Provence—the food, the people, the land. I love your writing.”
“Are you sure? Because