thighs. Plump above, slender below.
“Your ankles are rather small,” he said.
“I have boots!” Betsy pulled forward a pair of battered boots and stamped into them. “I used to wear them riding when I was a girl, so I asked Aunt Knowe to have them taken from the attic.”
“You wore riding boots as a girl?”
She nodded. “It looks better, doesn’t it?” she said, before the mirror again. “My legs don’t look as skinny.”
No wonder lust was one of the seven deadly sins. It was as strong as the instinct to live.
“No, they don’t.” His voice could be classified as a groan, if one were so inclined.
A grin crossed Betsy’s face. “Jeremy! Regard me as if I were a stranger, remember?”
“Do you have any more of the material you bound your breasts with?”
“Muslin? Yes. My maid brought rolls of bandages.”
“Wind them around your waist until you look like a stocky young lad.”
Nodding, her hands went to the buttons on her jacket.
“Not until I leave. Where’s your sense of self-protection, Bess?”
“I don’t need that around you.” But she dropped her hands.
It was the work of a moment to wrap his hands around her shoulders, bend his head, and catch her lips in a hard kiss. He was no tamed and toothless alley cat.
She giggled and kissed him back, her tongue lapping his until his mind blurred. And when her teeth closed on his bottom lip? He growled and his hands slid down her back, rounding that luscious bottom.
“You’re sweaty,” she said, sometime later.
That was when Jeremy realized that Betsy had her hands under his shirt in the back, tracing his muscles. He jerked. “Bloody hell.”
Her hands slid from his back. “I watched you pitching snow in the courtyard. I couldn’t stop wondering . . .” To his shock, she raised a slender finger and licked it. His tool throbbed, demanding attention. Demanding her.
“Mmmm,” she said with throaty pleasure. “Salt.”
Jeremy’s brain had seized up, and he came up with only one response. “You must say No to the duke,” he said. “Conclusively.”
She licked another finger. “Duke? What duke?”
“Greywick.”
“Thaddeus is not a duke, but a viscount.”
“Bess. He’s courting you.”
“Oh, all right. I must say no to being a duchess, is that your command?”
“Precisely.”
Her hands went back to her coat. “Unless you want to help me transform into a plump schoolboy, you’d better leave.”
For a moment, time froze. Jeremy’s eyes caught on the laughing curve of her red lips, the heat of her gaze as it met his.
“I do want that,” he said, his voice a ragged groan.
“Next time?”
Next time. His mind obediently served up an image of Betsy in her breeches, laughing from horseback.
It wasn’t until he was sluicing himself in water that he realized he’d imagined her in the courtyard of the house where he grew up.
The house he had sworn never to return to after he’d disgraced his name.
When he first returned from the colonies, he and his father had fought bitterly; he couldn’t remember the precise words now. But he had left believing that he was thrown out.
It seemed he had been entirely wrong. Unsurprising. In those first months, anger had raged inside him to the point where he hadn’t been able to sleep or think. The only sounds in his ears were the ricochet of bullets, and the moans of dying men.
The anger was still there, the grief and guilt too. But it felt as if a snowstorm had covered those emotions. They were muted by soft mounds of snow. The voices of dying men quieted.
Not silenced . . . but muted.
The voices of his men would always be with him. His experience on the battlefield had changed him forever.
But he could live in this wintry landscape better than the hellfire he had walked through for the last months.
He shook his hair, drops of water flying across the chamber. He felt clean.
Chapter Eighteen
While Betsy waited for Winnie to return with a greatcoat, she stripped off her coat, waistcoat, and the long white shirt underneath. Her breasts were tightly bound. Below them her waist curved in and her hips curved out.
The breeches strained over her hips, and when she turned to peer in the glass over her shoulder, she could actually see the stitches that held the fabric together over the roundest part of her bottom. She’d be lucky not to split them down the middle.
A giggle escaped her at the memory of Jeremy’s expression. She put a hand on her rear and slowly ran it over the curve. There was something