Between the Devil and Ian Eversea by Julie Anne Long

wall.
    She fancied she heard a grunt on the opposite side.
    Excellent.
    She exhaled at length, and then settled at her desk, stabbed a quill into some ink, unfolded her sheet of foolscap and carefully added to her list:
    Makes you feel like you’re the only woman in the world when he’s with you.
    It seemed a terrible character flaw. A terrible, terrible character flaw to look past her shoulder at a brunette who, while certainly pretty, was also getting on in years. But then, if she was a widow, that meant she possessed the freedom to do whatever she liked—including all of those things Giancarlo had suggested in Italian slang—with Ian Eversea. Who wasn’t a duke, who would never be a duke, who did not even have a title, even if he had those blue blue blue eyes that made her breath snag . . .
    Tansy flung herself backward on her bed. Just for a moment. Just for one, long, lovely moment. She would close her eyes for just a moment. Her feet were sore and it would be lovely to . . . lovely to . . .

 
    Chapter 8

    A ARGH!
    The moment her eyes fluttered open, her hands flew up to cradle her head. Cannons were firing in there. Last night’s champagne and ratafia seemed to have re-formed into a boiling ball of lead and situated itself behind one eye.
    BOOM. BOOM. BOOM. BOOM.
    She lay as still as she possibly could to avoid jarring anything overmuch. No effigy installed in Westminster Abbey had ever lain quite so motionless. She was fascinated by, and a little proud, of the gruesome pain. She felt very worldly. And nauseous.
    She glanced down. She was still entirely dressed. Apart from her slippers. Where were her slippers?
    But it was just about dawn . . .
    Curiosity was stronger than nausea.
    She slipped out of bed and very, very gingerly, as though her head was a grenade balanced atop her neck, carried herself to the window by following that beam like a tightrope. She gingerly parted the soft curtain.
    Aargh!
    Ghastly punishing light!
    Even though the sun was just a suggestion on the horizon, like half of a peach rising from the water.
    She recoiled and gripped her head.
    But instinct forced her forward again, and she tentatively cracked her eyelids.
    She was rewarded for enduring pain. The man was standing on the balcony!
    The sun had just reached him, and he was part in shadow, partly gilded. A pagan harlequin.
    For one merciful moment pain ceased.
    All of her senses were marshalled to the job of seeing him, like spectators rushing a fence at a horse race. She breathed and she felt him everywhere, again. As though her entire body wanted to participate in his beauty.
    But then even in her incapacitated state something about him . . .
    Something about the height . . . something about the way her breath stopped . . .
    Could it be a certain insufferable in-love-with-himself Eversea?
    He arched backward again, thrusting sun-burnished gorgeously muscled arms high into the air like an acrobat landing, and he roared—though this time the roar tapered off into what sounded suspiciously like a hungover groan.
    And then he broke wind, scratched his chest, and ducked back into his room.
    She snickered.
    “Ow ow ow ow ow ow!” And was immediately punished by the return of the booted battalion in her head.
    She stumbled and fell upon the servants bellpull as a lifeline.
    She would have happily traded all the blood in her veins at that moment for coffee.
    “ H AVE YOU ANY books on Richard the Third? Bent fellow, the kingdom-for-a-horse chap?”
    It seemed a miracle to be ambulatory, but after her second well-sugared cup of coffee and two and a half fluffy scones, Tansy and a similarly fortified Genevieve set out for a walk into town, on the theory that the fresh air and exercise would do them good and that Tansy would naturally like to get a closer look at Pennyroyal Green.
    The fresh air had done them good. It smelled faintly of the sea and green things, and she liked it. She could scarcely remember anything