Linda Needham by My Wicked Earl

to the chamber next to his. But that would only bring on a torment of its own. He swallowed back his untoward anger and said as evenly as he could manage, “You’ll let me or Mumberton know if you need anything.”
    “Any sign of my belongings? I was hoping that’s why you’d come.”
    “Not for a few hours.” It wasn’t until she was shrugging out of the huge frock coat that he realized where he’d seen it. “That’s my coat, madam.”
    She clutched it against her chest. “And your socks.”
    “My what?” She slipped her foot out of the tall boot and showed him a long white sock drooping off the end of her toes, the cuff bunched down enough to reveal the angry bruise she’d gotten from the damnable shackle.
    “Mumberton was busy enough without me bothering him about socks and such.” She rucked the sock up her shapely calf all the way toher perfect knee and then jammed her foot back into the boot, prepared to do battle against the furniture, while the boy dodged between them on his errand.
    “I suppose you stole those boots off my greensman while he was still wearing them.”
    “Do let me know if he complains, and I’ll return them instantly.” The genuine teasing of her smile stunned him, caught him in the gut, and filled him with a callow wanting. Wanting to sample her mouth and savor her laughter, to bury his face in her hair. And damned if she hadn’t crossed the distance between them to stand just a foot from him, turning her back to him, sweeping up the scattering of curls off her fine shoulders, and exposing the ivory column of her neck, the snowy shell of her ear.
    “Buttons, if you please, my lord.” The back of her dress was gaping but for two tiny buttons. “I could only reach a few of them.”
    A whole line of open little buttons exposing her bare back.
    Her absolutely bare back.
    Bloody hell, Mumberton had found the dress but forgotten a set of small clothes. This insubstantial little gown was hardly more decent than her flannel nightgown and certainly no barrier to his imagination. No wonder she’d borrowed his coat and the boots and his stockings.
    Hell, that’s just what he needed. To be carrying this image with him all day and well into thenight—her breasts unbound inside her bodice, just beyond the muslin, just beyond his hand.
    Far beyond that, if he had any sense, any decency at all. He hadn’t slept well last night, wondering how this ruse was going to play out, wondering if she longed for her coward of a husband. Had she lain awake praying that he would scale the walls of Everingham Hall and rescue her? Most of all, he’d wondered why the thought of her being married at all had set his blood to boiling.
    He fastened the buttons as swiftly as he could manage, given their pea size and his large fingers, trying not to brush the downy silk of her skin in the breach.
    “There.”
    “I’m obliged, sir.”
    And I am standing on quicksand, aroused and wanting you, madam.
    “May I send for food from the village? There’s little in the kitchen.” She brushed past him in her scent of peach and vanilla and laid a folded sheet on a side table. “You can mark it against my account.”
    Her account! “You’ll take meals in the house.” The barked order came out of nowhere and drew a suspicious frown to her mouth.
    “That’s not necessary.”
    “It is, and you will.”
    She hesitated, her hand rounding against her hip, defining too many lush curves for a mistysoft morning in a secluded cottage. “Does this mean that I’m your prisoner after all, my lord? Doomed to obey your every whim?”
    It was plain to him which of them was doomed in this inequitable arrangement between them. “It means, Miss Finch, that you’ll starve if you don’t come to dinner in the hall.”
    She blinked at him and looked to the boy across the room, madly rolling up a sheet. Her smile was fond and unfeigned, her gaze gentled from its usual wariness.
    “Well, Chip, it seems as though you and