Page 126 of Their Master

Moira hadn’t realized how much a creature of touch she was, until the only person who touched her was Doctor Felson every week or Sandrine and her girls when they came to visit.

Sexually, she’d had nobody since that last catastrophic night with Smith.

She suspected her newer contract forbade it, just like the first one had—although she’d not bothered to read this one, at all. Not that she would have wanted a stranger around her body right now, in any case.

“Perhaps playing the piano might make you feel better?” Luke suggested. “The room is warm, I had Armand light a fire first thing this morning.”

Armand was a young footman who’d come to work a few weeks earlier and had turned the house upside down with his gorgeous looks. It amused Moira to watch a houseful of men behave exactly like a houseful of women over a good-looking man. It restored her fractured faith in human nature.

“I never asked how your night out with Armand was?”

Smith had been out of town for almost two weeks, and Luke had said he didn’t require his usual evening off, but Moira had insisted.

The poor man was already forced to spend too much time with her. And she knew that Smith being out of town caused him considerable anguish.

She’d been amused and titillated when he’d told her he’d accepted an invitation to go to a nearby pub with Armand.

Luke flushed, as he always did when any attention was focused on him. She knew he was older than her by a decade, but she sometimes felt ancient around him.

“We had a nice evening.”

Moira groaned. “You are my only source of amorous entertainment, Luke. You must do better thannice.”

“I have noamorousinterest in Armand. We only had a few pints—nothing else.”

“Oh, pooh! Surely you could make something up—just to entertain me?”

“You know what the doctor said, Miss—”

She narrowed her eyes at him and he sighed.

“You know what the doctor said,Moira, too much excitement is bad for the baby.”

Moira laughed. “You are worse than an old woman, Luke.”

He smiled, rather than look offended.

Her free hand drifted to her belly.

“Would you like me to rub you?” Luke offered.

Moira knew she should say no, she already relied on him for everything in her life. But his hands were magical and her body was so constantly aroused that she all but wore out her nub rubbing it most nights.

“Perhaps that might be a way of making it up to me.”

He smiled, something he did more often after she’d cornered him one day and verbally battered him about treating her like she was the daughter of the Queen.

“We were both whores, for pity’s sake. I need a friend more than I need my cunt shaved. If you can’t be a friend to me, you might as well leave,” she’d shouted at him, like a fishwife.

Moira had spent a horrible evening after that, locked in her room and buried under a pile of bedding, terrified that he would pack up his things and leave her alone, which is what she deserved. She had cried herself to sleep.

In the morning, she’d looked up to find Luke standing beside her bed.

“How did you get in here?”

He held up a key.

“I’m sorry for being such a wretched shrew.”

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