Her hand trembling shamefully, Mira managed a knock on the door, which was immediately answered with a muffled “Come in!”
The door swung open with surprising ease. Quickly, before she could lose her nerve, she crossed the threshold into Nicholas’s private chamber.
She got a vague impression of bold colors and rich, decadent textures, but before she could take in any details of the room, her attention settled on Nicholas. Nicholas, who stood in the middle of the room, turned at an angle away from the door, vigorously rubbing a bit of toweling over his head. Nicholas, who was entirely without trousers.
She stood transfixed by his naked legs extending from beneath the loose tails of his linen shirt.
Although the fireplace behind him threw him into silhouette, the ambient light from the windows revealed the details of Nicholas’s form. At once Mira saw that his left leg, the one closest to her, appeared to be completely human, not even slightly goat-like. A long, angry-looking scar ran from the middle of his thigh to his knee, where it wrapped around from the outside of his leg and disappeared from her view. There at the joint the leg appeared a bit out of line, not quite straight. But otherwise the left limb was much like the right.
And, while Mira had no reliable point of comparison, she thought that Nicholas’s legs were actually quite spectacular. The muscles running their length formed graceful arcs and intriguing shadows that were highlighted by the crisp hair that seemed to follow and complement the lines of his musculature. The effect was fascinating.
Suddenly, those remarkable muscles shifted as he turned, repositioning his wounded leg so that it was out of her sight, and she glanced up to find him staring at her from beneath the toweling still draped over his head, a wicked smile on his face.
“Good afternoon, Miss Fitzhenry. I did not expect you to respond to my invitation so quickly.”
The rush of blood to Mira’s face made her lightheaded, and she thought for an instant that she might actually swoon.
“Yes, my lord,” she choked out. “I am quick, my lord.”
He chuckled. “Mira-mine, promise me that, in the future, whenever I stand before you half-naked you will call me by my Christian name. Without my trousers I feel decidedly un-lordly.”
Though he had turned to hide his injury, he appeared otherwise unashamed of his dramatic state of dishabille. He casually drew the toweling from his head, and his hair, free from its queue, fell forward in dark, sinuous waves about his face.
With a sudden jolt of realization, Mira thought, He is beautiful. The epiphany shook her to her core. She had no words to describe the viscous warmth spreading through her limbs and seeping like spilled honey into the hollow beneath her belly. She did not know how to satisfy the sudden restlessness that quickened her breath and made her fingers flex with the independent yearning to touch, to caress, to grasp, to hold. But in that hot, still moment, as Nicholas’s quicksilver eyes mirrored the flash of lightning through the tower windows, Mira knew instinctually that the man before her held the key to some deep mystery.
Nicholas was the first to break the mood, taking two short steps to retrieve a pair of dry trousers from a long, low couch angled out into the room. He stepped behind an easel, which, with the large canvas propped upon it, provided a small measure of privacy. Still, however, she could hear him shuffling his feet about as he tried to don his trousers without sitting down, could hear the sibilant whisper of the fabric over his skin, and the intimacy of the situation made her shiver.
“I apologize if I have embarrassed you,” he called out. “I would not have so cavalierly invited you in, but I thought you were Pawly, my valet.”
“Yes,” Mira responded distractedly, as she tried to purge her mind of an image of Nicholas tucking his shirt into the waist of his trousers, drawing the fabric taut across his stomach, coaxing the buttons into place. “Yes, I met Pawly at the main house. He showed me the covered passageway out to the tower. But he said he had no further duties out here.”
Nicholas offered only a skeptical hum in response.
The room, cloaked in rich colors and deep shadows, was dominated by an enormous bed, long enough and wide enough that Nicholas could easily stretch out his prodigious length in any direction. Generous curtains of ruby red silk were tied back to the posters, and Mira could see the feather pillows and rumpled linens inside. Her head was suddenly filled with a vivid image of Nicholas recumbent among those pillows, those linens concealing the lean, powerful lines of his body. The vision loosened something deep within her belly, an intimate and alarming sensation, and she quickly looked away.