“Then mind yourself, gel. No point in kissing a man you don’t want to marry. At least, not until you are married! And there’s my lecture for you.” Lady Sylvia gave her characteristic bark of laughter and strolled toward the door. “You have a caller, gel. Codswallop tells me that he’s put Lady Sophie, Duchess of Gisle, into the Yellow Drawing Room.” Her voice was a question.

“I met the duchess yesterday, in Madame Carême’s establishment,” Gabby said. She had her palms pressed against her hot cheeks.

“Well, stop looking so much like a guilty housemaid and let’s go meet the woman,” Lady Sylvia said. “I don’t know her myself, but I’ve admired her style. Now, there’s one that never minded a few kisses!”

QUILL STALKED INTO HIS CHAMBER, conscious of a shaming sense of embarrassment. What was it about Gabrielle Jerningham that led him to behave like such an utter ass? Kissing his brother’s fiancée! You’d think he was jealous. Whereas in truth, he told himself, he felt relief rather than jealousy.

He pulled off his clothes and moved toward his dressing room, clad only in smalls. He’d had the room stripped to the walls a few years ago, and now it housed only Dr. Trankelstein’s equipment. With an irritated jerk, Quill grabbed one of the German doctor’s oddly shaped dumbbells and began raising it in the air. After a while he slowed into a comforting and familiar rhythm.

By an hour later, his skin glowed and his right leg was aching from exertion. Quill cast a look of dislike at the machine in the corner. It was a horselike contraption, also designed by Dr. Trankelstein. But whereas Quill quite enjoyed working with Trankelstein’s dumbbells, he loathed the time he spent on the chamber horse. The doctor’s idea that its rocking motion would inure Quill to the motion of a true horse had borne little fruit. But Quill’s punctilious nature would not allow him to ignore the machine completely.

With a sigh, he rubbed his hands with a towel and climbed onto the horse. No two ways about it: He felt like a child riding a toy. Large leg muscles bunched on his thighs as Quill forced the horse into a rocking clip that sent searing pain through his hip and then gave him a queasy feeling in his stomach. He’d found by painful trial and error that he could go no longer than five minutes on the horse without inducing a migraine.

Today he endured his five minutes with gritted teeth, stopping the moment he saw faint purple flashes at the corner of one eye. It wasn’t a day for experimentation, not while he was acting as Gabby’s host.

Chapter 7