Free Not Proper Enough (A Reforming the Scoundrels Romance) by Carolyn Jewel

upstairs, and there was almost no sound but what noise they made.
    “The baths haven’t been used since my grandfather passed. I’m told he returned from his travels with a Turkman servant who’d been employed in a private home with baths in a similar arrangement to this.”
    She touched the tiles, cool underneath her fingers. “Why not? You have this magnificent place and you’ve never had a bath here yourself?”
    “I have.”
    Eugenia looked at him over her shoulder. He tipped his head to one side.
    “When I was a boy. My grandfather brought me here. We used the bath, and it was really quite the most splendid immersion of my young life.” He held up the lantern and adjusted the screen to widen the glow.
    She took a few more steps inside. “How old were you?”
    “Ten, I think. The Turkman scrubbed me within an inch of my life, but the warm water afterward? Bliss.” He picked up the lantern and crossed the room so as to enter a second, larger room with empty scalloped fountains set into the wall and three empty pools.
    She absorbed the austere beauty and tried to imagine what it must have looked like when the pools were filled and the fountains working. “This is marvelous. Simply marvelous.”
    “It is. And how relaxing to soak in the water after that scrubbing. In here”—they passed into a third room—“we were dried off with the softest towels you can imagine. Our skin was rubbed with oil, our hair combed. I don’t think I was ever so clean and presentable in all my days before or since.”
    Eugenia pictured not a boy, but a grown-up Fenris. Naked. Which was not a proper place for her thoughts towander. “Why doesn’t your father use the baths? Or you, for that matter?”
    Rather than answer, he walked her out of this last room and into another corridor with the same ornate scrollwork in the tiles. The decor, she supposed, was after the Ottoman fashion.
    “After our bath, we took tea in here.” He opened another door and held it for her. This room, like the corridor, had intricate scrollwork and lattices in the shape of inverted teardrops. “I’m told it’s copied after a salon in the sultan’s palace in Constantinople. I was served tea. My grandfather had coffee and let me try it.”
    “And?”
    He grinned, and there was nothing austere at all about his smile. She shivered inside, in a hot, disturbing way that did not feel at all proper. Not for her. Not for a widow who still missed her husband. Not for a man she’d disliked for so long. “I discovered Turkish coffee was not then to my taste.”
    “I expect not.” There was, incongruously, a gold-framed painting of a spaniel hanging on the wall. She stood before it, head tilted. There was something off about the painting, but she couldn’t decide what it was. The dog did not seem to properly fit on the canvas. She couldn’t help the impression that the animal might actually slide off the canvas and onto the floor.
    He pointed at the nameplate affixed to the bottom center of the frame. “Delilah. My grandfather’s favorite bitch.”
    She tried looking at the painting from the corner of her eye. “She’s lovely.”
    “You are entitled to your opinion.”
    “Thank you.”
    Fenris crossed his arms over his chest and leaned against the wall by the painting. She had the eerie sense that the dog’s eyes followed him. “Camber—my grandfather, that is—fancied himself an artist. As you can see from his effort, it was mere fancy.”
    She craned her neck and squinted.
    “I’m afraid, Mrs. Bryant, that there is no angle from which this picture improves.”
    Fenris was right. The painting did not improve at any angle she could see. “Perhaps oils were not his medium.”
    “Assuredly not.”
    She was entranced by the thought of a not very talented duke taking the time and effort required of an oil painting, all to preserve the likeness of a beloved dog. “Why does no one use these rooms?”
    “My father disapproves.”
    “Of