Free Seduced by a Pirate by Eloisa James Page A

to England, he had never considered that he might find his father lonely, or happy to see him.
    “Have my carriage brought around, if you please, Mears,” Griffin bellowed after the butler. The man’s back became visibly rigid, but he turned about and bowed silently.
    “Just as if you never left,” the viscount remarked. “Poor old Mears. He has such passion for propriety; must you tease him?”
    “Teasing implies affection. We share a mutual loathing.”
    “Would you like to visit your old bedchamber? I kept everything just the same in case you returned.”
    “Unfortunately, even looking at those stairs makes me sweat. I’m going to save my strength to totter to bed this evening.”
    His father frowned. “What caused your injury?”
    “A lucky bandit managed to slash James’s throat and my leg just before expiring. He was damn close to taking off my crown jewels. If that had happened, I wouldn’t have come home.”
    “Then I’m glad to hear it didn’t.”
    Griffin felt a surge of restlessness. He wanted to be wooing his wife, making sure she hadn’t changed her mind in his absence. “Let’s go.”
    “Are you that eager to see Lady Barry?”
    “Yes.”
    His father’s eyes lightened. “I didn’t pick so terribly, did I?”
    “No.” There was something raw and powerful in his admission that shocked. “No, you didn’t.”

 
    T EN
    G enerally speaking, Phoebe ate her meals with the children. She saw no point in dining by herself, and it was much more congenial—if sometimes wearing, given Nanny McGillycuddy’s conversational style—to listen to the children’s chatter. She’d had enough of solitary dining in the first seven years of her marriage.
    But Griffin had said he was returning home for supper. She would have a grown-up seated across from her at the dining room table, a rather fascinating idea.
    She planned a menu with the cook—three courses instead of her usual two—and instructed the downstairs housemaid to set the table in the dining room. Then she ordered a bath and sat in it for a good forty minutes, trying to calm her mind.
    And not succeeding.
    Griffin was her husband, and he didn’t want to break off the marriage. She could already tell that what Sir Griffin Barry didn’t want to do, he didn’t do. She could see it in every lineament of his body, in the set of his jaw.
    She raised her knee in the bath and watched water roll off her knee and down her leg. It had been one thing to face her wedding night when she was twenty, with the confidence of feeling both delectable and young. She had been utterly certain that her young husband would find her enticing.
    There was something smoldering in Griffin’s eyes that told her he still felt that way, but she was no longer so assured.
    She soaped her knee for the fourth time. Two thoughts kept chasing themselves around her head: the first was a memory of her mother talking of tearing pain. That didn’t sound any better now than it had fourteen years ago. And the second and more important was that she was old. Practically wizened. Dried up. Over thirty .
    It made the blood roar in her ears to even think about that number. On her marriage night her breasts and her waist had been perfect. Now her hips were rounder, and her bosom was larger. Her breasts hadn’t kept the teacup shape they’d had at seventeen.
    Griffin, on the other hand, had only improved over the years. He was everything a woman ever dreamed of in the privacy of her own bed. His eyes, shoulders, even thighs, even . . . She had seen what he looked like from behind.
    Now he was the delectable one.
    She swallowed hard.
    “Are you ready for me to wash your hair?” her maid asked, jolting her out of that train of thought.
    “Yes,” she murmured.
    “An exciting day,” May said, as she poured jasmine soap onto her hands and then began massaging it into Phoebe’s hair.
    “Yes.”
    “If you don’t mind the presumption, my lady, Sir Griffin is as handsome . . .