Free More than a Mistress/No Man's Mistress by Mary Balogh

would leave. Now, out of sheer stubbornness, he could not let her go.
    â€œPerhaps,” he said, “all the excitement will bring on a fit of the vapors and I will need the ministrations of my nurse, Miss Ingleby.”
    She would doubtless have argued further if the door had not opened to admit his visitors. As it was, she scurried for the farthest corner of the room, where she was still standing when it occurred to him to look a few minutes later. She was doing an admirable job of blending into the furniture. Her cap was adorning her head again and covering every last strand of her hair.
    They had come in a collective body, all his closest friends—Conan Brougham, Pottier, Kimble, Thomas Garrick, Boris Tuttleford—bringing hearty good cheer with them. There was a great deal of noise as they greeted him, asked rhetorically after his health, jeered over his dressing gown and slippers, admired his bandage, and found themselves seats.
    â€œWhere is your claret, Tresham?” Garrick asked, looking about him.
    â€œMiss Ingleby will fetch it,” Jocelyn said. That was when he looked and noticed her in the far corner. “Mynurse, gentlemen, who runs and fetches for me since I am unable to reach the bell rope from where I recline. And who scolds and worries me into and out of the dismals. Miss Ingleby, ask Hawkins for the claret and the brandy, and have a footman bring a tray of glasses. Please.”
    â€œ
Please
, Tresh?” Kimble chuckled. “A new word in your vocabulary?”
    â€œShe makes me say it,” Jocelyn said meekly, watching Jane walk out of the room, her face averted. “She scolds me when I forget.”
    There was a raucous guffaw from his gathered friends.
    â€œOh, I say,” Tuttleford said when his mirth had subsided a little, “isn’t she the one who squawked out, Tresham, just when you were unnerving Oliver with your pistol trained at the bridge of his nose?”
    â€œHe has employed her as his nurse,” Conan replied, grinning. “And has threatened to make her sorry she was born or something like that.
Is
she sorry, Tresham? Or are you?”
    Jocelyn played with the handle of his quizzing glass and pursed his lips. “You see,” he said, “she has a damnably annoying habit of answering back, and I have a damnable need for mental stimulation, penned and cribbed and incarcerated as I am and as I am likely to be for a couple of weeks or so longer.”
    â€œMental stimulation, ho!” Pottier slapped his thigh and roared with merriment, and everyone else followed his example. “Since when have you needed a female for mental stimulation, Tresham?”
    â€œBy Jove!” Kimble swung his quizzing glass on its ribbon. “One cannot quite picture it, can one? How elsedoes she stimulate you, Tresh? That is the question. Come, come, it is confession time.”
    â€œHe has one immobilized leg.” Tuttleford laughed again. “But I’ll wager that does not slow you down one whit, does it, Tresham? Not in the
stimulation
business. Does she come astride? And do all the bucking so that you can lie still?”
    The laughter this time was decidedly bawdy. They were all in fine fettle—and getting finer by the minute. Jocelyn raised his quizzing glass all the way to his eye.
    â€œOne might casually mention,” he said quietly, “that the female in question is in my employ and beneath my own roof, Tuttleford. Even I have some standards.”
    â€œMy guess is, fellows,” Conan Brougham said, more perceptive than the others, “that the notorious duke is not amused.”
    Which was a mistake on his part, Jocelyn thought a moment later as the door opened and Jane came back into the room, carrying two decanters on a tray. A footman came behind her with the glasses. She was, of course, the instant focus of everyone’s curious attention, a fact that should have amused him as it would surely disconcert