“Oh, she wouldn’t do that,” Sébastien said. “She’s rather brusque, but she has a good heart.”

That was Sébastien. He always saw the best in people.

“Actually, she doesn’t have a very good heart, if by that you mean a capacity for human sympathy,” Piers said. “That’s one reason I keep her around, given her utter lack of charm. She can hold down a screaming child without a flicker of an eyelash.”

“A screaming child?” Linnet shuddered.

So she did have a soft spot.

“Gavan screamed like the dickens when we had to set his broken leg,” Piers said. “But look at him now. He stopped screaming, and he’s walking again. The boy will be going home soon.”

“Yes, but how long as he been here without being allowed to see his mother?”

Sébastien frowned. “I’ll look into it, Miss Thrynne.” He threw her a hopelessly addled look. “What a kind spirit you have. Piers and I have been in and out of that room for months without considering the question.”

“Well, you have the patients, not to mention all those Ducklings, to look after,” she said, gesturing across the room. “I can ask Mrs. Havelock about visitors.”

“The Ducklings?” Sébastien inquired.

But Piers was already chuckling. “Those foolish boys,” he said, nodding at Penders, Kibbles, and Bitts. They were hovering around Lady Bernaise, likely absorbed by his mother’s exuberant display of bosom.

“Oh, I see,” Sébastien said. “I suppose they follow Piers as if he were a mother duck. A sweet, lovable mother duck.”

“It does strain the imagination,” Linnet agreed.

“I like that smile better,” Piers told her.

It vanished.

“That was a mean, sarcastic little smile,” he continued. “It showed the real you.”

Her eyes narrowed, and for a moment he thought he was going to get a glass of champagne in the face. But Prufrock rang the gong for supper, and she simply turned her shoulder to him and sauntered off with Sébastien, making a point of clinging to his arm.

After the meal, Piers’s mother rose and with a twinkling, sweeping smile that encompassed everyone at the table, including her former husband, said, “Why don’t we retire to the drawing room together? Prufrock has been kind enough to arrange for some small entertainment.”

One look at her face and he knew that his Maman had some devilish plan in mind.

“Dancing!” he said moments later, seeing the floor cleared and Prufrock at the piano, accompanied by a weedy-looking footman with a violin. “How very kind of you, Maman. That’s just what I was hoping for.”

His mother swanned over to him in a cloud of jasmine. “Darling, the world does not revolve around you, and I’m sorry if I ever gave you the impression that it did. Now sit down there and rest your leg. Sébastien will dance with me, of course.”

“Of course,” Piers echoed, sitting down, because when one’s mother decides to stage a comedy, why not enjoy it?

His father sat down on a straight-backed chair at the other end of the sofa and watched. He didn’t even make a pretense not to, just sat, his eyes fixed on his former wife as she circled the floor in a waltz, laughing up at her nephew.

“She’s as light on her feet as she ever was,” Piers said, after a time. He would rather have a conversation than watch the dancing. It was making him irritable to watch Bitts grinning down at Linnet, for one thing. He liked to think of Bitts as a doctor, however incompetent, not a young gallant.

“Your mother?” His father nodded. “You should have seen her when she was seventeen. She was as slender as a willow, with a sparkle in her eyes that made all the men in the room fall in love with her.”

“Are you going to ask her to dance?”

His father glanced over at him, a little twist on his lips that Piers realized, with a shock, he’d felt on his own face, time and again. “Oh, I shall ask. She’s arranged the entertainment, and it would be unchivalrous for me not to allow her to refuse me. We didn’t waltz back then, of course.”

“Back then?” Piers repeated, rather dim-wittedly.

“I broke all the rules of society,” his father said. “I didn’t wait to be introduced, to request her hand in the dance. I simply pulled her onto the floor.”

“Well, go then,” Piers said. “Pull her onto the floor.”

“She doesn’t want to be pulled. She wants the chance to turn me down.”

Yes, Piers definitely recognized that sardonic smile. It was his own.

“And my transgressions mean that she deserves that pleasure,” the duke added.

His mother might well refuse to dance with his father, but Sébastien wasn’t going to turn down the chance to dance with Linnet, and he’d be damned if he’d sit watching from a sofa as Sébastien whispered into his fiancée’s ear.

He got up to leave, and then hesitated. “Good luck,” he told his father.

“Too late for that,” the duke said. “Good night.”

Chapter Sixteen

You’re a pig,” Linnet informed Piers. He had woken her by dangling a ribbon over her face so it tickled her nose.

“I brought you hot chocolate.”

“That goes some way toward ameliorating your piggishness,” she said, pushing herself up against the backboard so she could drink her chocolate. And watch Piers surreptitiously, though why she was beguiled by such a boorish character she could hardly say.

But a woman who’s dreamed all night that a certain doctor was kissing her—and not stopping with mere kisses—can hardly pretend to herself that she isn’t fascinated.

“Don’t make such a dead set at Sébastien,” he said. He still hadn’t met her eyes. Instead he was playing with the ribbon the way a small child might, tying it in knots and testing its strength.

“You’re ruining that ribbon and it’s one of my favorites.”

“Made of silk?” He tied another knot.

“Of course. Why?”

“We need something better with which to tie patients to the table during surgical procedures. We’re using ropes, and they complain of burns later. Maybe silk would work.” He tested it again by running it against the edge of the footboard. It promptly snapped in half.

“Oh for goodness’ sake,” Linnet said. “Did you have to break that? Wind silk around the ropes.”

“Good idea. Did you hear what I said about Sébastien?”

“Yes. Are you worried about losing your playmate?”

Piers snorted. “I wish I was the boy you keep calling me.”

“Why?”

“In thirty, forty years at the most, we’ll have something to control infection. Surgery will be revolutionized.”

“You’re what, thirty years old? You could be operating at seventy-five, propped up against the table.”

“Taking my patient’s nose off with my shaking hands,” he put in.

“I call you a boy because you act like a child whose parents have disappointed him, and he’s determined to pay them back.”

“I love my mother.” He seemed to be truly listening to her. But then Linnet realized that it wasn’t in Piers’s nature not to listen.