Amanda Rose by Karen Robards Page B

was what he had intended all along. “If you’ll just turn your back …” He was sitting up, his movements slow and careful, as if his wound pained him.
    “You really shouldn’t be moving around,” she said, her eyes worried as she watched him. “If nothing happens to break the wound open again, it should heal without any problems. I won’t change the bandage for a week or so—if you behave. But if it starts to bleed again …” Her voice trailed off, but the implication was obvious.
    “After this I’ll be still as a corpse,” he promised. “But I’ve been sweating like a pig, and I stink so much I offend myself.” He finished with the buttons. The shirt hung open, revealing such an expanse of black-furred muscles that Amanda’s eyes widened. “Pass me the soap, will you?” he added casually. “And then turn your back, Amanda.”
    Amanda passed him the soap, then obediently turned her back. She heard the splash of water and out of the corner of her eye saw him lift an arm to scrub beneath it. She shut her eyes, and immediately the tantalizing image of the hair-roughened masculine flesh his opened shirt had revealed was imprinted against her closed lids. How would he look with his shirt off entirely? she wondered. And, cheeks pinkening, immediately banished the thought. It was positively unseemly to be so curious about a man …
    “Oh, I brought you some clean clothes,” she said, recollecting. Her eyes opened as she spoke, but she carefully kept her back to him. If he should somehow divine the incomprehensible curiosity the thought of his unclothed body inspired in her, she would die of shame.
    “Pass them here, would you?” he asked. Amanda did so, careful not to look at him as she complied. Out of the corner of her eye she got a hazy impression of wide shoulders and flexing, sinewy arms …
    “You can turn around now—I’m decent.” Amanda heard the amusement in his voice, and as she turned rather hesitantly to look at him she saw it in his eyes as well, although they were not unkind. But they left her in no doubt that he was aware of her embarrassment and found it funny. To her chagrin she blushed furiously. He was watching her with keen eyes. In the clean and whole white shirt with loose black trousers she had brought he looked slightly less disreputable, despite the bristly beard, scratched face, and tumbled hair.
    “How old are you, Amanda?”
    Matt lay back on the feather tick as he spoke, folding his arms under his head and surveying her from beneath raised brows. Amanda was all too conscious of his gaze as she knelt on the stone floor some few feet away. She had to force herself to meet those too-knowing eyes.
    “Almost eighteen.” Her voice sounded strangled.
    “And shy with it, hmm?” He laughed, but the sound was comforting rather than mocking. “Don’t worry about it, Amanda. You’ll outgrow it soon enough. All you need is a little more experience of men. Don’t you have a father, brothers?”
    “My father died almost five years ago. I have a half brother, who inherited his title.”
    “Title?”
    Amanda nodded. Her embarrassment was fading somewhat as the subject changed. “My father was the fifth Duke of Brookshire. My half brother is the sixth.”
    His eyes widened, and his lips pursed in a soundless whistle.
    “So you’re ‘milady,’ are you? You should have told me at the outset—I would have been more polite.”
    “You weren’t polite at all, ” she retorted, meeting his eyes without discomfort now.
    “I wasn’t, was I? You’ll have to excuse me on the grounds that I’ve never met a titled lady before. In America, where I’m from, we don’t have such things.”
    “What part of America?”
    “New Orleans. That’s in Louisiana, in case you don’t know, milady.”
    She gave him a look designed to tell him what she thought of his mocking use of her title. “And Louisiana’s in the South, I know. I’m not ignorant. And even if I were, I’d be able to