Pleasure For Pleasure by Eloisa James Page A

before?”
    â€œNow you sound like my mother,” he told her. “My mother could—”
    â€œWhat did I not look like before?” she interrupted. “You might as well finish. I am ready for a grossly uncomplimentary remark.” She wasn’t, really, but it sounded courageous.
    â€œWhen we were on the way to Scotland, I noticed several times that you had developed a really lovely figure,” he said, waving his glass in the air.
    â€œOh,” she said, taken aback.
    â€œWhen I first met all four Essex sisters, you understand, you had a perfectly charming little figure for a girl of your age—damn it all, what is your age?”
    â€œI was fifteen when you first met me,” Josie said with dignity.
    â€œBit lumpy, back then,” Mayne said, “but all girls are. On the way to Scotland, I remember telling myself several times that you were developing the kind of figure that was going to break men’s hearts and make them grovel in your wake. You didn’t quite have it yet, and you certainly didn’t know how to walk.”
    â€œThen I got fatter.”
    â€œNo! Then you showed up wearing this contraption that makes you look—you look—well, you look stuffed.”
    â€œLike a stuffed sausage.”
    â€œTake the damned thing off.”
    â€œWhat are you talking about?” Her blood was pounding through her veins.
    â€œTake it off,” he said. He stood up, and to his credit, he wasn’t even unsteady. “I’ll help.”
    â€œYou must be drunk,” she said with horror. His face didn’t appear to have the cruel ravishing power of the heroes in her favorite novels, but how would she know? He was standing before her looking helpful and just slightly drunk.
    â€œFor God’s sake, Josie,” he roared, “I don’t want to seduceyou! How can you think such a thing. I’m thirty-four, in God’s name. Thirty- five in two days. And you’re what? Eighteen?”
    â€œAlmost nineteen,” she said, tight-lipped.
    â€œWell I am almost thirty-five. And in the course of my long and misspent life, I have never yet taken up cradle-robbing. Finally, as I think you are quite aware, I am in love with Sylvie!”
    â€œThen what—what do you want?”
    â€œIf you won’t talk to Sylvie, and your own sisters colluded in stuffing you into this despicable garment, then I’ll have to show you myself.”
    â€œShow me what?”
    â€œShow you how to walk so that you make a man slaver at your feet, of course. Isn’t that what you want?”
    â€œOf course that’s what I want!” she cried. “But I can’t—I can’t unclothe myself.”
    â€œNot all the way,” he said, pained. “You just need to take off that cravat thing and put your gown back on.”
    â€œIt’s not a cravat, it’s a corset! And you’re drunk.”
    â€œSo are you,” he said, laughing a little now. “We are both drunk in the starlight room. That’s what my aunt used to call this: the starlight room. When she was very ill, toward the end of her life, she would lie on this couch all night and watch the stars on the ceiling, and the stars through the window. Sometimes my father would stay with her through the night.”
    â€œIt must have broken his heart when she died,” Josie whispered.
    â€œHe always said that without her, he wouldn’t have known how to love. My grandparents were as stiff as if they’d been carved from wood.”
    Josie’s eyes filled with tears. “That’s so lovely. My sisters taught me how to love, because my mother died before I was born.”
    His eyebrow shot up. “Before?”
    â€œWell, on the same day. But she never even held me, so I think of it as if she was gone before I arrived.”
    â€œI suspect that Lady Godwin taught me how to love,” Mayne said. “Damned annoying that