Page 19 of Miss Beresford and the Beast

Charlotte didn’t answer.

Unfastening the final button, Magnus parted the back of her bodice. There was a startling flash of raspberry pink satin.

His pulse jumped.

It was her corset, by God. Hiding there beneath her elegant lady’s clothing, as bold as the costume of a French courtesan.

He stared at it for a moment in the lamplight, nonplussed.

Was this the style now among English young ladies? To be perfectly proper on the outside and daringly risqué underneath?

Or perhaps it was merely her own style, and all of a piece with her practice of keeping one suitor dangling on a string while she conspired to secretly meet another. A lady of questionable morals, then, in both character and dress.

Or no morals at all.

Magnus treated her with no less respect because of it. Who was he to pass judgment on her character? Indeed, it was far wiser not to think of her at all.

An impossible task given their present positions.

His only hope was to focus on the mechanics of the business as single-mindedly as possible until he was finished. Stiffening his jaw, he reached for the metal hooks that closed her skirts. Another series of straps and ribbons lay beneath them—the fastenings of some fiendish wire underpinning which his masculine brain could scarcely fathom.

“Not how I’d imagined spending my day,” he said under his breath. “Dealing with all this frippery.”

Her skirts dispensed with, he took hold of her corset strings to untie them.

“It fastens in the front,” Charlotte murmured against his shoulder.

His fingers stilled. “It laces here.”

“There are hooks in the front. It’s…easier.”

“It’s diabolical is what it is.” Magnus shifted her weight from his shoulder. One hand at her waist, he used the other to pull her bodice off of her one sleeve at a time. Her arms fell limply to her sides when he’d finished.

Her blazing pink corset came next. It fell away from her inch by inch, exposing a slim, shapely figure shielded by nothing more than a fine linen shift.

Heart beating ridiculously hard, Magnus tossed the corset onto a nearby chair, along with her bodice. He silently thanked God that there was no need to hold her any longer. The rest he could do with her lying down. “If I may?” he asked.

“Please,” she said.

He gently helped her to lean back onto the bed. She exhaled an unsteady breath as her head came to rest on the stack of pillows. A wince of pain contracted her brow.

Magnus withdrew his hand from her waist. His fingers flexed briefly into a fist. It was either that or hit a wall.

Where was the wretched doctor when they needed him? Taking care of some squire in Upper Beadwell? To hell with the squire! And to hell with Upper Beadwell too!

“Husband?” Charlotte queried.

“Stop calling me that,” Magnus snapped.

She stared at him with wide, wounded eyes, provoking an immediate surge of guilt.

“It’s Lord Eversleigh,” he said. “Or Captain Sterling. Or…Or Magnus.”

Or idiot, he might have added, for snarling at her so readily.

Gritting his teeth against an apology, he methodically removed her skirts and her wire underpinnings, casting them onto the heap with her bodice and corset.

She looked smaller without her armor. More vulnerable. As though anyone and anything might hurt her.