Kissed by Starlight by Cynthia Bailey Pratt Page A

grasping hands. A few more steps, she knew, and she’d be trapped against the Zeus-bull’s flank. Sir Elswith knew it too, judging by the gloating gleam in his gray eyes.
    Felicia would know the answer to her next question even if it meant suffering another attempted kiss. “But what is it, specifically, about me that makes you .,. and the gardener ... act this way?”
    “You tell me that gardener’s name and I’ll spread his insides all over his flower beds! Annoying you like that! Next thing you know they’ll be demanding rights like the Frenchies do!”
    “Never mind him. What do you see in me?” Was it her mother’s bad blood they saw?
    Sir Elswith smiled, much as a lion must grin before he devours a gazelle. “You’ve a mirror in that house, Felicia. Take a good look in it tonight.”
    “My face is plain, sir. I have been told it often enough.”
    “Oh, you’re no raving beauty! Though I’ve always been partial to blue eyes with dark hair. My first love . .. well, there’ll be time and to spare to tell you of your predecessors, eh? You were asking about your figure.”
    Felicia glanced down. She saw what she always saw. Her lace fichu, the only white on her unrelieved black dress, lay across her bosom, concealing the upper slopes of her breasts, which were pressed tight against the edge of her bodice. The scarf never would lie smoothly. The knot would always fly up, making the trailing ends flip and flop as she walked.
    Looking up, she saw that Sir Elswith had sidled closer. “You are a lovely creature,” he said, whispering again. “Such a figure, like one of these images your father loved so. That Venus there behind you, for instance.”
    “That’s Europa....”
    “Look at her, though. Look at how she’s got what you’ve got. Lovely high breasts—real firm ‘uns—and that trim waist curving down. And hips! Any man worth his salt likes them full ‘n’ round that way. I wager that under that skirt you’ve got the kind of hips that make a man want to get on his knees to worship!”
    He suited his actions to his words, dropping to his knees and making a grab for Felicia. But he miscalculated her appalled reaction and found himself instead sprawling in the gravel at her feet. Felicia, who had leapt out of the way not unlike a frightened gazelle, stared down at him in horror. If he had struck his head on the edge of the plinth ...
    Her relief when he grunted and pushed himself up on his arms was complete. When she saw his face, however, that feeling fled. “Good day, Sir Elswith,’’ she gasped, and hurried away before he could get to his knees.
    She hurried into the house without speaking to anyone and locked her door when she reached her room. With any luck, she reasoned, Sir Elswith was too dirty and battered after his spring at her to make a further appearance in the house.
    Felicia poured water into a basin. Washing and drying her face and hands, she caught sight of herself in the mirror. She looked strange to her own eyes. Her hair was half-tumbled, her eyes huge with surprise.
    She walked to the mirror and tilted it so as to show all of her person. She smoothed back the extra fabric at the waist of her black dress. Her corset strings never needed to be tightened past the comfortable point, for she had indeed a slender waist. She’d always been grateful for that, as she avoided much pain, but she’d never thought of it as an attribute that would drive men mad.
    Untying her fichu, she flicked the scarf onto the bed. “Item: high breasts. Item: slender waist. Item: hips?” She pulled her full skirts back to outline that part of her body.
    “Really, men are very strange,” she said, cocking her head to the side. Her body swelled out here, curved away there, only to swell out again farther down. It was just as it had always been.
    She looked like a woman, no different from Cook or Lady Stavely. Perhaps she had a little more on top than her father’s wife, and no one would call