Quote-tastic(#20): "When Beauty Tamed the Beast" by Eloisa James

This meme is about sharing your favorite quotes and the books they come from!

It is Hosted by Anna at Herding Cats and Burning Soup.

I chose "When Beauty Tamed the Beast" by Eloisa James. It's one of my favorite historicals and a great introduction to her work. Here we meet the hero, he's an A-hole molded after Dr House :D

Piers strolled out, finding his butler Prufrock in the hallway. “I wonder how you ever get anything done,” he said to him. “It must be hard to run a household when you have to conduct all your business in the corridors so you can hear every golden word that falls from my lips.”

“I do not find it a particular problem,” Prufrock said, falling in beside him. “But then I have lots of practice. You don’t think that you were a trifle hard on Lord Sandys?”

“Hard? Was I hard? Surely not. I told him exactly what was wrong with his son, and what to do next—in short, go home and wait for choirs of angels, because there are no miracles on this side of the divide.”

“It’s his son that’s dying. And if I got you right, he gave the poor lad the illness. That’s a blow, that is.”

“My father wouldn’t have minded a bit,” Piers assured him. “If he had another heir, that is. But Sandys has a whole passel of children. An heir and more to spare.”

“How do you know that?”

“The Church, you fool. He put this boy into the Church and seems to have trained him up to it from an early age, too. The heir must be rousting about in brothels just like good old Pa. Sandys would never have allowed the spare near a Bible if he were, in fact, the heir. This one is expendable, which is a bloody good thing, under the circumstances.”

[...]

Piers didn’t bother answering that. His leg hurt as if someone had stuck a hot poker into his thigh. “I need a drink, so why don’t you rush ahead like a good butler and meet me at the door of the library with a strong brandy?”

“I’ll keep walking next to you in case you keel over,” Prufrock said.

“I suppose you have visions of breaking my fall,” Piers said, giving his scrawny butler a sidelong glance.

“Actually, no. But I would call for a footman, who could drag you along the corridor. It’s marble, so you might get a concussion, and that might make you a bit kinder to your patients, not to mention your staff. You had Betsy in tears again this morning. You seem to think scullery maids grow on trees.”

Thank God, they were getting close to the library. Piers paused for a moment, the idea of amputation flitting through his mind, and not for the first time. He could get one of those Egyptian bed-things that Cleopatra had herself carried about on. Walking would be a damned sight more difficult, but at least he’d be free of this infernal pain.

“Your father has written,” Prufrock told him. “I took the liberty of putting the letter on your desk.”

“Took the liberty of steaming it open, more like,” Piers said. 

You can find more about Eloisa and her work from her website or Facebook page.