by Anne Stuart
Alexandra squirmed against her, mewling in unhappiness, rooting against her breasts with blind need. “She’s still hungry,” Emma announced. Trust two men to think they knew a thing about babies! “You’ll need to get the wet nurse back, quickly, before she works herself up into a full-blown tantrum.”
He glanced around him. “Where’s the bell-pull?”
She let out a long-suffering sigh. “That would take too long. A footman would answer, he’d have to go to Richmond, and then Richmond would need to find someone to rouse the wet nurse. Go yourself.”
Another man would have been affronted but Brandon simply grinned. “Yes, ma’am,” he said, and a moment later he was gone, leaving her alone with the snuffling babe. She leaned back, rocking, murmuring softly to the little one, and together their bodies warmed to each other, relaxing in the shadowy room. He’d come back. The baby would sleep. And they would be alone together, with the memory of those heated moments in the salon fresh in their minds. What if he touched her again? What if he didn’t?
Brandon had needed an excuse to leave her. Watching the infant root at her breast through the thin cotton shift had been far too arousing, and she was an inconveniently observant female. He had little doubt she’d notice his condition, and whether her reaction would be fear or disgust, he didn’t want to go there. And if she responded with interest. . .
He’d been unable to sleep. When the gentlemen had eventually joined the ladies in the salon he’d been informed that Mrs. Cadbury had retired for the night due to her early departure the next day.
The hell with that, he’d thought. She wasn’t going anywhere until they’d had an honest talk. He’d made a royal mess of it all, when he’d only been wanting to do the right thing and then get the hell out of there. Now, for the first time in his memory, he found he was thinking of someone other than himself, someone who felt like she belonged to him, someone he wanted, not just her body, but her heart and soul and brain.
He wanted to pound something, perhaps his own thick skull. Charles would have been even more worthy of a pummeling, but he’d already been banished. Brandon couldn’t even acquit his closer brother of wanting the best for him—Charles’s only interest was in securing the land next to his for his family. He knew perfectly well that Brandon had no interest in the English country estates he already owned, much less those of Harry Merton, the man who had almost killed him and so many others. He wanted nothing to do with it, and Charles would somehow manage to secure it, sly bastard that he was.
Brandon didn’t want to be thinking about Harry Merton or his sister. He wanted to think about Emma Cadbury, wearing the thin nightdress, a shawl trailing from her shoulders, her bare feet peeping deliciously from beneath the hem.
In fact, he’d been lying in bed, in the midst of a truly immoral fantasy about her, one hand wrapped around his cock, when he’d heard the baby crying and gone in aid of the situation. It had been organized chaos, with Benedick trying to hush everyone, Nanny and the nursemaids clearly in the midst of some power struggle, and the poor little infant wailing her head off. At any moment he’d expected his sister-in-law to charge in, but not even her baby could rouse her from her long-denied rest.
Things had settled down relatively swiftly, and everyone returned to their beds until an hour later the cries came again, cries he’d been doing his best to deal with when Emma had entered the room, looking only slightly the worse for wear, her thick, black hair tumbling down her back, her feet bare, her shift too thin for the chilly air and his peace of mind.
Christ, he had to get out of there, get back to Scotland, before he did something he regretted! He was half-tempted to simply scoop her up and take her with him, which wouldn’t go over too well with his fiancée, he thought sourly, moving through the halls as swiftly as his bad leg would let him as he followed orders and went for the wet nurse.
It wouldn’t take much to finish things up—Benedick was probably more than ready to see the last of him. Tomorrow he would ignore the temptations pulling at him and head back to Scotland until the time came for his marriage ceremony, assuming he couldn’t avoid it. Neither he nor Miss Bonham spent time in society—no one would expect them to make the rounds that an average engaged couple normally would. In fact, he might insist on holding the wedding in Scotland. He wanted the business handled with the least amount of disruption—anyone could marry them in Scotland, and then she could go back home a safely married matron and he wouldn’t have to think about her again. He had no intention of ever living with her. No intention of bedding her either, though he supposed he might have to, sooner or later. She was too meek, too pale, too. . .
Too not Emma. Jesus, he had to get out of there!
It was relatively quick work to arrange for the wet nurse, and he started back slowly, favoring his leg, but even so, he reached the hallway outside the nursery before anyone else did. To his astonishment there were no howls of fury, no baby screams of despair. Just a soft voice, almost inaudible, singing.
He pushed open the door, and he froze, unable to move. He’d faced down charging lancers, deranged Moghuls, murderous Afghan tribesmen, and the fathers of innocent girls. Nothing compared to this.
Emma was sitting in a chair, the baby in her arms, rocking gently. She was smiling down at the dozing infant, and she looked like a Madonna as she sang an old Welsh lullaby, one he knew as well as he knew his own name, even as everything else in his life seemed suddenly upended.
Sleep, my child, and peace attend thee, all through the night,
Guardian angels God will lend thee, all through the night.
Soft the drowsy hours are creeping
Hill and dale and slumber sleeping
I, my loving vigil keeping
All through the night.
Her voice was beautiful, clear and sweet and low, and it danced through his brain, through his body like a wicked taunt. He knew that voice, that sound, that lullaby, and the knowledge went through his body like a bolt of lightning.
He’d heard it before, from a woman who had sat by his bed, night after night, holding his hand while he fought against a death that had seemed so enticing. A woman who had talked to him, made him laugh, kissed him, made him want to live again. A woman who had disappeared when he’d needed her most. His Harpy.
She sat there, all innocence, as if she hadn’t been lying to him for days now, as if she hadn’t been acting a part, pretending there was no past, nothing between them. She hadn’t forgotten—he knew that full well. So why had she lied?
No wonder he’d been like a moonling over her. His mind may not have remembered that dark, confused time, but something more elemental had. She had come to mean so much to him back then it had almost frightened him. She was his nebulous dream for the future, his reason for enduring the vicious pain and shattered bones. She was his hope, and then she’d taken it away, gone between one moment and the next. He’d ended up ensconced with his family, the last few weeks of his life vanishing, concentrating instead on the opium pipe and draining his brother’s cellars, concentrating on decadence and indolence and the darkest of desires.
He tried to die, then, by any means necessary, but it was already too late. She’d been with him long enough to nurse him past the danger point, then abandoned him with nothing to live for, and he’d survived in broken fury.
He’d even gone to look for her one day, when he’d made himself sick on the foul stuff he was taking, when he’d seen things at the gathering of the Heavenly Host that he could never scour from his memory. His orders from their anonymous ruler had been disturbing enough that even he had balked, and he’d gone out, lame, staggering, in the early morning rain in search of her at St. Martin’s Military Hospital.
How could he have forgotten all this? The insidious power of the opium had even more wide-ranging consequences than he’d realized—she had vanished, along with his time in that miserable hospital, in a puff of sweet-scented smoke.
He never should have been sent there in the fir
st place, of course. If he’d been properly identified when they shipped him back to England he would have been taken up by his family and given the kind of care the brother and son of peers should receive. By the time he awoke in that crowded, stinking ward, awash with the screams of pain and the misery all around him he’d said nothing, pretending to have no memory, simply awaiting death.
Until his Harpy had come along and ripped it away from him.
But when he returned to the hospital it had been almost a year since his family had found him and carted him out of there, and no one remembered the woman. The kind of women who worked in hospitals tended to be anonymous, from the dregs of society and quickly forgotten. Even the celestially beautiful woman who spent nights by his bed, holding his thin hand, teasing him, chiding him, exhorting him to live.
Celestially beautiful? He’d thought her some kind of angel. Now he could see her for what she was, his eyes no longer blinkered by sickness and vulnerability. She was a woman, nothing more, one who derived pleasure from taking a helpless man and making him rely on her, then abandoning him. In truth, a part of him couldn’t blame her. It was the only revenge against the abuse she’d suffered at the hands of men, and if he hadn’t known her he might even have applauded it.
But he did know her, finally, even with her deceitful games throwing him off-track. Never once had she tried to find him, never once had she reached out, even though his own brother married her closest friend. She’d kept herself aloof, indifferent, as he’d been drowning in a morass of decadence and addiction. After she’d saved him she’d been willing to stand back and let him die by his own hand.
No wonder she’d been as desperate to leave this place as he was. She’d probably been terrified he might remember her.
The wet nurse arrived through the door off the servants’ stairs, and Brandon drew back into the shadows abruptly. He should be well satisfied, he thought as he returned to his room, not even bothering to hide his limp. The nagging question about her had been answered—it explained his fascination with her, his obsession. It answered the question that had haunted him until he’d smoked enough and drank enough to drown it out—what had happened to the beautiful woman who sat in the shadows and had somehow become everything to him.
Whores’ tricks had served her well. She was well versed in the art of bringing a man to his knees, and she’d played him very well. He could salute her—she was a worthy adversary, and she’d managed to win their first encounter.
She’d won the second as well, playing her games again, the only pleasure she allowed herself to accept from the opposite sex. He mentally bowed down to her—he’d been in the presence of a master of manipulation and deceit.
But in the end he’d won, because he’d remembered, and he could now see her in all her duplicitous glory. He would leave first thing in the morning and never have to see that lovely, lying face again.
She would believe he’d forgotten her completely. It was a paltry revenge, but it was the least he could do. He’d return to the Highlands and do everything he could to make it the truth. He had no idea why he felt so angered by her lies, but he welcomed it. Anger was something he was used to—it fit him well enough.
Regret was far too troubling.
Chapter 17
He didn’t come back. Emma had been sure he’d return, to banter with her at the very least, perhaps even to flirt, to kiss her again, to perhaps. . .
And she might let him. She could allow herself so little, but that one night would tide her over for years. She could survive giving herself to him—there was no question that he wanted her. And she wanted him to hold her.
She might as well accept the fact: she was like a green girl in raptures over a pair of broad shoulders. And his shoulders were very broad after the years in Scotland, his strength returned to him in abundance.
But this hadn’t started with broad shoulders. This had all started with a deeply damaged man barely clinging to life, to long hours in the darkness as she did everything she could to bring him back from the precipice. With soft, harmless midnight kisses until they became something more. The man whose charm and wit had surfaced and enchanted her, until it was too late to defend herself.
She’d spent many long hours of the last three years, trying to understand her unlikely infatuation, she who despised most men, and she’d come across a simple answer. When she first met him, he was so frail he was no danger to her, not on any level, and she’d let down her guard. He wasn’t the enemy, as most men were, he was simply a damaged boy in need of comfort, and she’d tried to convince herself her feelings were only maternal. After all, she loved children—she found both boys and girls delightful.
But as Brandon returned to life, growing stronger day by day, it was already too late. When he’d first managed the pale ghost of a grin she was smitten, and nothing had been able to scour that unlikely attraction from her soul.
And his kisses. They were innocence and charm, and she’d never been kissed like that in her life. Growing up, she’d been kept close to home. The lurid dangers of the male species had been explained to her in such harsh and explicit terms that she’d viewed every man with distrust, relying on her stern father’s guidance, until he’d turn those same, lustful eyes on her and she’d known her presence on this earth was a curse.
Why had she let herself forget? For years she’d believed that her inconvenient beauty had tempted her saintly father to attempt something so heinous she refused to think about it. It wasn’t until many years later that she recognized the fault wasn’t in her, it was in the male of the species, and she’d been absolutely fine since then, armored in her dislike and distrust.
That is, until Brandon had slipped into her heart.
She’d always been a great reader, and she adored travel books, the vicarious adventures almost enough for a woman who would doubtless never leave England, and she read of a strange phenomenon in the desert, something called a mirage. It happened when the sun grew so abominably hot it seemed as if cool, refreshing water was floating on the sand. The idea had always fascinated her, and the knowledge that when the thirsty traveler arrived at the fantasy oasis they only found barren ground.
That was her relationship, for want of a better word, with Brandon. A mirage, a brief, tantalizing glimpse of cool, refreshing water, only to find it turn to sand in her mouth. She was a fool to ever let herself be so vulnerable.
She waited in the nursery for over an hour, but he didn’t return, and she told herself it was a relief. Tomorrow she could leave—she was feeling well enough, and Brandon would marry Miss Bonham, and she and her companion would be miserable. . .
It wasn’t her problem, she reminded herself. She was already dealing with enough—the girls at the Dovecote, her patients, her nemesis, the cow-handed Dr. Fenrush. There was no place in this world for unconventional attractions, be they between two women or a gentleman and a whore.
As luck would have it, she slept late into the morning, only waking when the sun moved overhead, the sun she hadn’t seen in so many days. She struggled out of bed, landing on the floor in a tangle of covers, bruising her backside, before she could fight her way out of the linen and throw off her nightclothes. Dressing normally was a matter of a few short minutes—she didn’t bother with voluminous petticoats, tight corset or a myriad of buttons, and her hair was usually screwed into a tight knot at the back of her head. She’d been primping the last few days, and she knew why, knew she should make her way downstairs looking like a drudge. And knew she wouldn’t.
She stared at herself, frustrated. She looked her age—two years older than Brandon Rohan, and a century beyond that. Perhaps she should just stay in her room to pack and have the maid bring her something to eat.
And then Melisande would come traipsing in, asking her all sorts of uncomfortable questions, and she surely didn’t want Brandon to think she was avoiding him. She was happier if he didn’t think of her at all, something he seemed to have mastered last night, even if his af
ternoon kisses had shattered her.
She yanked her hairpins out, twisted the long length of her hair into a knot and secured it with a few hairpins, secure in the knowledge that now she looked like herself, a sensible woman with no interest in attracting the attention of anyone. She could convince Brandon, and she could probably convince Melisande as well. She just needed to convince herself.
“Darling, you shouldn’t be up!” Melisande greeted her when Emma wandered into the small green salon. Young Adrian was playing at her feet, entranced with a set of wooden blocks, and Alexandra Emma lay curled in her mother’s arms. “Surely you aren’t still intending to leave? Only two days ago you were attacked and almost killed.”
“But I wasn’t killed,” she said, squatting down besides Adrian and handing him a block, accepting his toothy smile as reward. “I had a restful day yesterday, a good night’s sleep, and I’m more than ready to get on the road. I have work to do.
“What about Brandon?”
“What about him?” Emma said innocently.
Melisande wasn’t so easily distracted. “I don’t suppose he’s remembered you yet, has he?”
It had taken years of practice, but Emma knew how to keep her expression serene and unruffled. “I hadn’t thought about it,” she said airily. “It doesn’t matter, Melly. You’re making a romance where there is none, and he’s engaged to be married. Really, I can’t put off leaving any longer—I must return to the city. I can’t leave the women in town to the tender mercies of Butcher Fenrush.”
Melisande laughed, distracted. “Do you think he’s going to be a problem? Being replaced by anyone is always difficult, by a woman is worse, though I agree with Benedick’s decision completely. Sooner or later he was going to kill a patient.”
“He kills patients every week,” Emma said. “It’s the only reason I agreed to Benedick’s high-handed decision, and I have no intention of staying in charge any longer than it takes to find a more suitable surgeon. The sooner I get back the sooner things will settle down.”