Barely a Lady (7 page)

He didn’t bother to answer. Tangling his hand in her hair, he pulled her closer, until she was stretched out almost atop him. He kissed her hard, and she found herself answering. Overwhelmed, her senses swamped, she couldn’t gather the strength to fight what she had tried so desperately to forget in the secret hours of night. She felt his mouth open beneath hers, and she opened in welcome. She met his tongue, sliding and curling and invading to lay claim to him. She felt the pure force of him washing through her like spring light, like fire on a cold morning, like life itself. She recognized something she’d never thought to taste on Jack Wyndham.

Need.

Not just the passion that flared when the two of them came close. Not the sweet, bright joy of communion. Need, as if he’d been starving without her, his soul as well as his body. As if he’d walked the same dark roads as she and needed her comfort.

She felt his other hand wrap around her breast, and she arched into it, moaning. Her nipples tightened, and her bones melted. Her skin glowed. Her heart thundered, and her body shook as she sucked in a startled breath. She slid her arms around his sleek shoulders and held him to her.

It was so familiar. So good. So right. His hand, his wonderful elegant hand with its long clever fingers, skimming across her suddenly fever-bright skin, his mouth commanding, controlling, cherishing her lips, her cheek, her throat where she laid it bare for his touch. His hard shoulders and broad back flexing beneath her fingers. The feel of him, the sound of him, the smell of him.

Oh, sweet God, the smell of him. Not trauma or blood or smoke or death. Not even the clean-air perfume of fresh sheets.

Jack.

Somehow through all the work they’d done on him, the bathing and cleaning and bandaging, the filthy clothing they’d removed and the slashes they’d sewn, she could still, miraculously, smell him. Not his cologne, a melange of spice and smoke. His essence, a sharp, dark scent that was so uniquely him that it had set her senses sizzling from the moment she’d met him, a musk of secrets and strength and seduction. She inhaled that cherished scent and succumbed to it.

He slipped his hand beneath her bodice, beneath the frayed lawn of her chemise to set her breasts on fire. He found the peak of her nipple and teased it. Heat pooled deep within her and spread out to every finger and toe, to the roots of her hair, to the juncture of her thighs.

She rubbed against him, desperate for the friction, for the age-old attraction of soft for hard. She pushed the blankets down to bare his chest. She closed her eyes, narrowing her world to the feel of his tongue as it swept her mouth, the texture of his hair-roughened skin beneath her fingertips, the dark seduction of her own arousal, all but forgotten over the years. She wished briefly for the lady’s hands she’d once had. She wanted to shatter his control with her soft hands.

She heard him groan, felt the vibration of it against her breasts. She slipped her leg over his to fit more closely and realized that he was surprisingly hard. She wrapped her hands in his thick, curling hair and savored its silk.

“Oh, Jack,” she murmured, licking the salt from his throat. “I’ve missed you so.”

She felt him nip at her shoulder and gasped. She felt his hand snaking beneath her skirt and heard her blood sing in her ears.
Yes,
she thought, arching higher, there.
There
.

She felt the air swirl against her thigh and higher, searching out the weeping flesh that ached for him. She arched closer, suddenly shameless, whimpering with the sweet feel of him. Of her Jack. Of the only man she’d ever loved.

The man who had thrown her away.

From one heartbeat to the next, she lurched back, gasping and shaking and stricken. The room was suddenly cold, her heart bereft.

No!
her body screamed, the pain acute and disabling.
Let me go back. Let it be like it was before.

Except it wasn’t. It couldn’t be.

She lifted a trembling hand to her mouth, as if she could hold in the keening that rose in her soul. Would it always be this way? Could he merely touch her and she’d crumble all over again? Before explanations, before apologies? Just a hot, hungry mating of bodies too long kept apart?

“Livvie,” he moaned, his eyes opening, wide and hurt. “What’s wrong? What happened?”

He reached his hand out again. She stumbled to her feet to get far enough away. Struggling to right her gaping bodice, she closed her eyes. “I… I can’t…. You’re hurt, Jack.”

“Oh, I can’t be that hurt….” He ran a shaking hand through his hair and paused, his hand meeting the swath of bandages that circled his head. “Bloody hell. What happened?”

Olivia tried hard to masquerade her distress. “Don’t you remember?”

He frowned. She curled her hands into her skirts, where they wouldn’t get her into more trouble. Her heart still thundered uselessly. Her senses screamed to regain Jack’s touch.

“I must have come a cropper on a horse,” he said, frowning as if he had to search for his words. “Never did that before.” Fingering the bandage, he gave a lopsided grin. “I guess this is what happens when I get mad.”

“I don’t think this happened because you were mad, Jack,” she said, suddenly feeling uncertain. “Try to remember.”

He laughed. “I am remembering, sweetheart. I remember needing to get away to clear my head. I remember wanting to throttle you. I remember Gervaise being the one to suggest I might benefit from a bit of a cooling-off period.”

Olivia gaped. “You call this a
cooling-off
period?”

He blinked, staring as if she had just sprouted horns. “For heaven’s sake, Livvie. It’s only been two weeks.”

Suddenly she was the one struggling for sense. “What?”

Jack was frowning. “Well, what did you expect me to do, Liv? I needed to put a little distance between us until I could forgive you. It was my wedding gift, for God’s sake.”

She felt as if the world had just been upended beneath her. Suddenly she was sitting. “Your wedding gift? What are you talking about?”

This conversation was so familiar, as if it were a piece of an old dream or memory. But she was too careful with her memories. She would never have let this one loose.

“Your gambling,” Jack said, taking hold of her cold hand again, as if that would help. “I’ve forgiven you. I even paid off your debts. But then you went behind my back and sold my wedding gift to cover your losses. How did you expect me to react, Liv? If Gervaise hadn’t found your necklace in that store window, we never would have gotten it back.”

Lurching like a drunk, the fragments of memory tumbled into place. Olivia felt her perilous world spin out of control.

“Jack,” she said, pulling her hand back. “Tell me what year this is.”

He was rubbing at his forehead. “Livvie, don’t be ridiculous. You know perfectly well what year it is.”

She nodded, her hands knotted together so tightly her fingers had gone numb. “You hurt your head, Jack. I need to know that you know what year it is. What day.”

He sighed, as if she were being ridiculous. “Oh, all right. But I promise. I may feel as if I were run over by a field of racehorses, but my brainbox ain’t broke. It’s 1810.”

No
. This was not possible.

“1810?” She knew her voice sounded unpardonably shrill. “You’re sure?”

“Of course. It’s October. No. November. The Harvest Fair was on October twenty-seventh, and Gervaise brought me your necklace two days later. I left the next morning while you and Mother were arguing over the garden.”

More accurately, his stepmother had had a three-day tantrum over Olivia’s attempt to transplant a rosebush that, according to the marchioness, had been in place since the Conqueror.

Olivia had moved that bush five years ago. Five
years.

Jack had no idea what had happened since. That he’d killed her cousin Tristram and cast her off with nothing more to support her than the wedding ring he’d forgotten to reclaim in his hurry to throw her off his property. He didn’t know about Jamie or Gervaise or any of what had followed.

His smile faded. “Livvie? What’s wrong?”

What was
wrong
? What was wrong was that she had spent five years in hell after what he’d done to her, and in his mind he was still her generous husband. What was wrong was that she had risked everything to protect him from exposure. Suddenly she wasn’t quite sure why.

She meant to say something; she was sure. She meant to explain, to correct him with calm and logic. She would tell him the truth, quietly, and then she would escape before she could tell him in no uncertain terms what exactly had happened to his precious wedding present and his cousin and his honor.

She opened her mouth.

And she began to laugh.

Appalled, she slapped her hand against her mouth to stop.

She couldn’t. Tears welled in her eyes. Her stomach heaved. She kept laughing.

Jack struggled to sit up. “Livvie?”

She reached out a hand as if to ward him off. She fought to regain her composure. She really did.

Instead, laughing even harder, she ran out of the room. And no matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t stop.

The Allee Verde was all but empty. A lovely stretch of green lined with trees at the edge of the river, it was where the society of Brussels gathered on fine days to exercise their horses. Now the ground was churned up from all the military wagons, and society stayed inside rather than face the thousands of dead who had been collected on the city ramparts.

Two men had braved the hot afternoon. Giving every evidence that they would succumb to ennui by the end of the day, they walked their horses beneath the thickly leaved trees.

“What have you learned?” the taller one asked impatiently.

His dapper companion shook his head. “Nothing. The battlefield is a hellish mess. They were already carrying on mass burials before I could even get down there. There’s even talk of funeral pyres.”

“You are certain someone saw him.”

“That’s what I heard.”

“We need to find out for sure. It is imperative.”

“You think I don’t know? You haven’t been the one with his handkerchief to his nose as he turned bodies. I tell you, if he really was where he was supposed to be, he is there no longer.”

“Then find him.”

For a moment, there was silence. “I did hear something about his wife,” the dapper man said. “I wonder if she’s involved.”

The tall man scowled. “You need to find out for certain.”

He received a shrug. “Well, at one time or another, all society meets at Lady Kate’s. If I want to catch a rumor on the wind, that’s where I’ll have to start.”

“Do you expect me to help?”

For a moment, the more handsome man seemed to consider it. Then, with a smile full of mischief, he shook his head. “No, I think I’d much prefer to plow that field myself.”

He lifted a cambric handkerchief to lazily dab at a bit of perspiration on his forehead. The movement caused the ruby on his signet ring to flash bloodred in the sunlight.

“If you do find him,” his companion said, “notify me at once. Our good friend might need a bit of… persuasion to cooperate.”

The handsome man actually grew pale. He wanted nothing to do with his associate’s idea of persuasion. No one with sense would. Not when the man had such a facility for knives that he had taken to calling himself the Surgeon.

One of his victims had once suggested his name should more rightly be the Butcher. He had carved his response in the man’s forehead in perfectly legible copperplate.
Precision is the true mark of genius. The Surgeon.

The mistake had never been made again.

“I don’t have to tell you how vital it is that we find our friend,” the Surgeon insisted. “Or how I would feel toward you if we didn’t.”

Dabbing once more at his damp forehead, the other man tucked his handkerchief away. “No,” he said with feeling. “You certainly don’t.”

Just then, a pretty Bruxellois on a roan mare approached, her groom in tow, and the men turned to doff their hats. After all, there was nothing else to say until Jack Wyndham was found and, if necessary, eliminated.

Chapter 6

L
ivvie! Damn it, come back here!”

Jack couldn’t understand it. Livvie had been here; he couldn’t have mistaken that. His body still thrummed with residual sexual energy. He had seen her, tasted her. He had cupped those gorgeous breasts in his hand.

And then she’d fled like a fox hearing bugles. And hadn’t returned. He swore he’d been lying here for a good thirty minutes trying to get her attention, without any success, and he was feeling worse by the minute.

It might have just been that he couldn’t seem to get off the damn bed. He kept trying, rolling over and throwing his legs over the side. He’d even gotten an arm under him to push himself aloft. But it had proved impossible to move farther. It was as if those moments holding Livvie had completely done him in.

He hurt everywhere. His stomach dipped and rolled like a leaky ship, and every so often, he swore he saw two of everything. His face felt like an overstretched balloon, and his chest ached like the devil. And to top it all, he was abysmally weak. He’d felt like hell before. This was far worse.

He wished he could remember just how he had been injured. It must have been a hell of a story.

Throwing back the bedcovers, he got a good look athimself. He had no mirror with which to see what had happened to his head, but there were bandages wrapping his left thigh, right arm, and chest. He took an experimental breath and gasped. Must have broken a rib or two.

If only his head wasn’t such a disaster. The pain wasn’t unendurable. He’d suffered more from a five-bottle night. But he felt as if he were caught in a fog.

He couldn’t remember anything past the moment he’d arrived at the Wyndham hunting box. He certainly couldn’t remember doing something so spectacular to himself that he’d ended up in bed looking like a second-rate mummy.

He felt as if everything he knew was shifting, the colors bleeding, the shapes suspect. He looked around the room and didn’t recognize it. It definitely wasn’t one of the bedrooms in the hunting box. It wasn’t any place he’d be caught dead in, with its fussy gold and white furniture, pink walls, and brocaded fabrics. Where the blazes
was
he?

“Livvie!”

His voice seemed to be fading away like a badly filled bellows, but he knew she could hear him. She was still close. He could feel her, just as he’d always been able to, as if invisible threads connected them. And he could hear the oddest muffled noises out in the hall, as if she were still laughing. Which was ludicrous. As upset as she’d been when he’d walked out two weeks ago, he couldn’t imagine her finding any of this funny.

He most certainly didn’t.

He needed to hold her again. He needed to make sure she was real.

Why did he have such a sudden sense of dislocation from her? She was his beautiful girl, with her sun-streaked corn-silk hair and doe-brown eyes. He only had to close his eyes to see the sweet sweep of her cheek, the lush lower lip he loved to nibble, the hint of a dimple that peeked out just to the left of her pretty mouth when she laughed.

But something was
different,
and he hadn’t realized it until she’d disappeared.

He needed to see her.

“Chambers!”

At least he could count on his valet. Chambers made it a point never to be farther away than ten feet.

But Chambers didn’t answer. Instead, a short, bandy-legged gnome with shocking red hair and dressed in a worn Guards jacket clumped into the room. And he looked as confused as Jack felt.

“Who are you?” Jack demanded, and was mortified when his voice came out as nothing but a rasp. “Where’s Chambers?”

The little man must have heard him, because after a quick frown over his shoulder toward the hallway, he smiled and limped over. “If that’d be your man, he’s not here. I’m after bein’ an excellent batman, though. Name’s Harper.”

“My wife.” Why did that sound odd? Just saying the words made Jack’s head ache. “Where is she?”

The little man’s squashed features scrunched up in a frown. “Now, that I’m afraid I don’t know. It’s grand to see y’r eyes open, though. Hasn’t the house been fair fetched thinking we’d be after buryin’ ya next to the general?”

Jack found himself blinking, not sure whether it was his brain or the little man that was having trouble making sense.

“Can you tell us your name then?” the little man asked, making short work of getting Jack comfortably back beneath the covers. “So we can get on with settlin’ your affairs ’n all?”

He stared up at the ugly little man, feeling even more disoriented. “My name? How could you not know my name?”

It was the little man’s turn to blink. “Well, now, when have we had the chance to ask? Sure, this is the first you’ve woken.”

“Then what the devil has Livvie been doing?”

“Livvie?” the little man echoed uncertainly. “Who… ?”

“Harper,” Jack heard from the doorway and battled a cowardly impulse to weep in relief. Livvie had come back. She’d tell him what was going on.

She was standing in the doorway, clad in an awful brown gown, her eyes red as if she’d been crying rather than laughing, looking as hesitant as a fox kit on the edge of the woods.

Livvie had never looked like that in her life. It made her look faded somehow. Thinner. Sad.

Had he done that to her? Had she had such an awful time with his mother while he’d escaped to his retreat?

No. Instinctively, he knew this was worse. But how? And for the love of God, why was she clad in the ugliest gown he’d ever seen?

“I’m sorry, Liv,” he apologized, reaching a hand out. “I didn’t mean to hurt you. I don’t mind about the gambling. I promise.” He flashed her a wry grin. “Just tell me you haven’t put up the Abbey. I’d rather not have to inform Mother she has to share lodgings with Millicent.”

But she didn’t smile back. “I’ve told you before, Jack. I don’t gamble.”

He laughed. “Since I’m at your mercy, I’ll be happy to agree. Now where the hell am I?”

The Irishman shifted. “Language, milord.”

Jack glared at him. “What are you still doing here?”

“Protecting the missus, looks like.”

“That’s
her ladyship,
you repellent little bog trotter,” he snapped. “And don’t threaten me. I’ve killed better men than you.”

Olivia stared at him as if she didn’t recognize him. For a second, Jack thought she might be right. He had the most disorienting feeling that he didn’t recognize himself.

But before he could ask why that could be, she turned to the Irishman and laid a hand on his arm. And oddly, she smiled as if the two shared something. “You really think a curse is going to cripple me, Sergeant?”

His answering smile was far too familiar. “Curses are one thing,
a chuisle
. I won’t be after havin’ you insulted.”

Again, Jack battled a surge of confusion. He felt as if he’d walked into the middle of a play he’d never seen.

“Jack,” Livvie said, still smiling at the Irishman. “This is ex-regimental sergeant Sean Harper, late of His Majesty’s First Life Guards. He’s the one who sewed you up and cared for you when we found you. You can thank him any time.”

If it had been anyone but Livvie, or had this little leprechaun been any handsomer, Jack would have given in to jealousy. “My thanks, Sergeant.”

“Ah, no, that’s
mister
these days,” the little man said with a big grin as he gave his leg a knock that thunked.

“Harper,” Olivia continued, “I’d like to present Jack Wyndham, the Earl of Gracechurch.”

“Well, good,” Jack couldn’t help saying. “At least I was right about that. Can you tell me what it is you think I don’t know?”

He was rubbing at his forehead again, where the pain had seemed to swell with Livvie’s return.

Walking over to a table, Olivia poured a glass of water. Adding a few drops of some liquid, she brought it over to him. “You fell,” she said, “just as you said. The rest can wait ’til you feel a bit better. Now drink this and get some rest.”

Catching her hand, he slipped his fingers beneath the cuff of her brown sleeve. “I think I did overdo it a bit just now, Liv,” he said, teasing the soft skin of her wrist with his thumb.

For a second, she hesitated. But she didn’t smile back as she tilted the glass to his lips. “I think you did, Jack.”

Jack drank, suddenly thirsty. He knew without asking that there was laudanum in the water, but he didn’t care. Livvie had pulled her hand away as if he’d hurt her. She wouldn’t make eye contact.

Suddenly he felt exhausted. Finishing the water, he lay back. “Promise you’ll be here when I wake.”

Again she briefly paused. “Yes, Jack. I’ll be close.”

It wasn’t enough, he thought. There was something she wasn’t saying. Something he wasn’t understanding. But for right now, it soothed him to have her take his hand. To know she was there with him.

Feeling somehow saner, he closed his eyes. “There’s a good girl. I knew I could trust you.”

For a second, all he heard was silence.

“Did you?” she finally asked.

But he was too tired to make the speech he’d been working on while he rusticated, about how no matter what, they had each other, and they could weather anything as long as they did it together.

He settled for, “I love you, Olivia Louise Gordon Wyndham. Never doubt that. I’ll always love you….”

This time he got no answer at all.

He was fading quickly to sleep when he finally thought he heard her speak.

“I know you have questions, Harper. But I have to share something with the duchess before I can answer them.”

“O’ course, missus. Anything.”

Jack frowned as he slipped away into the dark.

Olivia knew she had to get up. She had to take the dispatch bag downstairs and wait by the front door so Lady Kate could no longer avoid her. She needed to confess.

In a minute. When she regained her composure.

She would not cry. Not anymore. No matter what it took, she would not cry over Jack Wyndham.

But she was feeling so overwhelmed, tossed into a cold ocean with the water closing over her head. And now, when she thought she couldn’t survive a moment more, here was Jack vowing undying love.

Damn him for doing this to her.

She pressed her clenched fist against her chest, as if it could stop the burning there. She closed her eyes, as if it would help her hide.

It didn’t. Instead she saw that high shelf where she’d stacked all the secrets and memories she’d locked away in little boxes where they couldn’t hurt her. Only they weren’t there anymore. They were all tumbled about her like bricks from a building toppled in a high wind, hundreds of them, all broken open and leaking.

Five years. She hadn’t seen Jack in five years. And in that time, she had endured hunger and cold and destitution. She had given birth in a cow byre assisted by a farmer’s wife and had carried her baby over hundreds of miles as she sought work, as she sought handouts when nothing else was available. She had withstood Gervaise’s scorched-earth campaign and stood tall and dignified as she faced public condemnation from those who should have loved her. She had even survived a mother’s most unspeakable agony, that of empty arms. In all that time, she had managed to keep those odd little boxes of hers securely locked away so she could focus on what she needed to do rather than what she had lost.

When Jack had thrown her away, she’d locked him away in one of her most impregnable boxes. She’d spent months disciplining her mind, her heart, her body to forget him. To abolish the sweet joy of his smile, the heady exhilaration of his touch, the very miracle of his love. She’d made him disappear, like Jamie, because she simply couldn’t survive as she must, knowing he still existed.

Until now. Until Jack opened his eyes and swept all those boxes down about her.

Abruptly she straightened.
Enough
. No one needed to see her feeling sorry for herself. Especially in this house, where honorable men suffered worse pain in silence. Stiffening her back, as she had a thousand times before, she stopped her tears by will alone. And then, picking up the torn and bloody dispatch bag, she left her little room and descended the stairs.

In the house of the Dowager Duchess of Murther, disaster was evidently served up over tea and scones. Olivia learned this when she finally ran Lady Kate to earth later that afternoon. Knowing that she could put off her confession no longer, she decided to intercept the duchess before she could again escape. So she took up a post in the foyer on a straight-back chair and waited for the duchess to return from morning visits.

Lady Kate swept in just as the Percier clock struck four, Grace and Lady Bea on her heels. Olivia caught the brief flash of humor in the duchess’s eyes when she realized what was afoot.

“Are you certain this can’t wait?” Lady Kate asked as she unpinned her rose Oldenburg bonnet and handed it off to Finney. “You’ll pardon my saying so, Olivia, but you look perfectly hagged.”

Rising to her feet, Olivia dredged up a smile. “Well, since I feel perfectly hagged, I can hardly object. I’m sorry, but I waited as long as I could.”