Three Nights with a Scoundrel

Page 2

Worst decision he’d ever made. And not just because Carnelia was uninspired in bed.
Leo had attended the fight without him. And afterward, he’d been attacked and beaten in a Whitechapel alleyway—murdered in the street by a pair of footpads. A random act of thievery, it was concluded by most.
Julian knew better. That attack had been meant for him. In recent months, he’d attended every boxing match, cockfight, dogfight, and bear-baiting within a day’s travel of London. If the scent of blood hung in the air, he followed it—no matter how the spectacle turned his stomach. He could not rest until he reckoned with Leo’s murderers, lest they become his killers, too.
“Do you really think attending these matches will lead you to them?” she asked. “You have scarcely any description of the men. They could be standing next to you on the street, and you would never know.”
“You don’t understand.” Though he had a better description of the men than Lily supposed, it was vague at best. He knew well how ineffectual the search was. It didn’t matter. Giving up was unthinkable.
“No, I don’t understand. I don’t understand a great many things you do lately. For example, just how do you get from a boxing match in Southwark to a costermonger’s wheelbarrow in Mayfair?”
“After the bout, there was a bull-baiting. The beast snapped its tether, and the crowd panicked.” Julian closed his eyes and pinched the bridge of his nose, his thoughts crowded out by memories of noise. The men shouting, the dogs’ frenzied barks, the thunder of footfalls as everyone rushed for the exits at once.
He raised both hands between them—one balled in a fist, the other extended as an open palm. “The bull charged.” In illustration, he drove the fist into his palm. “I was in the way.”
“I don’t suppose you were doing something noble, like diving in front of the beast to save a hobbling grandfather.” She put a hand under his chin and tipped his face to the light, examining his cheek. Her finger traced a slanting line toward his mouth—he must have a scratch there, he supposed. He licked his cracked lips.
Her touch skipped to the bandage encircling his arm. She ran her fingers over the binding, tucked a raw edge under the fold.
The casual intimacy of her touch was affecting. Too affecting.
Shaking his head, he pulled her hand away. “Nothing noble. I was just the one stupid enough to be wearing red.”
“Julian.” Her dark eyes glimmered with emotion as she squeezed his fingers. “You must stop making yourself a target.”
“I was only squashed. No real injury, save the pain in my arm. I decided to walk home to shake it off.”
“Walk home? From Southwark?”
He shrugged his good shoulder, easing his hand from her grip. “It’s not so far.” Not for him. Lately he spent most nights wandering all quadrants of the city.
Last night, he’d made his way back so far as the square where Harcliffe House was situated. This house was always the last stop on his nightly rounds. He would pause on the corner down the street. If he stood half on the pavement, half on the green … then craned his neck … he could just glimpse the fourth rightmost window on the second floor. The one he knew belonged to Lily’s bedchamber. If the window was dark, she was sleeping and at peace. He, too, could relax. On the nights he found a lamp burning, he ached for her sorrow. And he simply stood there, quietly sharing her grief, until that light went dark or the sun came up—whichever occurred first.
In the weeks after Leo’s death, he’d found that lamp burning more often than not. As the months passed, however, her bad nights had grown less frequent. Last night, he’d been comforted to see the window dark. And just as Julian had turned to seek his own home, that faint pain in his arm shifted to a deep, persistent throb.
He said, “I was passing nearby. I stopped under the streetlamp to have a look at my arm. Just a flesh wound, but I hadn’t noticed it earlier. Something was caught … a shard of glass, I think.” He touched his bandaged arm in demonstration. “I grasped it and pulled it out, and there was a fair amount of blood. Quite startled me, and I …”
“And you fainted.”
“Fainted? No.”
“You swooned.”
“No,” he said stoutly, jamming his hand under his arm. “Absolutely not. I didn’t swoon, Lily. Men do not swoon.”
“You slumped to the pavement unconscious, for the costermonger to find. Sounds like a fainting spell to me. What else could it have been?”
“I don’t know. Something different. Apoplexy. Malaria.” Anything more masculine than swooning.
Her eyes rolled toward the ceiling. “You don’t have apoplexy or malaria. Aside from your wound and a few bruises, the doctor could find nothing wrong with you. Not physically, at any rate. You’re simply exhausted. When was the last time you slept through the night?”
“Can’t recall, honestly.”
“Hm. And when’s the last time you had a proper meal?”
“Ah, now that I remember. I had a very fine steak at the Stoat’s Head.”
“Yesterday?”
He hedged, pushing a hand through his hair. “Not precisely.”
One dark eyebrow arched in disbelief. “You fainted, Julian.”
“And what if I did? What would you have me do, start carrying a vinaigrette?” He chuckled to himself. That would be a good joke. Within a week, every young buck in London would be carrying the same. Like Beau Brummel before him, Julian was the trendsetter of his day. His clothing, hair, even mannerisms were meticulously copied by the impressionable young gentlemen of the ton. Just as he’d planned from the start.
“Don’t be ridiculous. I want you to start taking care of yourself, that’s all. Sleep. Eat. Avoid scenes of violence and mayhem. Is it really so difficult?”
“Yes. It’s impossible.”
She winced, absorbing the force of his reply. He regretted his vehemence, but not the sentiment.
She said quietly, “I want you safe. I care about you. What’s so impossible about that?”
Everything.
He yanked the coverlet about himself, scanning the room for his clothes. He had to get out of this bed, this house … before this conversation went places it shouldn’t. He planted one foot on the floor and transferred his weight to it.
Dizziness swamped him. The room made a violent twirl, and he found himself pitched straight back to the mattress.
“Malaria,” he muttered. His arms felt wooden at his sides.
“It’s not malaria. Nor even a fainting spell this time. The doctor left a sleeping powder, and I put some in your barley water.”
She pushed him back on the bed, arranging the coverlet about him. Her hands … they were everywhere. As she leaned forward to arrange the pillows beneath his head, he got an intoxicating lungful of her sweet warmth. The swell of her breast brushed against his wounded arm. Soft. God, so soft. His heart gave a wild kick. Now this was perilous.
He said, “I thought you wanted me to avoid danger.”
“I do. That’s why you’re going to sleep. When you wake up, you’re going to eat. And then we’re going to talk.”
Her words seemed wrapped in cotton. It took him a moment to unravel their meaning. “Just how much sleeping powder did you give me?”
“Two doses, and an extra pinch for good measure. You’re a large man, Julian Bellamy.”
“Ah, Lily. You noticed.” The flirtatious retort slipped out by accident. Damn. He was so sleepy, drunken with it. He couldn’t censor his replies.
“You’re also an ass.”
“You know me so well.”
“Do I?” She laid a hand to his cheek. “Sometimes I wonder. Sometimes I think I don’t know you at all.”
“Don’t say that.”
Her dark eyes searched his. So beautiful, those eyes. He wanted to keep staring into them for hours—forever—but some devil’s imp had tied lead weights to his eyelashes. He couldn’t hold them up much longer.
“Go to sleep.” Her soft form receded.
“No, wait. Don’t go. I’m sorry.”
A spike of clarity pierced his drugged haze. He struggled up on one elbow. With his other hand, he reached for her, curling his hand around the back of her slender neck. He wove his fingers into the thick silk of her hair, holding her tight. Leaving her nowhere to look but at him. He needed to say this. Nothing in the world was more important than saying these words, right now. And he needed to know she understood.
He twisted his grip in her hair, and she gave a little gasp. He waited until her gaze fell to his lips. There. Now he knew she was listening.
“I’m so sorry, Lily. So damn sorry, and I wish to God … It’s my fault, you know. Leo’s murder. My fault. But I’m going to make it right. Not right. Can’t be put right. But better. I swear to you, I’ll …”
Damn it, he was rambling like a bedlamite. From the furrowed set of her brow, he could tell he’d lost her some ways back.
“Please,” she said. “Don’t distress yourself so.”
“I’m sorry,” he repeated, his voice breaking into a hoarse whisper. He began again, forcing his lips to shape the words clearly, even if no sound came out. “You must know I’d do anything for you. For you. You and I … I wish …”
She shushed him, tapping her thumb against his jaw. “Rest, Julian.”
Julian. The name echoed through his skull until he scarcely recognized it as his own. Perhaps because it wasn’t.
“You should sleep,” she said.
His chin concurred, nodding in agreement. He should sleep. He should.
No. His eyes snapped open. He couldn’t let her go, not yet. And if he couldn’t reach her with words, he’d have to try something else. With his last bit of consciousness, he pushed up on one arm, pulled her close with the other—
And kissed her. God damn his soul, he kissed Lady Lily Chatwick for all he was worth. Which, unfortunately, wasn’t much at the moment.
Beneath his palm, her neck went rigid with shock. Her lips were warm, but firm. Resistant. Sealed.
Still he held her fast, pressing his mouth to hers with artless desperation. All his seductive techniques—clever caresses, murmured endearments, nimble flicks of the tongue—they’d deserted him utterly. After all these years, so many fantasies of this moment … Bloody hell. This was not going well, not at all.
He tilted his head, hoping a different angle might help.
A panicked sound creaked from her throat.
Julian cursed himself. Really, he wanted to pull back and insist, I’m a much better kisser than this.
But what was the use? He’d never have another chance to prove it.
Then, suddenly, something happened. Or nothing happened.
Because in that moment, neither of them moved. Neither of them breathed. They just … existed together. The tension melted away. And the kiss was still artless, still desperate—but only because it was real. The most honest, truthful moment they’d ever shared.
The sheer power of it was a lightning strike, jolting them apart.
He stared at her, unable to speak as the room contracted to a dark, narrow tunnel. He at one end, and she at the other. Sleep tugged at him with its clumsy grasp, stealing the edges from his vision and the strength from his limbs. His grip slipped from her neck. Strands of her hair slid through his fingers like water. Cool and abundant and vital.
Impossible to hold.
He fell back to the bed, and knew no more.
Chapter Two
There had been a time, not so very long ago, when Julian had counted few regrets in his life. The night of Leo’s murder, those “few” regrets multiplied to “many.”
And he faced today with the unhappy knowledge that at some point overnight, “many” had been revised to “innumerable.”