Leslie Lafoy (39 page)

If it was Barrett’s time, there was nothing she could do to lengthen the number of his days. Wanting and needing and praying didn’t make any difference. She’d learned that truth the hard way. Everyone she’d ever cared about was gone. All of her family, so, so very many of her friends. She hadn’t been able to save them, hadn’t been able to change the course of events or the twists of Fate that had swept them into dark and cold and lonely graves.

The price of surviving, of living with that failure, had been to accept it. She’d made the decision ever so consciously, ever so firmly, as she’d laid Reny and Nigel and Bart to their rests. She’d stood there, watching as the tombs were sealed, and resolved not to care anymore, to keep a distance between herself and the people who crossed her path. It was easier to let them go if she’d never held them in her heart.

And she’d maintained her vow. Through the rest of the war and into the year after it ended. It had kept her sane and strong when others around her were crumpling in despair and inconsolable grief. It had brought her to England and seen her through the terrible news of Mignon’s horrible death. It had given her the resolve she’d needed to keep going, to find Barrett Stanbridge and ask him for his help.

In looking back now, she could see that in the asking, in the accepting, her vow had begun to crack. She had allowed herself to come to know him. Guilt and need had slipped to easy companionship. Companionship to heated, hungry desire. And somewhere along the course of tumbling into bed with him, she’d also tumbled into love. The survivor’s vow had been somehow forgotten. Or perhaps, she mused, it simply hadn’t been strong enough to hold back the power of love. Of life.

There was no undoing it; no walking away from him, no letting him go. The grief would be unbearable and unrelenting, deeper than any she’d ever known.

Gathering her wrapper and nightrail into her hands, Belle crossed to the bed and then hiked the hems high to gently climb up beside him. “I imagine that you’re thirsty,” she said quietly, taking the bowl of water from the night table. Barely wringing out the cloth, she trickled precious liquid past his lips. He swallowed and faintly smiled.

“I’m willing to offer some concessions, Barrett,” she said, continuing. “I promise that I’ll never, ever complain about the cold and damp again. I can learn to live with it. I’ll knit myself some wool stockings. And some wool gloves too.”

He settled deeper into his pillow and sighed—with what seemed like contentment. When he didn’t open his lips for more water, she wrung the cloth drier and gently laid it over his swollen eye. “And I’ll store the trousers away,” she promised, putting the bowl back on the table. “I’ll try very hard to be a proper lady. At least when out in public. And especially around your parents.”

Deciding it was best not to share with him the details of the evening’s unfortunate episode in the foyer, she lay down at his side. Trailing a fingertip over the fullness of his lower lip, she went on, saying, “I could help with your investigations. I think we work very well together, don’t you?”

She took a steadying breath and summoned her courage. “I want to stay with you, Barrett. I love you. Please, please love me. Just a little would be enough.”

In his daze, he brought his lips together as though to kiss her fingertip. Belle closed her eyes and told herself that—for a while—there was no harm in pretending that it was a promise.

Chapter Twenty

Barrett struggled through the last thick wisps of sleep, struggled to obey the urgent command of his mind to rouse. Bits of dream jumbled with bits of reality and wafted past his awareness. Carden was telling him he had to wake up because Belle had a bomb. It smelled like apples and cinnamon to him. The bookish-looking man and the white wall of pain … Which wasn’t as bad, he vaguely realized. And he wasn’t cold anymore. And the ground wasn’t hard under his back either. Maybe he was dead.

The tendrils of sleep evaporated in an instant. No, he wasn’t dead, he assured himself. Dead men’s hearts didn’t pound at the possibility. He dragged a shallow breath into his lungs and when it didn’t hurt as badly or deeply as he thought it would, he took a deeper one and opened his eyes. A flat, white ceiling, he noted. Realization slowly clicked in his brain. He closed his eyes again, then opened one, closed it, and opened the other. It wasn’t swollen shut anymore. It wasn’t quite perfect, but it was much better than the last time he’d tried to look at the world through it.

God, where was he? The ceiling didn’t tell him a blessed thing; they were all alike. He turned his head slowly to the right. Home. His home. He recognized the armoire. How had he gotten here? How long had it been? He shifted his shoulders and turned his head to the left.

Belle lay beside him on the bed, curled on her side, her hair tumbling in an inviting, golden riot over her shoulders and across the pillow. Thick dark lashes smudged the high arches of her delicate cheekbones and her luscious lips were sweetly parted as she softly breathed in her sleep. No, he wasn’t dead. Not in the least.

“Belle,” he whispered, reaching out to take a warm satin curl between his fingers. Her eyes flew open and the instant wonder and joy in them sent his heart soaring. “Isabella Stanbridge,” he murmured, trying the sound of it, the feel of it. And loving it as much as he did her, as much as he loved waking to find her at his side.

She didn’t appear to feel the same way, though. Her brows knitted, her dark eyes clouded, she pushed herself up onto her elbow and peered deeply into his gaze. He tried to cock his right brow, but it didn’t seem to move as effectively as he wanted. He cocked his left instead and asked, “What’s wrong, Belle?”

“Dr. George told me to watch for confusion.”

Dr. George? “I’m not confused,” he assured her. “A bit stiff and sore, yes, but not the least confused, angel.”

“What’s my name?”

“Isabella Dandaneau.” She wasn’t impressed. “Destroyer of bridges and lumber mills,” he said softly, reaching up to curl his hand around her neck and draw her closer. “Ravager of public peace and order. Daring angel of my heart.”

“Oh, Barrett,” she murmured, tears welling in her eyes as she leaned down and brushed a gentle kiss over his lips.

He smiled and slid his arm over her shoulder, drawing her closer still and laying hungry claim to her mouth. So welcoming, so lusciously heated. She was all he needed to live, all that he could ever want. She snuggled her hip against his, drew a leg across his own, and desire shot through every fiber of his body, gathering tight and hard in his loins. He was naked beneath the sheets, his brain supplied. A wrapper was all she had on. It and the sheets had to go.

His right arm didn’t, though. At least not with any mind of its own. It weighed a ton and he couldn’t control it, couldn’t keep it from falling against her shoulder.

“Ow,” she laughingly said against his lips. Drawing back ever so slightly, she gazed down at him, her eyes sparkling.

“That didn’t go as I’d planned,” he admitted, bringing his arm down across his chest. “The work of Dr. George, I presume?” he asked, lifting his head to look at the thick plaster encasing his arm from just above the elbow all the way down to his knuckles.

“He said it would be at least six weeks before you can hope to have the cast removed. But since you’ve been sleeping for the better part of a fortnight, it’s not as long as it sounds.”

A fortnight? God, no wonder he felt oddly thick around the edges. He rolled the shoulder of his casted arm and felt better for the stretching of the muscles and the popping of the joint.

“Dr. George wants you drugged for another four days, at least, so when he comes in this afternoon, you’ll have to pretend that you are.”

He wasn’t going to pretend for any doctor. He was alive and mending and he had the most beautiful, decadently inviting nurse at his side. Not that he was content with her at that distance. No, as soon as he could manage it, he was going … He glanced down at the bend of his casted arm and accepted that they were going to have to make some adjustments for a few weeks. Which wasn’t all that bad, he decided. Belle atop and astride him was actually a rather delightful prospect. And the sooner he got her there, the better.

“Baths are certainly going to be interesting,” he ventured.

“I’ll bathe you,” she offered, trailing her fingertips along the rough stubble of his jaw.

Oh, having a broken right arm wasn’t going to slow them down the least little bit. “I could hurt myself getting a fork to my mouth.”

“I’ll feed you, too.”

Oh, yes, this was going to be the best convalescence in the history of mangled men. “What else might you do for me, Belle?”

“Anything you want.”

“Angel, as I’ve warned you before, when it comes to you, I want a lot.”

“Whatever your heart desires, Barrett. Name it and it’s yours.”

“You,” he said, reaching down to undo the sash that held her wrapper closed. Pushing the silk aside, he slowly brushed the palm of his hand over the heated, satin skin of her hip.

A sultry smile tipped up the corners of her mouth. “Dr. George suggested that your ribs might not be up to robust exercise for yet another week or two. He didn’t come right out and ban lovemaking, of course. But he made it clear that that’s what he meant.”

What did doctors know? “I’ll let you know when the hurt outweighs the pleasure,” he promised, shifting, thinking to draw her across him. “Which would be,” he gasped, abandoning the attempt as his bones and muscles screamed in protest, “right now.”

“Do you want some laudanum?”

“No,” he breathed, trying to focus beyond the pain. “I’ll be all right.”

“That’s what everyone kept telling me,” she said, smoothing his hair. “I was so afraid that we wouldn’t find you in time. So afraid that you’d never wake up. That I’d never get to hear your voice again.”

Belle had been afraid he might die? His heart swelled. “‘We’ being you, Carden, and John Aiden?”

She nodded, sat up, the edges of her open wrapper lying provocatively over the curves of her breasts and pooling around her thighs as she ever so deliberately began to push the bed coverings down. “And O’Brien and Inspector Larson, too. Although, in all honesty, Larson wasn’t as concerned about finding you as he was catching Emil.”

Lifting his arm to make the task easier for her, Barrett decided that he probably needed to know what had happened during his forced absence. While he still had the ability to think at all. “Did Larson succeed?”

“In a manner of speaking, I suppose.”

“Oh?” he pressed, sensing that she really didn’t want to tell him the story.

“There were only little bits of him left to sweep up.”

Ice shot through his veins. “Jesus, Belle,” he gasped. “What did you do?”

“You’re assuming I did something to Emil.”

Oh, such innocence. Such utterly feigned innocence. He grinned. “Angel, ‘little bits’ implies an explosion and you’re the only one I know who plays with that kind of fire.”

“Actually,” she said sweetly, sliding a leg slowly across his own, “he blew himself up.” The friction was exquisite, a prelude that shimmered through every fiber of his body.

“I warned him not to jar the dynamite,” she went on, settling herself low on his abdomen, “that it could detonate without a spark. He didn’t take me seriously.”

Lord Almighty, she was so good, so distractingly wanton. Hardening in anticipation, he promised himself that someday he’d ask her for the details of how she’d come to have dynamite in the first place. He’d ask Carden and John Aiden, too. And when he finally pieced it all together, he and Belle would likely have a set-to that would make the front page of the
Times
. But for the moment, he was less concerned with the past than he was with enjoying the full wonder and joy of their having survived it.

“You could have gotten yourself killed, Belle,” he observed, shifting beneath her so that his desire lightly caressed her backside.

She smiled down at him appreciatively for a long second and then seemed to consciously move the sensations to the edges of her awareness. His heart skipped a beat when she nodded. “Yes, I could have. I’ll admit that I played hard,” she assured him, languidly trailing a fingertip around his nipple. “But I played as safely as I could.”

Belle’s idea of safe … His heart was pounding so hard his ribs ached. He reached out and caught her hand in his, determined to keep her advance under control until all that needed to be said had been. He’d put it off too many times already. She had to know how much her life meant to him. How deeply he loved her, how forever he would mourn her loss.

“I know that you like dancing on the edge, Belle,” he said gently. “I understand the attraction in it. I honestly do. And God knows I find your fascination with it far more stimulating than I should. But please promise me that you’ll never again put yourself in true danger.”

She shrugged and smiled serenely. “I wouldn’t worry about the risks, Barrett. Nothing horrific is going to happen to me. Madame Tanay says that I’m destined to live long.”

“Madame Tanay?”

“She’s something of a priestess. She’s the one who taught me how to divine for missing things.”

“And you believe her?” he asked, incredulous. “Enough to risk life and limb on her word for it?” He didn’t give her a chance to reply. “Belle, you’re a keenly intelligent woman. For God’s sake, use some reason in this. Divining is one thing; courting death is quite another.”

“I can’t make you promises I have no intention of keeping, Barrett,” she whispered, looking genuinely regretful. “I could never put my life before yours. Never. I love you too much.”

It didn’t matter that he couldn’t breathe. Or that his heart was hammering on his smashed ribs. Belle loved him. They’d have the rest of their lives to battle over her penchant for risk. “And that makes you sad?” he asked, his soul singing.

“It scares me.”

“I understand that, too,” he assured her, drinking in the wonder his life had so unexpectedly become.

“You do?”

Oh, Lord, that she’d always look at him with such trust and hope in her eyes. “It rather opens up the heavens,” he explained softly, “and demands that you face tomorrow with some firm decisions in hand.”