Lost in Your Arms (7 page)

“No.” MacLean looked him right in the eyes. “I don’t.”

Hope faded again, and Enid sighed.

A silence fell on the chamber. Not a silence such as had wrapped them ’round for the last fortnight, but a thoughtful silence. A guarded silence.

Enid watched the two men, wondering how Mr. Throckmorton would take the disappointment, seeing how MacLean waited, apparently relaxed, while waiting for the reaction.

Straightening, Mr. Throckmorton said, “You’re a suspicious sort. You always have been. That’s one of your qualities that first attracted my attention.”

“Am I? I don’t remember.”

“You say you don’t remember, yet you always were pessimistic about marriage.”

“I still am, although I can’t tell you why.” MacLean glanced up at Enid. “Especially when I’ve taken such a bonny lass to wife.”

Mr. Throckmorton’s gaze flicked from one to the other.

“Of course, she tells me we’ve been estranged.”

“I . . . yes, you were.” Mr. Throckmorton paced away.

“Perhaps that’s the reason for my cynicism.” MacLean closed his eyes for a moment as if the excitement had tired him.

In a tone so noncommittal as to be dry, Mr. Throckmorton said, “I had to bring Mrs. MacLean here in the hopes you would revive for her sake.”

“As I have. It was her sweet voice that guided me to consciousness.” MacLean’s thin face creased as he smiled at her with an edge so sharp it cut her like a razor. “But not to memory.”

Mr. Throckmorton paced back to the foot of the bed and grasped the rails between his fingers. “I will tell you the truth, MacLean. I can’t shake the suspicion that you remember everything but fear I may have betrayed you. Yet if I’d had anything to do with the explosion, you’d be dead now. You’re on my land; it would have been no problem at all to have had your life snuffed out.”

“I may have information you need,” MacLean said flatly.

“You do.”

Enid shrank from their intensity.

Mr. Throckmorton said, “We believe—we hope—you have some knowledge of who set that bomb, killed our man and injured you. If I didn’t want that information known, I could have had you killed. Knowing this, I have to ask you again—is it true you remember nothing?”

Enid found herself holding her breath.

“Nothing,” he whispered, as if grieved, and his eyelids drooped. “I remember nothing.”

“Very well,” Mr. Throckmorton said. “I believe you. I have no choice.”

“Where . . .” MacLean seemed to be struggling to stay awake. “Where are my things?”

Enid was startled. “Your things?”

“I must have something that is mine. If I could see and touch and smell the pieces of my past, perhaps I could remember . . .”

“You came away from the bombing with only your kilt and your sporran.”

“My sporran. Yes. I want my sporran.” As quickly as MacLean had awoken, he slumped on the pillows.

In a panic, Enid leaned close to his face. His breath dusted her cheek. She placed her fingers on the pulse of his neck. His heart beat strongly beneath her touch. Easing away, she answered Mr. Throckmorton’s unasked question. “He’s fine. Just exhausted.”

“He’ll wake again?”

“There are no absolutes in human health—but yes, I think so.”

Mr. Throckmorton sighed. Walking to the window, he stared out at the garden. “How long will this loss of memory last?”

“I don’t know. I have no experience with riddles of the mind.” She put the mug on the tray and noted that her hand trembled. “I’ve heard of patients claiming they didn’t remember anything, but I always thought it was silly, a story concocted by the guilty or the insane.”

Mr. Throckmorton faced her. In a voice of displeasure, he said, “MacLean has no reason to feel guilty.”

“I hope not.” No recent reason, anyway.

“And he’s not insane.”

“Heavens, no!” She shook her head with a little more calm. “No, he is not.”

“All right.” Mr. Throckmorton took her hands. “Feed him. Make him better. When his body is healthy, his mind will heal, too.”

“I hope so.” Although she liked this enfeebled husband
better than the physically whole one she’d had before. “I think so.”

“I’ll send Mrs. Brown to you.” Mr. Throckmorton went to the trapdoor and opened it. “Lock this behind me, and open it only to one you know.”

Enid stared after him, then hurried to obey him. The sturdy bolt slid into place with a click. The quagmire in which she found herself grew deeper and more perilous by the moment. She feared she would be sucked below the surface. More than that, she feared, despite Mr. Throckmorton’s assurances, that MacLean might be in danger, and she knew herself only too well. While he was helpless, she would do anything, even risk her own life, to save him.

She would do the same for any patient, she assured herself. She would; nothing about MacLean and that kiss could remove the sting of eight years of poverty and debt.

“What is your impression of Throckmorton?”

At the gravelly sound of MacLean’s voice, Enid almost jumped out of her skin. She faced him and saw how he struggled to keep his eyes open, how his skin had bleached to the shade of parchment, how he remained awake only through the exercise of his will. “You need sleep,” she said. “You haven’t the strength for this kind of exertion.”

“What do you think of Throckmorton?”

Weak as a lamb, stubborn as a mule! MacLean wouldn’t stop asking until she’d given her opinion, and so she said, “I like him.”

MacLean wheezed with laughter. “But is he telling the truth?”

“Yes. I mean, I think so. He has given me no reason to think otherwise.” She came to MacLean’s side, lifted his head and gave him another drink of water. “He’s right. He could have had you killed at any time.”

“If I’ve discovered information he wants, and the information exists only within my mind, then Throckmorton would wish to keep me alive until I’ve given up that information. When he has the information, then he can kill me.”

“Oh.” She hadn’t thought of it that way. “I never excelled at logic.”

“That’s what you have me for.” MacLean’s eyelids drooped and his voice became slurred. “Throckmorton might not be an ally. He might well be my executioner.”

“So you really don’t remember.”

Smiling, he shook his head.

But she began to comprehend the labyrinth of distrust and skepticism through which they wandered. “But I work for Mr. Throckmorton, and you don’t remember that I’m your wife.”

“Not so awful at logic, after all.” He smiled at her with that cruel, sharp smile. “You could be my executioner, too.” His eyelids slid shut. “And there isn’t a damn thing I could do about it.” He was asleep.

She stood looking down at him. The swelling on his face had subsided, leaving the harsh bone structure unsoftened by a padding of healthy flesh. Instead his skin was slashed and scarred, his blade of a nose hooked where it had been broken, his beard was scraggly and colored blond and auburn with sprinkles of gray. His
lips . . . when she’d first come, they’d been cracked with fever. She’d rubbed them with ointment, bringing them to a state of wide, pale smoothness. Truth to tell, she’d fallen a little in love with his lips. Not that she’d gone so far as to imagine another kiss, but she had found pleasure in their shape, their velvety texture, the way they might feel if they brushed her neck, her chest, her . . . well, she found pleasure in their velvety texture.

She still didn’t recognize Stephen MacLean, but as each day passed and she concentrated solely on the man in the bed, the old memories faded. He would never again resemble the man she’d married, but perhaps that was a good thing, for he gave every appearance of wanting . . . things she wasn’t ready to give.

He’d kissed her. More important, she’d kissed him back. That kiss had succeeded because MacLean had caught her by surprise. Yes, that was it. He’d caught her unawares, and her response had been a reaction more to years of deprivation than to real passion. She needed to remember who he was. What he had done. To her. To others, too. Stephen MacLean had never been too concerned with telling the truth or allowing others to retain what was theirs. They’d fought about that, and many a time he’d taunted her, called her an orphan who didn’t understand how her betters lived.

When this man’s memory returned, his old, feckless personality would return. She knew it. No man changed as MacLean had changed. She needed to remember that because . . . because if he stayed the man he had been for this brief hour, she could develop a passion for him.

She’d suffered through infatuation once, and the results
had almost brought her to her knees. The thought of springing that trap again frightened her as she hadn’t been frightened for eight long years. Her gaze fixed on the unconscious man, she freed her fingers from his and retreated from the bed.

Plagued by sleep terrors, he jumped. He groaned. His eyes fluttered open and glanced wildly about him. His gaze found her, and he sighed. “Stay with me.”

She heard the undercurrent of desperation in his voice. She didn’t want to feel sorry for him. She didn’t want to make promises.

He tried to struggle up on his elbows. “Stay,” he insisted.

“I’ll be here when you wake.”

He extended his hand.

Helpless to resist, she returned.

He grasped her fingers. “I need you.”

Surely there could be no harm in promising such a simple thing. “I won’t leave.”

On that assurance, he was asleep. Really asleep this time. But even in slumber, he clung to her.

Sighing, she hooked her foot around the straight-backed chair and brought it around so she could sit. “I want you to understand something,” she told the sleeping man. “I’m not promising forever.”

Chapter 7

MacLean opened his eyes to candlelight. He knew where he was immediately. In an attic room in Suffolk, his body torn by an explosion, his mind blank and still—and the woman who called herself his wife hovering close over him like a restless spirit. “What is wrong, woman?” he snapped.

Enid straightened and backed up a long, slow step, her spine stiff with displeasure. “You’ve slept long, ten hours since this morning. We feared you wouldn’t again wake.”

“You’ll not be so lucky again.” His leg hurt, his butt ached. He groped for another pillow to put under his shoulders.

Enid sprang to his assistance. “You’re a more pleasant man when you’re unconscious.”

The village woman he’d met earlier—Mrs. Brown, her name was—stood at the foot of the bed, and she gave her unwanted opinion. “Most men are. Most babes, too.”

Enid’s smile came as suddenly as a spark to flint. “I suppose there’s a lesson to be learned there.”

For all that he wanted to nip at her for her insolence, he was so stricken by the dimple in her chin, the lilt in her voice, the sparkle of her teeth, that he could do no more than stare. Gads, when she was happy everything about her shouted her joy.

She hadn’t smiled at him before. Not once. Not ever.

He couldn’t have forgotten her.

Damn it. Damn it! His name. His home. His mother, his father, his kin. What had this explosion done to him? He’d forgotten all. Oppressed by lucid despair, he pressed his hands to his forehead.

Gently, Enid pushed them away and looked into his eyes. “Do you have a headache?”

She wasn’t staring at him with romantic interest; she was watching his pupils, checking to see if they were normal. His wife. She had claimed to be his wife, yet—how had his wife become this woman of cool blue eyes and steady voice? She said they were estranged; did she cherish no sweet memories of their mating?

Mrs. Brown handed her a steaming cup, and the rich scent smelled of parsley and beef.

His mouth watered, and he found himself reaching out.

Enid steadied the mug.

He swallowed so quickly that it burned the roof of his mouth, and the broth tasted salty and rich on his tongue.

“Do you have a headache?” Enid asked again.

He glanced at Mrs. Brown. She stood across the room, folding linens at the table, too far away to hear
him speak, so in a low tone he admitted, “More of a heartache. I don’t know who I am.” Then he cursed himself for showing Enid his soft underbelly. Women scorned a weak man.

But Enid didn’t show her contempt. She answered just as softly, “I’ll take care of you until you know who you are.”

She still wore the dark green gown, a little more wrinkled than before, with the sleeves rolled up to the elbow. The candlelight caressed her, but tiredness ringed her eyes and curling wisps of hair straggled from the snood that bound her locks. He caught her hand. “And after,” he demanded rather than asked.

“If you want me.” Her tone made it clear she doubted that.

Again a memory slipped from the mists of his mind. Enid, leaning over him, her wrap loose about her shoulders, golden candlelight gleaming on the upper swells of her breasts.

Why couldn’t he remember what happened after? Just that wisp of memory brought his member stirring to life, and he needed to remember everything about her more than he needed to remember all the rest of his life.

He wanted to press a kiss on her fingers, slip an arm around her waist, carry her off to some private place and love her until that tight expression of concern and control slipped and became tender passion.

He wanted to do all those things, but he gazed on their intertwined hands, and the difference jolted him. Her fingers were strong, her nails short, her skin pink and healthy. His hands were skeletal, pasty white, the hands of an invalid. He hadn’t the strength to take her,
but more important, no woman would want him like this.

A thought occurred to him, and panic abruptly escaped from behind its prison bars. “How old am I?”

“Let me think.” Her brow wrinkled, and she counted on her fingers. “You’re thirty-five.”

Relief swept him. “Not an old man, then.”

“Not at all.”

“Just contrary as the devil,” Mrs. Brown said.

He smirked at her. “Do you recognize your master?”

Mrs. Brown went on about her work, not at all offended. “Ah, ye’re a wicked one, Mr. MacLean.”

Enid brought him a hand mirror.

The scars struck him first. Pale lines crisscrossed one side of his face. “I look like Frankenstein’s monster.”

She didn’t answer.

Glancing at her still, set face, he asked, “What?”

“You’ve read
Frankenstein
?”

“Yes.”

“Who wrote it?”

“Mary Shelley.” He understood Enid now, and he said, “I don’t know why I know that, I just do. I can quote Bible verses, hundreds of them, and do all of Hamlet’s soliloquy.” He gestured grandly and proclaimed, “To be or not to be, that is the question. Whether ‘tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, or to take arms against a sea of troubles—”

“—And by opposing end them,” she interrupted. “I do believe you when you say you remember your
Hamlet
.”

He continued, “I can tell you how to trap a rabbit
and clean it, and how to make at least a dozen knots. But I don’t remember who I am, and that’s what I want to know.”

“All right.”

He didn’t believe she had accepted his explanation, and silently he demanded she do so.

“All right!” She spread her hands wide. “I don’t understand how this works, I admit it. You’ll allow me my moments of doubt.”

“You can doubt anything you want, but don’t doubt me. I’m the only man here who is telling you all the truth.”

“How do you know that?”

“I have an instinct.” Let her make of that what she would.

Lifting the mirror again, he touched the scars lightly with his fingertips. They explained why his cheek felt stiff and sore when he spoke. He widened his eyes, flexed his jaw, tilted his head. The man in the mirror made the motions, too, but he didn’t recognize him. Nothing about the juxtaposition of harsh lines, pale scars and dark beard looked familiar to him.

Yet Enid seemed to find nothing unusual in his features. “Do you know yourself?”

“Not at all.”

“Ye’re a man quite in your prime,” Mrs. Brown commented as she moved back and forth in the room, putting the linens away.

He teased, “If you have to wipe a bottom, you’re glad it was mine, heh?”

Enid gasped. “MacLean!”

But Mrs. Brown positively cackled. “I’m getting
old, sir, but my eyesight’s fine and I got quite a pleasant eyeful.”

“Mrs. Brown!” Enid sounded even more shocked by the older woman than by MacLean himself.

MacLean and Mrs. Brown exchanged grins.

Handing Enid the mirror, he said, “For a moment I wondered if I’d slept my life away.”

“Gambling it away would be more your style.”

He frowned. He didn’t understand her. “I don’t gamble.”

“It is your vice.”

He didn’t understand that, either. He knew about cards, he knew about men who spent days and nights in smoke-filled rooms betting their livelihood on a single toss of the dice, but that wasn’t him. He resented her insinuation that he was a weakling like . . . the thought slipped away almost as soon as he formed it. Like who? Whose face did he see, garish with agitation, as he wagered everything on an illusion?

MacLean’s excitement subsided before it had a chance to develop. Faces paraded across his mind in no more context than they would in a dream, and until he could bring the memories up from the depths, he would be helpless to understand them.

Helpless . . . he was helpless, damn it! Extending the mug, he said, “I want more broth, and this time put real food in it.”

She mimicked his deep voice. “Please, Enid, may I have some more broth?”

“If I don’t beg, will you starve me more?”

“I don’t want you to beg, I want you to treat me with a modicum of courtesy. But I forgot!” She snapped her
fingers. “You don’t possess manners unless you’ll profit from the effort.”

The trouble was, he rather thought she was right. Command felt right to him. Impatience felt right to him. Words like “please” and “thank you” felt alien. In a tone of grinding rage, he said, “Please, Enid, may I have some more broth?”

Taking the cup, she said, “I’d be delighted to get you more broth.”

“And this time, put some real food in it.”

The flame in her burned vibrant and restless, yet contained by her strength of will, and her smile blazed with hauteur. She tossed her head. A few more errant curls drifted from the snood and settled around her shoulders. Her skirts swished as she descended the stairs.

He watched her until the last strand of hair disappeared from sight. “Where is she going?” he asked Mrs. Brown.

“Downstairs we have a cookfire with someone always ready with food should you wish for some.” She came to the bedside, her arms full of linens, her simple, kind, wrinkled face set in smiling lines. “Mr. Throckmorton has gone through a great deal of trouble for you.”

“I’ll wager he has. Are there guards below, too?”

“Night and day. A great deal of trouble, indeed.”

“He considers me worth the trouble.”

“Ye’re an arrogant bear of a man.” She studied him until he thought she could see right through his skin. “Scared to death, aren’t ye, m’lord?”

He flinched, and the movement shot pain through his whole body. “What do you mean?”

“Everyone wonders if ye’re playing a game, saying ye don’t remember. I know that ye aren’t, for if ye did ye’d not be shouting and nasty to hide yer terror.”

“I’m not terrified.” He wasn’t!

“Of course ye’re not. I’ve raised a dozen boys, and I don’t know a thing about men.” She placed a stack of towels on the table beside his bed. “For yer bath tomorrow.”

“I’m not taking a bath.”

“We’ve already discussed it, Mrs. MacLean and I, and we’re going to give ye a sponge bath, just like we do every other day.”

“The hell you are.” He refused to expose this white, emaciated body to anyone, certainly not a female who had once fawned over his strength and masculinity. Fawned enough to marry him, if he was to believe her.

Mrs. Brown’s smile widened. “See, there it is again. Ye’re so terrified, ye’re snapping about every little thing.”

“It’s not a little thing,” he said from between clenched teeth.

“My point is, I’m right fond of Mrs. MacLean. I’ve watched her bring ye from the brink of death, talk to ye when I thought her addled to do so, turn yer big, limp body so ye wouldn’t get bedsores when she’s just a slip of a thing who shouldn’t be lifting her own teacup.” Mrs. Brown placed her hands on her broad hips. “Now I understand a man having his fears, and I understand ye’re a man used to command, but when I hear ye being so nasty to Mrs. MacLean, I think to myself that I ought to explain to her how frightened ye are so she’ll not take offense.”

He stared at Mrs. Brown, seeing the iron beneath the
kindness. She threatened to tattle to Enid that beneath his gruff exterior lay a scared little boy. Enid would be nice to him, of course, but he knew that beneath her courtesy would be the lash of condescension all women felt for puny men.

He wasn’t weak. He wasn’t scared of the great, gaping hole in his mind, or that he would never find himself again. It wasn’t true—but it didn’t matter. Mrs. Brown would say it was, and his denials would fall on deaf ears.

“Of course, I’m just a servant. My place is to keep my mouth shut.” Mrs. Brown’s face lost all kindliness and gleamed with demonic determination. “And I could keep mum if ye could find it in yer heart to be a little bit more civil to our dear Mrs. MacLean.”

A deal. Mrs. Brown was offering him a deal! And he spied a way to sweeten the pot. “You’ll get me out of taking a bath.”

“Ye smell.”

“Females are too fussy about cleanliness.”

“Ye haven’t had a real bath for at least seven weeks. The cows in the barn have complained of the stench.”

In slow, succinct tones, he said, “I’m not having
her
bathe me.”

“Ah. It’s
her
you object to.” Mrs. Brown nodded. “Ye don’t want
her
to bathe ye. Now, that I can arrange.”

She moved away before he could say more, and he heard Enid’s footsteps on the stairs. By the time she entered, Mrs. Brown stood across the room wiping off the dining table.

Enid held a cup and, under her arm, a package
wrapped in brown paper. Coming to his side, she extended the cup. The same cup as before.

He wouldn’t take it. He glared at that cup as if it were possessed of unnatural powers. “No more broth.”

“Thickened with gruel,” Enid assured him.

Excellent! To him, gruel now sounded like manna from heaven.

She let him take the mug, balancing it as if he were a child who might slop all over himself. As he well might, he admitted. His hands trembled with weakness, and he wanted to swallow every bit at once.

She wouldn’t let him. She removed the mug after every swallow and gave him water instead.

And his stomach filled rapidly. He couldn’t believe half a mug of broth and thin gruel satisfied him.