Slightly Tempted (15 page)

"Is it possible," he asked before he left, "that Lord Alleyne Bedwyn rode off with the troops last evening in the direction of Paris?"

But he received only blank stares and questions instead of answers. Why would an embassy official do such a thing? For what purpose? On whose authority? He was not, after all, attached to any embassy in Paris.

Lady Morgan was a great deal more than half concerned when Gervase reported back to her at Mrs. Clark's house.

"He hasstill not returned?" she asked. "Wherever can he be?"

He could see fear in her widened eyes. Her already-pale face lost even more color.

"All was confusion south of Brussels yesterday," he said, taking her by the elbow and stepping outside the house with her, "and doubtless still is today. Something important has delayed him, you may be sure."

"But he is not a free agent as you are-or as I am," she said, frowning. "He had business to attend to, and no doubt he was expected to hurry back here for further orders. Alleyne would not neglect his duty."

He did not tell her about the reply Bedwyn had been expected to bring back.

"I am going to take a ride out there," he said. "I'll see what I can discover and come right back to you. All will be well with him. He is not, after all, a military man and was not engaged in the battle."

But hehad ridden close to the fighting. He had had a message for Wellington, and Wellington was notorious for being always in the very thick of battle. Gervase could see from the look in Lady Morgan's eyes that she knew this too and had drawn no comfort at all from his words. He drew her against him without forethought, wrapping his arms about her as if he could protect her from all the world's ills.

"I'll find him," he said. "I'll find him and bring him to you."

She tipped back her head and gazed into his eyes without speaking, and he lowered his head and set his lips to her forehead, regardless of the presence of a number of pedestrians who were out on the street. He cupped her face in both hands and smiled at her.

"Courage,chérie, " he said.

But it was a rash promise he had made-if indeed hehad promised. The horror of the scenes he saw as he rode south through the forest where less than two weeks before he had entertained dozens of guests to a moonlit picnic was too vast for words, or even for thoughts. The road was clogged with traffic, most of it heading north-and much of it bearing yet more wounded. The abandoned bodies of the dead were strewn everywhere, no burial detail having yet come this far north. Many of the bodies had been stripped naked by fellow soldiers looking for uniforms less threadbare than their own or by local people intent upon finding some loot to compensate them for all they had lost in yesterday's hell.

Even as Gervase stopped for perhaps the dozenth time to ask about Lord Alleyne Bedwyn, one woman was kneeling beside one of the naked bodies a short distance away in the forest and looking up to call for help.

"He isalive !" she cried. "And he is myhusband . Please help me, somebody."

Even as Gervase hesitated a sergeant with a bandage around his head and over one eye detached himself from a group trudging along the road and called good-naturedly to her.

"Coming, missus," he said. "How bad hurt is he?"

Gervase did not wait to watch the development of this one small happily-ever-after-ifthe woman's husband survived, that was. But the incident served to remind him that he was not by any means the only one out on this road or on the battlefield itself today searching for a missing person. There were dozens-perhaps hundreds-of others, many of them women, searching desperately among the dead and wounded for the familiar figure of a loved one.

He rode all the way to Waterloo and beyond-onto the surprisingly small area where such a ferocious battle had been fought the day before. There was still the acrid smell of smoke on the air, mingled with the harsher stenches of blood and death. People were hurrying about here through churned mud and trampled crops with a great sense of urgency-burial details were already hard at their grizzly work.

Gervase wandered about, both on horseback and on foot, asking continually-in vain-if anyone knew and had seen Lord Alleyne Bedwyn. He looked down into the faces of a thousand dead, it seemed, but none was the one he looked for and dreaded seeing. In the end, with the advent of another day's dusk not far off, he had to give up his search and return to Brussels.

Perhaps, he thought hopefully, he had somehow missed Bedwyn on the road and he had been back in Brussels for several hours. Or perhaps he had been in the city since yesterday. Perhaps he had spent the night with a woman, forgetting both the message he was to have delivered to Sir Charles and his promise to find his sister and take her out of Brussels to safety. Perhaps . . .

And perhaps Lord Alleyne Bedwyn was dead somewhere between Brussels and the far edge of that battlefield. If that were so, he would never be found now, especially if his body had been stripped. It was possible that he had already been buried in some mass grave.

He would just have to hope that there was some other explanation, Gervase decided.

Lady Morgan had not yet returned to the Rue de Bellevue, he discovered when he called there. Neither had Lord Alleyne Bedwyn been there. Gervase left, assuring a somewhat agitated and annoyed earl that he would escort her home within the next hour.

WITH TWENTY-FOUR WOUNDED MEN IN THE HOUSE,a number of them amputees who were suffering the raging fever that so often followed surgical procedures, Morgan had had scarcely a moment for thought all afternoon and evening. When shedid have a moment, she found it amazing that she was actually doing this-and doing it without flinching.

She was a Bedwyn, it was true, and the Bedwyns prided themselves upon being tough and intrepid. But even so, she was only eighteen years old. This time last year-this timesix months ago-she had been at Lindsey Hall in Hampshire, carefully sheltered from all harm and from all that was ungenteel, under the close chaperonage of Miss Cowper, her governess and companion for the last several years. It was only in February that Miss Cowper had moved away to live with a newly widowed sister, taking with her a generous pension from Wulfric.

Morgan wondered what Wulfric would have to say when he knew how she had spent yesterday and today-and last night. Not one of the men at Mrs. Clark's was even an officer. There were two sergeants and three corporals among them. All the rest were privates, men whose coarse accents proclaimed their lowly origins.

It simply did not matter, she had discovered. They all needed her. She felt as far removed from the schoolroom and her aristocratic world as it was possible to be.

Mrs. Hodgins touched her on the shoulder as she held a cool cloth to the cheeks of a man who was delirious with fever.

"I'll do that," she said. "You take a break for a few minutes, my love. You have not stopped for hours. That gentleman is here who brought the news about Major Clark last night. He wants to speak with you."

"The Earl of Rosthorn?"

Morgan stood up and gingerly stretched her back. It was only at that moment that she remembered what errand he had undertaken earlier in the afternoon. And it was only then that she realized Alleyne still had not come. She hurried into the crowded hall, pulled her shawl from a hook there, and joined Lord Rosthorn, who was waiting outside on the steps.

She drew a deep breath of fresh air, realizing as she did so how veryunfresh the air was indoors. At the same moment she became aware of her untidy, blood-streaked appearance. But it did not matter. None of it mattered. She turned an anxious face to his.

"Alleyne?" she asked.

He shook his head slightly. "I have been unable to find him," he told her, "even though I rode all the way to Waterloo and beyond-out to where the fighting was yesterday, in fact. But you cannot imagine all the confusion out there, all the people and conveyances milling about and crowding the roads. It would have been a miracle if Ihad found him."

She looked closely at him in the darkness.

"Lord Rosthorn," she said, "you know better than to talk to me in that tone of voice."

"Whattone?" he asked.

"That deliberately hearty and cheerful one," she replied. "As if I were a child."

He looked steadily and gravely back at her for a few moments.

"Chérie," he said softly at last, "what would you have me say?"

"Simply that you could not find him," she said.

"I could not."

She closed her eyes and drew a slow breath. Her knees were feeling as if they had turned to the consistency of jelly. She fought panic and hysteria.

Where was Alleyne?

"He was delayed in Antwerp when you expected him to come and take you home a few days ago," Lord Rosthorn said, taking her firmly by the elbow and drawing her down to sit beside him on the doorstep. "You told me so. I suppose you worried about him then, did you not?"

"Yes," she admitted.

"But he came," he said. "Doubtless it will happen again. Who knows what could delay a man yesterday? And today. Tomorrow he will come and be surprised that you worried so much today."

Her hand, she realized suddenly, was firmly in his clasp. His fingers were laced with hers.

"Do you believe that?" she asked him.

"I believe it is a possibility," he said.

Alleyne could not be dead, she thought. He simply could not. There could not be a world without Alleyne in it-or without any of her brothers or her sister, for that matter. It was a thought she had had over and over again as a girl, whenever her worries over Aidan had threatened to overwhelm her. And she had always been right. There had always been a new letter from him to prove that he still lived. And then one glorious day last year he had ridden up the driveway to Lindsey Hall without any warning and she had flown down from the schoolroom-without either Wulfric's permission or Miss Cowper's-and hurtled into his arms.

Alleyne would come tomorrow. There would be some simple explanation for this absence and this silence.

She wouldkill him when she saw him.

"Chérie." Lord Rosthorn had one arm pressed firmly against her shoulder. His head was bent close to hers-she could feel the warmth of his breath on her cheek. Her hand was still firmly in his clasp. "Chérie?"

It was hard to remember a time when she had been offended with his calling her by that French endearment. Now it wrapped more warmly about her than her shawl, and she closed her eyes and gave in to the temptation to tip her head to one side to nestle on his shoulder. She had always prided herself on her strength to stand alone. She had four older brothers to fight her battles for her. She had never called upon them to do so.

She hadfour older brothers . . .

"Chérie." The voice was soft and husky against her ear and yet seemed to come from far away. "You have been dozing on my shoulder for all of five minutes. It is time I took you home."

She lifted her head, embarrassed. She could not really have fallen asleep, could she? When she was worried out of her mind over Alleyne?

"Home," she said wistfully. "But I cannot leave here. There is so much to do."

"Someone else will do it," he told her. "Besides, I promised Caddick that I would bring you home without delay."

Captain Lord Gordon was at the Earl of Caddick's. She would have to see him when she went back there-unless by some miracle he was asleep again. Life could beso wearying!

"I'll step inside and tell Mrs. Clark that I will return early in the morning," she said.

"But you will be departing early in the morning for England,chérie, " he reminded her.

"Before Alleyne has come?" She raised her eyebrows with unconscious arrogance. "Before I have discovered what has happened to him? I think not, Lord Rosthorn."

"Ah, no," he said as he got to his feet and reached down one hand to help her to hers. "You would not leave here under such circumstances even if the battle still raged and had reached the city gates, would you? In you go, then, so that I may escort you home before midnight. I'll bring you back here myself in the morning, and then I will go in search of your brother again."

She was standing on the step above him. She set her hands on his shoulders and gazed into his eyes. When had he come to seem so strong and dependable to her? So much like a trustworthy comrade?

"I am sorry in my heart," she said, "that I misjudged you on first acquaintance and thought you nothing more than a trivial-minded rake. Youdid flirt outrageously with me, Lord Rosthorn, and it wasenormously extravagant of you to organize that picnic in the Forest of Soignés just for my amusement. But I know now that you were merely bored and finding a way to divert yourself. Now, in the last few days, when life has become deadly serious, you have shown yourself to be the kindest, most dependable man in my world."

"Ah,mais non, mon enfant, " he said.

He kissed her. Very lightly on the lips, his own warm and soft and slightly parted. Very similarly to the way he had kissed her in the Forest of Soignés, except that it felt entirely different. It felt less lascivious, less naughty, less thrilling. And yet she felt it down to her toes and through to the depths of her heart. It felt . . . right. Yes . . . it felt right. She wanted to twine her arms about his neck and lean into him and lose herself in his dependable strength.