So Enchanting (24 page)
Chapter Twenty-six
At the sound of Fanny’s words, his eyes opened. “You’re not allowed to make quips,” Grey said. “You snuck into the room while I wasn’t paying attention and have an unfair advantage.”
“Native intelligence and wit hardly qualify as an ‘unfair advantage,’ Lord Sheffield,” Fanny said, masking her concern as she surveyed him. His pupils were enormous, the blue-green irises merely sparking rims around black pools. Good heavens, Fanny thought, alarmed, what had Grammy given him?
From the way he’d been denouncing magic and all its practitioners as she’d entered the room, she’d expected to find him on his feet at a lectern, not flat on his back, head lolling on a pillow, regarding her with a lazy, somehow sensual gaze that made her lips tingle with remembered sensitivity.
She was getting odd. She shouldn’t be fantasizing about Greyson Sheffield. As she’d listened to him instructing Violet she’d been overwhelmed by a sense of disappointment and worse, distress. She’d felt as though she were standing on one side of a widening chasm, while on the other something irreplaceable grew farther away, and the ravine below filled with molten lava.
She blinked the disturbing image away. This was what came of living in the middle of nowhere with no contact with the outside world save printed material and Bernard McGowan. One lost one’s reason.
She should be figuring out some way to hasten Grey’s recovery, not be building daydreams around him. And yet, she could not stop thinking about how she’d felt in his arms or how devastatingly, ridiculously attractive she found him. He’d become the object of daydreams far more evocative and titillating than those involving chasms and rivers. Well, it was her imagination, and therefore private, and he needn’t ever know how much she longed to feel him settling his body over hers again and—
“Damn, are all the birds in Scotland so bloody noisy?” Grey said. “Or is a cat raiding a nest out there somewhere?”
With a start, she came to her senses.
Oh, no.
What was she doing? She jumped up and went to the window.
That
was what she was doing. Reels of chimney swifts filled the sky outside in a flashing, chattering cloud.
Oh, no.
What was she doing? She jumped up and went to the window.
That
was what she was doing. Reels of chimney swifts filled the sky outside in a flashing, chattering cloud.
“Not that I see,” she said. She repositioned the basket she carried on her arm and pulled the window shutters half-closed. She turned around, smiling. “How do you feel?”
“Peculiar. Not unpleasantly so, however,” he said. “Most unlike myself. I feel quite . . . nice. Must be the tea.”
His liquid turquoise gaze traveled over her like warm syrup, lingeringly on her mouth, her chest, her hips, and her feet. Even for Grey, his perusal was bold, but there was something missing in his languid gaze: the urgency, the raw vitality she’d come to associate with him. She missed it. Missed his fire and spirit and bluntness and brusqueness and—
Oh, Bedlam was too good for her!
“Perhaps you ought to dose yourself with it more often,” she suggested.
“No. It’s pleasant, but pleasant like warm milk. You’d be bored with niceness all the time, wouldn’t you?” he asked seriously.
“I doubt it,” she lied, and before he could question her further, she raced on. “How do you feel physically?”
“My head hurts, but it’s pain at a remove. Like reports of a war on someone else’s shore. And I think you’re very nice but not in the least boring. I shall have to reassess my definition of ‘nice.’ ”
She was pathetic as well as strange. Her pulse had begun fluttering at his faint praise.
“You called me Grey earlier,” he murmured. “Out on the terrace.”
“Did I?” She laid her basket on his bed.
“How do you think I look?” he asked.
She cocked her head, examining him. He looked wonderfully masculine, indolent, like the big tom outside. Self-satisfied, a little lethal, disreputable, and fully aware of the appeal of disreputableness to female cats. Especially the stupid ones.
“Aside from your enlarged pupils and a disconcerting tendency for your eyes to wander independently of each other, you look fine. Your color is good.” She picked up his wrist. “Your pulse is strong and slow, and you’ve almost stopped bleeding. That will not last, of course, as you’re bound to start again as soon as I begin stitching you up.”
“There are lizards in the Americas that do that, you know,” he said.
“Stitch people up?” she asked, flipping back the lid of her basket.
He grinned. “No. Their eyes focus independently.”
“I don’t recall saying anything about focusing.” She picked out as fine a needle as she thought would pierce flesh and rummaged for a match. She struck it against the matchbox lid.
“I’m focusing,” he said, affronted. “I see you quite clearly. You’ve rid yourself of the flower garden hat and changed out of that fetching white lacy dress into something severe and custodial.”
“It’s called a skirt,” she retorted, squinting at the needle as she slowly swept it above the flame.
“Whatever, it isn’t nearly as winning as the lace thing.”
She dropped the hot needle onto a white kerchief, not bothering to hide her smile as she selected a skein of undyed silk thread. Whatever Grammy had dosed Grey with had rendered him less guarded in his comments. If one were not highly principled, one might take advantage of such a circumstance.
“So. You think I’m pretty?” she asked casually.
“I think the dress is pretty.”
Her spirits unaccountably flagged.
“You’re far too dramatic to be called pretty. I’m fairly sure Hayden would call you a stunner.”
She missed the eye of the needle.
“Oh, come now, Fanny. You know how handsome you are.”
“Well, yes,” she said. “But I didn’t know that you knew.”
Once more, he grinned. “Good God, I could like you. Too well,” he murmured.
“Except . . . ?” she prompted in spite of herself, and in spite of herself held her breath waiting for the answer.
He sobered. “Except you were a professional fraud. How can I forget that? I have spent my career seeing the results on unsuspecting fools of wiles such as yours, and now I find myself on the receiving end of those wiles, and I applaud you. They are damn near irresistible.” His smile was sad.
“But I am not an unsuspecting fool. And you are keeping something from me. Hiding a secret. I would stake my life on it. But not my hea—” Abruptly, he bit off the last word and cleared his throat. “But nothing else.
“I cannot forget who you are, who you
were,
any more than I can forget that you had a part in making me the man I am. How can I trust what I feel for you when I don’t trust
you
?” He sounded apologetic.
were,
any more than I can forget that you had a part in making me the man I am. How can I trust what I feel for you when I don’t trust
you
?” He sounded apologetic.
Ah, yes. That.
Her secret. The thing that stood like a mountain or a bottomless chasm between them, separating them, just as it had separated her from everyone, always. Until here. Until Little Firkin. He suspected it. He sensed it. Yet he wouldn’t have believed it even if she told him.
Her secret. The thing that stood like a mountain or a bottomless chasm between them, separating them, just as it had separated her from everyone, always. Until here. Until Little Firkin. He suspected it. He sensed it. Yet he wouldn’t have believed it even if she told him.
Nothing in the world would persuade Grey Sheffield that mysteries existed that no one would ever solve. She had no desire to do so. She’d had enough of people staring at her when she was a child. She understood too well the apprehension with which the world viewed mysteries, the isolation that the status of the unique bestowed.
Better a fraud than a freak.
“I know you’re hiding something, Fanny. I just cannot figure out what it is,” he continued.
Why must he see so clearly what she’d managed to hide even from Amelie?
“Grammy told me there aren’t six people in Little Firkin who would know where to post a letter to Lord Collier,” he said.
“Really?” she said.
“Really. And I imagine you are one of them.” For a second, the fogginess clouding his gorgeous blue-green eyes lifted, allowing a glimpse of the shrewd intelligence beneath. “I will ask you straight-out for the truth, Fanny. Did you send the letter saying someone was trying to kill Amelie?”
She met his gaze, her heart racing. His brows dipped toward each other, but not in anger.
“Fanny?” he whispered.
“No. No, I did not.” She turned to Violet. “Fetch Ploddy. I’ll need him to help hold Lord Sheffield down while I sew up his wound.”
The diversion worked as well as she’d hoped.
“No one needs to hold me down, ma’am,” he declared.
“Good. I commend you on your fortitude.” She advanced toward the side of his bed. Stained with blood, the pillowcase was already beyond salvaging. As was his shirt. His jacket, however, might be saved. “Violet, help me get Lord Sheffield out of his jacket.”
His face closed into a cold mask. He tried to raise himself up on his elbow, gasped, and collapsed back. The muscles at the corners of his lean, long jaw bunched. He clearly hated this.
His reaction seemed excessive. No one could fault a man who’d been knocked unconscious for being weakened by the event, except someone who had been rendered powerless before and learned to loathe the state.
She guessed it then, the roots of his abhorrence. He must have looked just so twenty-some years ago, when his father had dragged him from séance to séance to communicate with his dead sister, ruining his family’s fortune and name, while all young Grey could do was watch, helpless and infuriated and incapable of preventing it.
Her gaze softened, and she looked away lest he see it. He would hate even more being pitied. She had learned that the other evening when Hayden had told them of Grey’s past and she had masked her sympathy and won his involuntary look of gratitude.
“No, ma’am,” Violet declared, breaking the tension of the moment with a mulish refusal. “I’m a respectable girl and a virgin, and I got principles, and no one ought to ask a virgin to ’elp a man get nekkid. You wouldn’t ask Miss Amelie and you oughtn’t to ask me.”
“Violet,” Fanny said, trying to find her patience., “I am not asking you to bed—”
“Don’t never say no more!” Violet squeaked. “It ain’t right and I ain’t doin’ it.”
“At least ask Ploddy—”
“Ploddy ain’t much better ’round blood than Lord Hayden. I’m thinkin’ he’s pukin his guts out right now after ’elpin’ His Lordship once already. Why’d ya think he left Her Majesty’s army with the colonel? No one else would ’ave ’im. Ye’re on yer own.”
“Violet, be reasonable.”
“I am bein’ reasonable. You ain’t in the market for a ’usband like I am, ’less’n it’s McGowan, and ye’d ’ave a better ’ope of landing Prince Edward, in my opinion. I gots a reputation to think on.”
Heat erupted in a scalding wave up Fanny’s throat. “That will be enough, Violet!”
But Violet wasn’t through yet. “I’ll ’ave Ploddy fetch His Lordship a fresh shirt, but as fer the rest . . . You’re a widow. You’ve seen nekkid men afore.
You
do it.”
You
do it.”
And with that, Violet lifted her nose in the air and stalked from the room.
Chapter Twenty-seven
Fanny wasn’t sure why she should be dumbstruck. Violet had acted completely in character: argumentative, incompliant, and outrageous. Behind her, Grey laughed. She faced him. At least Violet’s overblown sensibilities had restored his humor.
“A witch who practices politics more shrewdly than many an M.P., and a scullery waif with as strict a sense of decorum as the Queen herself. Quite a fascinating household you run,” he said.
“There’s no ‘running’ about it,” Fanny grumbled, eyeing him with trepidation she prayed didn’t show. She was the only one left to get Sheffield cleaned up, stitched up, rested up, and out of here. And from the amusement he didn’t even bother to hide, he knew it.
“I don’t mind a little blood on my shirt, Fanny,” he said, his tone gentle. “Or a scar. Really.”
Had he challenged her, mocked her, or even dared her, she would have had grounds to leave him in his blood-soaked shirt, but his consideration undid any hope of that. She couldn’t repay kindness with priggishness. And Violet was right: She had seen a naked man before. Just not one built like Grey.
“Don’t be ridiculous.” She advanced toward him and set the tray containing the water, sewing basket, and bandages on the bed beside him.
“First, I’ll stitch that cut.” She unwound the bandage from around his head and blotted away as much of the blood as she could. Throughout it all, he didn’t flinch. His breathing didn’t even alter its rhythm. Bless Grammy and her tea. Then she carefully clipped away the black, charcoal-streaked curls from above his ear, exposing the four-inch gash. “This will sting.”
“No more than your tongue, I expect,” Grey replied.
She upended a bottle of iodine onto a cloth and dabbed gingerly at the wound. Again, Grey remained stoically immobile. She blew out a deep breath and picked up the needle and threaded it. She took another breath and stepped behind him.
She’d never actually sewn flesh together. Perhaps it wasn’t necessary. A second look destroyed this hope. Without stitching, the cut would reopen under the slightest provocation.
“I’ve been stitched up before,” he said calmly. “Just go one stitch at a time. And really, the procedure will cause you more discomfort than me.”
The unexpected reassurance melted some of her tension. “Thank you.”
“You’re welcome, Fan.”
It was the second time he’d called her Fan. She liked it. She liked the way he said it.
She positioned the fingers of her left hand on either side of the cut and pinched the edges together. Then, biting down hard on her lip, she stuck the needle into the skin. The skin resisted. She pushed harder and still got nowhere. Tears sprang to her eyes.
This was horrible, far worse than she’d imagined. How could he just sit there like that?
“Tough, isn’t it?” Grey asked conversationally.
“Pardon me?”
“Skin. It’s a most extraordinary material: self-mending, waterproof, elastic and durable.” He was talking to distract her. He was, she recognized,
comforting
her.
comforting
her.
With a forceful thrust, she pushed the needle through the opposite side and pulled the stitched skin closed, tying a little knot and clipping it off.
“Indeed it is.” She had to set the needle down for a second and close her eyes, thanking heaven she stood behind him, where he couldn’t see how much she was shaking.
“I nearly fainted the first time I was sewn up,” he said.
Blast the man for a mind reader.
“You’re lying,” she answered.
“Well, yes. I was hoping to bolster your confidence. After all, it’s my skin you’re impaling, you know.”
She picked the needle up and, setting her jaw, took another stitch. Two down. The room began to wobble on its axis. She wasn’t above asking for help. “Speak to me. Please.”
“About what?”
“Anything. Please.”
“Why did you marry him?” Grey asked.
“Marry him?”
“Brown.”
Of all the things he might have said or asked, that was certainly the most unexpected.
“Because he said he loved me.” She waited for a scathing reply. None came.
Rather than mocking her, he remained silent while she took another stitch, and then murmured, “I suppose. Yes.” Then, “You must have been very young.”
“Sixteen.”
“Your parents agreed to the match?”
“No. Oh, no. We eloped. Alphonse was not the sort of young man a parent is proud to acknowledge as a son-in-law, and my family is a very proud one.”
“Then why would you marry him?”
“Well . . .” She snipped off the thread. “I didn’t
know
he wasn’t a desirable sort. Daughters of the gentry don’t generally go looking for a husband who’ll bring shame to their family name.”
know
he wasn’t a desirable sort. Daughters of the gentry don’t generally go looking for a husband who’ll bring shame to their family name.”
She pulled the skin at the crest of his cheekbone more tightly together. “Certainly, I knew Alphonse was not as well educated nor as gently raised as I. But I thought he was atypical of his upbringing”—
like me
—“and misunderstood”—
like me
—“and unvalued. I didn’t know any better. I hadn’t been anywhere. I’d lived my entire life in the country until I met Alphonse.”
like me
—“and misunderstood”—
like me
—“and unvalued. I didn’t know any better. I hadn’t been anywhere. I’d lived my entire life in the country until I met Alphonse.”
She’d never spoken of this to anyone before. It was odd she should be doing so here, now, in these circumstances and with this man. And so casually, so easily, as if they always shared such things without fear of recrimination or judgment.
“Did you know, right from the start, his plans to hoodwink people with his spiritualist fakery?”
“Of course not,” she said, taking another stitch. “Again, a girl doesn’t set out aspiring to a criminal career.”
“But you knew soon after, and yet you remained a willing part of it?”
“Is that a question? I thought you knew all the answers.”
He didn’t reply, but he didn’t need to; she wasn’t going to go mute now. The words, bottled up for so long, the secrets held so close, the explanation she’d never been asked to give, poured out. “I knew it was all a fake. I knew it was rubbish, lies. I knew nearly from the first. Or soon enough after as made no difference.”
“Why did you go along with it? Money? Notoriety?”
Of course, those would be the most likely reasons. They had nothing to do with hers, however. “I went along with the charade because I thought Alphonse believed his claims himself, and I didn’t want him to be disillusioned.” She waited for him to evince either incredulity or confusion. Once more, he disarmed her by exhibiting neither.
“You must have loved him, too.”
“I loved who I thought he was.” She could have added,
And I loved him for loving me as I was
. But that had proved not to be true.
And I loved him for loving me as I was
. But that had proved not to be true.
“But you must have soon recognized the deceits he practiced,” Grey prompted. “You must have wondered why he would contrive the nonsense with the violin and the disembodied voices if he really thought himself supernaturally gifted.”
“At the time, I believed he had convinced himself that he was simply providing palpable evidence to aid his clients in believing what he
knew
to be true. You of all people should appreciate how much self-delusion a person is capable of when something is important to them.”
knew
to be true. You of all people should appreciate how much self-delusion a person is capable of when something is important to them.”
He fell silent.
After a moment, he asked, “But you knew you possessed no otherworldly powers?”
She hesitated, filled with an inexplicable urge to tell him that she did possess supernatural abilities. But that would mean trusting him more than she already had, and this time with the truth of not only who she was, but what she was. She had once trusted Alphonse in the same way. And look how well that had worked. She would never make that mistake again.
“A person is capable of a great deal of self-deceit when it is important enough,” she finally answered.
“But—”
“There,” she said, cutting him off as she snipped the last stitch and standing back to look over her handiwork, noting that the bleeding had stopped. She also noticed a myriad of other scars on his face, small ones: a crescent-shaped silver line at the corner of his eye, a raised welt of shiny skin beneath the point of his chin, a crosshatch of faint hieroglyphics beneath one dark brow. How had the son of a marquess come by so many scars and, from the look of them, from so many different times?
What matter? It was no concern of hers. All she needed to do now was wait for his new shirt to arrive. Which, knowing Ploddy, might be some time yet. Still, she couldn’t let him lie there in his bloody shirt.
“Now then,” she said brightly, “let’s clean you up a bit, shall we?”
“You sound like a nanny suggesting a nappy change,” he said dryly. “Just prop me up a bit on some pillows and I’ll do the rest.”
“Nonsense, let me help.” She’d leaned over him, preparing to slide her arm behind his shoulders, and reeled back in a shock of recognition as her skin met his.
“Is something wrong?”
“No. No,” she muttered, leaning forward and slipping her arm behind him. He was very broad and very warm and heavy. And that indefinable scent cloaking his skin inspired all sorts of heated images to flicker through her imagination.
“Are you really trying to move me?” Grey asked. “Because if so, you ought to commence a regimen of strenuous exercise at once. You’re as weak as a kitten.”
His words broke the spell holding her. She hauled him upright with a bit more force than necessary and shoved a towel over the pillow behind him. Weak she might be, but only in the head. Her arms were strong enough.
She picked up her scissors.
“You’re going to
cut
my shirt from me?”
cut
my shirt from me?”
“The shirt is a lost cause. This will be easier.” She didn’t wait for permission, but angled the blade beneath his collar and began snipping, pulling away the sticky material as she went, carefully avoiding looking up, all too cognizant of his exotic blue-green eyes on her.
Her skin tingled and her bones felt rubbery. This was ridiculous. She was performing an act of charity. If she stayed very close and kept her gaze focused firmly on the scissors rather than on the muscular torso revealed with every snicker of the blade, she could keep it that way.
Grey didn’t utter a word. Finally, she finished and tugged the ruined shirt from under him. There. That hadn’t been so bad. She straightened, smiling victoriously, and her view of him, until then made up of disconnected snatches and glimpses, coalesced into a sudden, overwhelming whole. The sight hit her like a cricket bat.
He took her breath away.
She’d once thought of him as Ares, the Greek god of war. She hadn’t known the half of it. The body she’d revealed had been fashioned on the anvil of time, tested and mended, knitted and reknitted of ever harder material.
This was no sleek youngster. His musculature was lean but dense, nothing superfluous padding the skin cloaking sinew and muscle that curved and bulged with each movement of his chest. His shoulders were broad, capped by thick muscles, his biceps prominent even when relaxed, his belly hard and flat. Silky-looking black curls covered his chest, thickening to a dark line that disappeared beneath his waistband.
“You don’t look anything like Alphonse,” she blurted out. “At all.”
Grey, who’d been trying without success to reach the basin of water, glanced up and snorted. “I should hope not. Unless he worked driving spikes for the rails before he took to chatting up ghosts.”
“You laid down railroad tracks?” she asked incredulously.
He laughed. “No. Not quite, though thinking back, it might have been the wiser choice.”
“I don’t understand.”
His smile faded a bit. “I boxed.”
“Boxed.”
“I fought in fisticuffs matches.”
“Fisticuffs?” she said, amazed. The memory of the felling blow he’d dealt Alphonse flashed into her mind. No wonder he’d made it look so effortless. And his comportment, the striking amalgam of gentleman and ruffian, now made sense. “Why?”
“Money.” At her astonishment, he continued, “You can’t make a fortune in the ring, but you can make enough. If you win.”
“Enough for what?”
“Enough to pay for my schooling.”
“But—”
“Come, Fanny, Hayden told you,” Grey said, disconcertingly gentle. “My father bankrupted my family in his mania to find my dead half sister in some spirit world.”
She looked away, the old guilt surfacing on a tide of self-loathing. How many families had been similarly affected by her and Alphonse’s actions?
At the time, it had seemed innocuous. She’d even convinced herself it was charitable to offer comfort to those in mourning. Later, she realized the devastation caused by realizing that one’s hopes were illusions. Like the illusion of her marriage. “Whom did you fight?”
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