The Mystery Woman (13 page)

T
he electrifying shock of the embrace made Beatrice go very still. She thought she had grown accustomed to the
little jolts of intimate awareness that sparked through her every time Joshua touched her. But she was wholly unprepared for the breathtaking thrill of his kiss.

Frantically she reminded herself that this was not the first time she had been kissed. Furthermore, this was a staged kiss, done for the sake of deceiving the couple in the hall. It was not a real kiss.

But it felt far more real than the kisses she had enjoyed with Gerald before he had run off with the séance practitioner. At the time she had been rather disappointed with kissing in general and had wondered if perhaps passion was highly overrated. Now, tonight, she understood that what she had known with Gerald did not amount to anything more than a mild flirtation.

Joshua’s kiss, on the other hand, was the gateway to the fiery passion one read about in the sensation novels that her friend Evangeline wrote. This was the kind of searing excitement that could overwhelm the senses and common sense. A passion like this could tempt a woman to take risks.

Joshua’s mouth was hot and hungry on hers, as if he was demanding—
needing
—a response. His embrace was fierce and devastatingly powerful and yet she did not feel threatened. Instead she reveled in his strength. She was crushed against him—she could scarcely catch her breath—but the sensation was intoxicating. There was an unfamiliar heat in the atmosphere. Her senses were stirring in ways that she had never known.

She forgot about the approaching couple and threw her arms around Joshua’s neck, allowing herself to sink into him. He groaned and wrenched his mouth away from hers with an effort.

“You smell so good,” he rasped against the skin of her throat. “I could get drunk on your scent. I want to get drunk on it.”

Her pulse was racing and not because of the danger of discovery. She was certain that Joshua was no longer faking the kiss.

“Joshua,” she whispered.

And then the couple was upon them. Beatrice heard the woman’s muffled laughter. The man snorted lewdly.

“Looks like those two couldn’t wait long enough to find a bed,” he said.

“Don’t get any ideas,” the woman warned sharply. “I’m certainly not going to do it in a doorway like a common whore.”

Joshua went abruptly still, every muscle rigid. An icy-cold sensation permeated the atmosphere. Beatrice knew that he was on the verge of turning to confront the couple. She clamped her fingers around his shoulders.

“Darling,” she said, speaking in what she hoped were sultry tones.
“Don’t stop.”

She could feel Joshua fighting to rein in the wave of icy anger.

“Please,” she said.

The man laughed. The woman snickered. They both hurried off down the gallery.

Beatrice was once again alone with Joshua.

“My apologies,” he said stiffly. “I did not mean to subject you to such insults.”

She realized that the roughness of the embrace had dislodged a few tendrils of her hair. She took a deep, steadying breath and started to put herself to rights.

“I make my living as a private inquiry agent who poses as a paid companion,” she said, trying to catch her breath. “Before that, I pursued a career as a paranormal practitioner for a certain individual who was evidently engaged in blackmail. I assure you, it takes more than a few snide comments from my betters to insult me.”

“They aren’t your betters.”

She paused in the act of adjusting her hair. “What?”

“You are so much better than they are,” he said. He touched her cheek. “Better in spirit, better in character, better in every way imaginable. You are . . . amazing, Beatrice.”

Stunned, she could only stare at him, aware that her mouth was open.

“Uh,” she said. And stopped. She could not think of anything else to say.

He used the edge of his hand to gently close her mouth. And then he kissed her again, a light, glancing kiss that was at once affectionate, proprietary and somehow filled with the promise of more to come.

But before she could collect her scattered senses he broke off the embrace, wrapped a hand around her arm and drew her into the adjoining corridor.

He opened a door. The dim light from the gallery sconces splashed over the worn stone steps of an old spiral staircase.

“It leads to the floor where your bedroom is located,” Joshua said. “Stay close to the wall. The steps are quite narrow at the outer edge and there is no railing.”

She surveyed the staircase, her heart sinking. Once the hall door was closed they would be locked in darkness. Out of nowhere, memories of her terrifying escape from Fleming’s office slammed through her. But at least on that occasion she’d had the benefit of a lantern. She tried to steel herself but she knew she could not face the absolute darkness of the stairwell, even knowing that Joshua was with her.

“I’m sorry, I cannot climb that staircase without a light,” she said.

“That did occur to me.”

He closed the hall door, cutting off the faint illumination from the gas lamps. When complete night descended, Beatrice felt the panic start to well up inside her. She shivered. Her breath caught in her throat. Tentacles of fear unfurled. She knew her reaction was illogical. She was in no immediate danger. But that awareness did nothing to calm her nerves.

“Joshua, I regret to say that I cannot stay in this place much longer,” she whispered. “I appreciate your high opinion of my spirit but the truth is I have a certain weakness of the nerves when it comes to dark, enclosed places.”

“That’s not a weakness, it’s common sense. Dark, enclosed places can be dangerous.”

She heard a rasping noise. A bright spark flashed and burned steadily, driving back the tide of night. Joshua had struck a light.

“Will this do?” he asked quietly. “It will last for a couple of minutes, long enough for us to get upstairs.”

She took a deep breath. “Thank you.”

She grabbed fistfuls of her skirts and started up the steps, careful to keep to the widest section of each stone tread. She put one hand on the wall to steady herself. Joshua followed, his cane thudding heavily on each step.

When they reached the upper floor Beatrice was relieved to see a small landing and a thin, pale line of light beneath a door.

“It opens into a storage room that, in turn, opens onto the hall,” Joshua said.

He put out the light and opened the door. Beatrice moved into a small space. At the far end of the room she saw another, brighter, strip of light beneath the hall door. Her nerves steadied. The small ordeal was over.

Joshua listened at the hall door for a few seconds. “There is no one nearby. You should be able to make it to your room without being seen. But if anyone does appear, make it plain that you were on an errand for your employer. No one will question that story.”

“I assure you, I am quite capable of inventing my own cover stories,” she said coolly.

“Right. Sorry. I have been out of the field for some time now. I am not accustomed to working with other professional investigators.”

She suspected he was smiling but as it was too dark to be certain, she decided to ignore him.

He opened the door partway and surveyed the hall.

“All clear,” he said.

She started past him and then paused, remembering. “I almost forgot. I brought this for you.”

She removed the small bottle from her pocket and handed it to him. When he took it from her his fingers brushed hers and she got another tingle of awareness. The little jolts of intimacy were getting stronger, she thought.

“What is it?” he asked.

“A pain tonic. Mrs. Marsh brews it in her laboratory. I always travel with a bottle of the stuff. I thought you might want to try some. I believe you will find it helpful for your leg pain.”

“Thank you,” he said, excruciatingly polite but not the least appreciative. He pressed the small vial back into her hand. “Given what I know of Mrs. Marsh’s talent for chemistry, I suspect it works well. But I never use medications derived from the poppy. They interfere with my thinking.”

Beatrice smiled in the shadows. “I’m not the least bit surprised that you would refuse a tonic based on an opiate.”

“You know me so well after our short acquaintance?”

“Naturally you would not want to take anything that might cloud your judgment or your talent.”

“My talent?” The edge was back in his tone.

“Forgive me,” she said smoothly. “I do not refer to a paranormal talent, of course. I meant your acute powers of observation and logic. Trust me, I understand your fear of the opiates. Rest assured there is nothing of the poppy in this tonic. Mrs. Marsh concocts it using salicylic derived from the willow and other plants. It’s her own special formula. Very good for fever and certain kinds of pain. She regularly treats her own rheumatism with the stuff. My friends and I have all taken a dose or two from time to time for the headache.”

“I do not like to take any kind of medicine.”

“Is that so? Are you going to stand there and tell me that you have never downed a quantity of brandy or whiskey late at night when the pain in your leg flares up?”

There was a short pause.

“I will allow you that point,” he said. “But that is different.”

“Are you always so stubborn and hardheaded, Mr. Gage? Or is it something about dealing with me that brings out your illogical side?”

“Something about dealing with you, I believe.”

In the darkness she could not tell if he was teasing her again. She decided she was not in the mood to find out.

“Never mind,” she said. “You may dose yourself with Mrs. Marsh’s formula or not, as you please. I am not going to waste any more time arguing with you. If you will step aside, I shall return to my room.”

“Before you go,” he said very softly, “there is one thing I would like you to know.”

“What is that?”

“Downstairs in the hall when we kissed a few minutes ago, I was not aware of any pain at all. In fact, I found our embrace to be remarkably therapeutic.”

“If that comment was meant to be humorous, it fails the test.”

“I am serious.”

He sounded serious, she thought. She got the impression that he was trying to work out the logic behind the observation and not making much progress.

“Yes, well, we were at risk of discovery,” she said stiffly. “Excitement of that sort can cause one to temporarily ignore an otherwise nagging pain. I’m sure you’re aware of that, given your former career.”

“I know all about the numbing effect that violent excitement has on the body,” he shot back impatiently. “But that couple in the hall hardly posed a serious risk. No, Miss Lockwood, I am convinced that it was your kiss that made me forget the discomfort in my leg.”

She cleared her throat. “As you said, you recently spent a very long year in the country. I must go now. We are in the middle of an investigation, if you will recall, and I have a blackmail payment to deliver.”

He opened the door wider and stood aside. She swept past him and hurried down the hall to her room. She knew that he watched her until she was safely inside.

J
oshua waited until the door of Beatrice’s bedroom closed and then he made his way back down the old staircase to the
ground floor. He winced at every step. Going down a flight of stairs was always more painful than climbing them in the first place. Worse yet, he did not have Beatrice to distract him now.

At the bottom of the staircase he stopped and opened the door. There was no one about in the hall. The house was quieter now. Traffic would pick up again just before dawn. There was nothing more predictable than the nightly routine of a country-house party.

A short time later he let himself into a small chamber that looked as if it had once been a monk’s cell. The little room was empty save for two old steamer trunks that someone had stored there years ago and evidently forgotten. With the door partially cracked he had a clear view of the heavy doors that guarded the great hall at the far end of the gallery.

He sat down on one of the trunks and took the small medicine bottle out of his pocket. For a moment he examined it in the narrow band of light that seeped through the doorway.

He was not sure how he felt about the tonic or the fact that Beatrice had given it to him. Certainly part of him was irritated. He did not like it that Beatrice was aware of his pain. Another part of him was oddly touched by the gift.

But it meant that even though she had been acquainted with him for only a few days, she knew him well enough to be able to discern those times when the leg plagued him. That alone was sufficient evidence that he was not doing a proper job of concealing his emotions.

It was the heated embrace in the hallway, however, that ought to alarm him the most. He had not intended for the kiss to get out of hand. It was to have been a charade, nothing more. But the instant he had crushed her against him, inhaled her scent and felt the sweet, soft, gently rounded form of her body beneath the fabric of the gown, something inside him had threatened to break free.

He had spent much of his life learning to control the powerful tides that threatened to wreak havoc on his carefully ordered world. The rigorous physical and mental training he had practiced for years had taught him to channel the fire inside. He had learned the hard way that when he violated his own rules, bad things happened.

A year ago he had slipped the bonds of logic in the course of an investigation and he was still paying for it. He still woke up in a cold sweat, wondering how he could have been so wrong about Clement Lancing.

The answer was always waiting for him. He had allowed himself to be ruled by his emotions, not logic.

Tonight, downstairs in the shadowed hallway, he should have been concentrating on the investigation. Instead he had been pulled into the sensual fire of Beatrice’s kiss.

In that moment he would have been willing to consign his powers of self-mastery to hell if it meant that he could have Beatrice for even an hour in exchange.

After all, what good had all of his training and focused meditation done? In the end, when it had mattered most, he had made the biggest mistake of his life. He had trusted the one person he should never have trusted.

Now a redheaded woman with incredible eyes, and a shady past—a woman who had a talent for deception—was asking him to trust her. She wanted him to drink some mysterious potion she just happened to have in her pocket tonight. This would be the same amazing female who carried a stocking gun and a vinaigrette filled with some vile concoction that was capable of bringing a man, sobbing, to his knees.

He would have to be a fool to risk even a single swallow of the tonic. The leg was uncomfortable tonight but it was not intolerable. He had known far worse nights.

Trust me, Mr. Gage
.

He opened the bottle and swallowed some of the tonic. It tasted slightly acidic but it went down easily enough.

He put the cap back on the bottle and thought about how he had just broken the most important rule in an investigation. He had trusted someone connected to the case, a lady who no doubt had any number of secrets to conceal.

He had a feeling he would be breaking a few more rules for Beatrice Lockwood. He wondered why he did not find that prospect alarming; why he was filled with anticipation instead of deep concern.