Untouched

“Are you all right?” His hauteur had vanished. He sounded concerned, kind. The hostility for once was absent.

Grace wrapped her arms around herself to control her shaking but they didn’t provide the warmth she’d found in Lord Sheene’s embrace. Her legs felt like they might collapse under her. She needed a couple of attempts before she could control her voice enough to reply. “They…they didn’t hurt me.”

“They would have. It was foolhardy to confront them.” Intent golden eyes ranged over her. Eventually, he gave a nod as if he accepted she was unharmed. “I believe your story about the kidnap.”

Well, hoorah for you. Good honest anger swamped her drea

d. Renewed energy made her straighten and glare at him. “I appreciate your condescension, my lord. Any man with eyes in his head could see I was telling the truth.”

His lips curved in another of his wry smiles. “You forget you’re dealing with a poor mad fool, Mrs. Paget.”

His show of charming self-derision made her angrier. Unless she got away, she’d pitch something at his handsome head.

“I think you are precisely as mad as you wish to be, my lord.” She whirled around and marched toward the house, cursing every male born into this miserable world.

By the time she came downstairs for dinner, Grace regretted her temper. It had been reaction to her paralyzing fear when Monks spoke so dispassionately of killing her. She shuddered anew at what could have happened if Lord Sheene hadn’t saved her.

If Lord Sheene hadn’t claimed her as his. Of course, it meant nothing. He didn’t want her. If he wanted her, he could have her. What stopped him extending those elegant hands and taking her? He’d even come to her room last night, then hadn’t been able to stomach the act.

When she quietly entered the salon and saw him standing at the window, her heart began to race. She told herself she trembled because she was scared. But years of endurance and unhappiness had taught her unflinching honesty. Along with fear, other emotions stirred. Her wariness of the marquess held none of the gagging revulsion Filey aroused.

Lord Sheene kept his back to her as he looked out into the twilight. Yet again, his isolation struck her. His physical isolation. And also his spiritual isolation. Perhaps that alone constituted his madness. So far, she’d seen little other sign of his affliction.

He spoke without turning. “Stay away from Monks and Filey. They don’t make idle threats.”

Again, that instinctive animal awareness of what happened around him. Were all madmen so attuned to their surroundings?

She wouldn’t have thought so.

A sudden memory pierced her of his intense concentration on the spindly rose bush that morning. His hands had been so deft, their very sureness breathtakingly beautiful. Her wayward heart dipped into an unsteady dance at the thought of those hands on her skin.

Grace, stop it! You’re in enough trouble as it is.

Heavens, she must regain self-control and quickly. The last thing she needed was an infatuation with her fellow captive. She hadn’t thought about a man touching her for pleasure in years. Certainly not since her marriage and the collapse of her girlish fantasies.

She stepped up to stand beside him. The window faced the darkening woods. The day had been clear. Now the first stars shone in the cloudless sky. It could have been a landscape by Claude, if one didn’t know an unscaleable wall circled the trees or two homicidal devils guarded the gate to this perilous Eden.

The silence allowed her to say something she was guiltily aware she should have said earlier. “Thank you, my lord. If you hadn’t come…”

“Don’t think about it.” He focused those uncanny eyes on her. Except that after a day and a half, she noticed their strangeness less and their beauty more.

“I can’t help it.” She’d been frightened and wretched for so long, even before her abduction. But nothing matched the horror that had gripped her when Monks stared into her face and promised rape and death. Compared to that, the mad marquess was a bastion of security. The clinging ghost of today’s panic made her speak more freely than usual. “You were magnificent.”

A bleak smile tilted his generous mouth. “Hardly.”

He swung away from the window. He clearly couldn’t bear standing so close to her. Perhaps her gaudy clothing disgusted him. She hitched at her amber silk gown’s neckline but it remained as provocative as when she’d put it on upstairs. A clashing pink sash cinched it around her waist but she hadn’t been able to fix the loose bodice.

She’d turned the bedroom upside down seeking her widow’s weeds. No black bombazine, but she’d found plenty of gowns to make a cyprian blush. She lacked nothing a whore required for her trade. Slippers dyed to match the tasteless dresses. Drawers full of filmy underwear such as she’d never seen, even in her days at Marlow Hall. A coffer overflowing with cheap jewelry. Boxes of cosmetics.

She’d also found a chest of the marquess’s clothes.

There was something unbearably intimate, almost marital, in having his personal belongings under her hand. As if he could pop in at any time to select tonight’s shirt or neckcloth. She’d quickly slammed the lid down on the neatly folded attire. The idea of him making free of her bedroom wasn’t quite so easy to shut away.

After a long search, this tent of a dress was the best she’d come up with. It threatened to slide off into a slippery pile, leaving her clad in only her shift. She could just imagine how the marquess would turn his well-bred nose up at that.

Why should she care for his approval? They were strangers flung together in an impossible situation. Whether he liked her was irrelevant. Already she spent too much time thinking of him in ways she shouldn’t.

Running the farm, she’d dealt with men from dawn to dusk. Workmen, farmers, tradesmen, merchants. She was used to men. Why was she in such a flutter over this particular one?