Miss Wonderful (The Dressmakers 1)

“I’m sorry I gave you a fright,” he said.

“Fright,” she repeated, still gazing at her hands as though she didn’t know what they were. “Yes.” She felt a wild urge to laugh and another to sob and another to fly from the room. She sat down heavily in the chair by the bed and buried her face in her hands. “Give me a moment,” she mumbled. To her dismay, tears welled. What was wrong with her? She never cried. Was she hysterical?

“You have enough to worry about without worrying about me,” he said. “It’s a wonder you don’t collapse from the weight of your responsibilities. I am sorry to add to it.”

“Oh, you are nothing.” She waved a hand to dismiss the notion but did not trust herself enough to lift her head.

“Don’t be ridiculous. I am the Earl of Hargate’s son, and a famous dratted hero besides, and now you are saddled with my care. If I should accidentally do myself a fatal injury, you will be blamed for not taking proper care of me—or even for hastening my demise, perhaps. Small wonder you can’t sleep. I shouldn’t care to be in your shoes—er—slippers, for the world.”

Mirabel looked up then and found him regarding her with a troubled expression.

“Not that I have any idea what it’s like,” he added. “I’ve never had to be responsible for anybody. Nothing—nobody—has ever depended on me. It makes one feel rather pointless. Well, not altogether. Certain people rely upon me to set an example in the way of neckcloth arrangements.”

She smiled in spite of herself. “Oh, more than that, I’ll warrant,” she said. “Your waistcoats are paragons, beautiful without being showy. You have the knack for not overdoing, which is exceedingly rare among dandies. Beau Brummell was one of the few who possessed it. So great a gift is also a great responsibility.”

“Yes, well, there you have it. My great responsibility is to look beautiful.”

And he carried it out to perfection, Mirabel thought. Even now, with his hair tousled and night shirt rumpled, he seemed a work of art to her. It took enormous will to keep her eyes from straying lower than his bared neck, to the crooked V of the shirt opening.

She told herself not to think about it, either: the hard muscle of his upper torso, and how soft and fragile she’d felt…how she’d longed to touch him…how she’d relished the feel of his long hands curling over her hips, sliding upward….

She turned away and stared hard in the direction of the fire, which had dwindled to glowing embers.

“You asked about Zorah.” His voice had dropped so low it seemed to vibrate inside her.

“It doesn’t matter,” Mirabel said. “It’s none of my business. She’s one of the seven or eight, I suppose.”

“No, a camp follower,” he said, frowning. “She was at Waterloo. When they found me. I…” He paused. “I couldn’t remember.”

ALISTAIR had never said it aloud before, in plain words, and almost wished he hadn’t now. But it was very late, and the household was asleep, and he seemed to be still half-dreaming.

He’d come out of a nightmare to a warm armful of woman. He’d come to consciousness inhaling her scent while her hair tickled his cheek.

In the next moment he was being swept this way and that in emotional crosscurrents.

She was, he’d recollected, the wrong woman—the one he mustn’t have—and he wondered if this was some hellish trial he must endure to pay for his youthful misdeeds.

And then, watching her struggle not to weep—with exhaustion, no doubt—he’d remembered he was a trial to her, one more burden in an already overburdened life.

He could not pretend, not to her.

“I don’t—didn’t—remember,” he repeated. “It’s driven me wild. It was not even three years ago. A battle, perhaps the most famous since Trafalgar—I was there—and I can’t—couldn’t—remember.”

“Good heavens,” she said, “that is the last thing on earth I would have…” She frowned. “Amnesia. So that is what Papa—” She broke off and looked up at him. “You were very much knocked about. It is perfectly understandable. And then, yesterday, when you fell into the Briar Brook—”

“On my head,” he said wryly.

“It must have jarred the memories loose.”

“It’s still only bits and pieces,” he said. “The battle itself remains hazy—an infernal din amid clouds of smoke. Perhaps that’s how it was. Every so often the smoke clears, and I have a moment of clarity. But not the important moments, the times when…” He hesitated. “The heroic feats you read about. I still can’t remember those. Only the aftermath, when the din has stopped and the smoke has cleared and the quiet seems unearthly. I come to, and it’s dark. I’m pinned down. And there’s a smell, indescribably vile.”

Alistair paused and shut his eyes. She didn’t need to hear about this. What was the matter with him?

He’d said far too much and was on the brink of revealing more: about the dream that had felt so real, true, familiar. Those endless hours spent trapped under a corpse, in the muck, suffocating in that stench.

“So many hurt,” she said softly. “So many dead. Two soldiers died on top of you. There were wounded and dead everywhere. I’ve sat by deathbeds, but I cannot imagine what a battlefield must be like.”

A charnel house. A hellish mire. He’d thought they would never find him, that they’d already given up on him. He didn’t know how long he’d lain there. It seemed like years passed while he was sinking into the ooze, rotting to death by slow degrees.

“Don’t try to imagine it,” he said.

She met his gaze. “To us at home, war is made out to be grand and glorious. But I don’t see how it could be anything but filthy and horrible beyond imagining.” He heard her breath catch as she added, “And heartbreaking.”

Someone dear to her must have died there, he thought. That would help explain why she buried herself in this out-of-the-way place.

“You lost a loved one?” he said. “At Waterloo?”

“A loved one?” She shook her head. “It is the end of so many young lives that makes me sick at heart.”

He decided not to probe further. “Lives lost, yes—that’s the hard price,” he said. “But there’s honor in fighting and dying that way. It is a great chance for a man to do something truly worthwhile. And a battle is glorious, in a way. Especially such a battle, against a monster like Napoleon. It is the nearest one can come to being like the knights in legend, slaying dragons and ogres and evil magicians.”

As soon as he said it, he regretted it. He sounded like a boy prating of fairy tales.

Miss Oldridge was looking at him, her expression impossible to read.

He’d revealed far too much. He searched for some witty, ironic remark, but before his sluggish brain could respond, she spoke.

“You are so complicated,” she said. “No sooner do I believe I’ve sorted you out than you do or say something to overthrow my neat theories.”

“You have theories about me?” he said lightly, snatching at the chance to redirect the conversation. “Can it be, Miss Oldridge, that there is time in your busy, responsible life for thoughts of me?”

“I make the time,” she said, “much as the Duke of Wellington made time to think about Napoleon.”

It was a douse of cold water, and Alistair told himself he needed it and ought to be grateful to her for stopping him before he opened his heart to her.

He was her enemy, because of Gordy’s canal. She did not forget it. He should not, either.

He should remember what he’d come here for.

He should never forget that not only his best friend’s but his brothers’ future depended on it, and it was his last chance to redeem himself in his father’s eyes.

“I haven’t come to conquer the Peak and make its inhabitants my subjects,” he said. “I am not your enemy. Furthermore, I must tell you that on any number of grounds I must take issue with your comparing me to Bonaparte. Have you any idea what the man wore to his coronation? A toga!”

She smiled and shook her

head. “It would be so much easier if you were more monsterlike. I wish you could contrive to be more disagreeable, or boring, at least.”

He wanted to ask how unmonsterlike, how undisagreeable she found him. He wanted to know how he could make it harder for her to hate him. But he’d already said too much, felt too much. He’d already gone farther than was sensible in the circumstances, the curst circumstances.

If only…

No. None of those worthless if onlys.

“Given a choice, I’d rather be thought loathsome,” he said. “I can think of few worse fates than being deemed boring. An incorrectly starched neckcloth, perhaps. Hessians worn with breeches. Waistcoat buttons left undone with a plain shirt.” He shuddered theatrically.

She laughed softly and rose. “How can I hate a man who does not take himself seriously?”

She did not hate him.