Heartless (The House of Rohan 5)

If Melisande thought Emma would remain meekly in bed then she didn’t know her nearly as well as she thought she did, Emma decided, pulling on her clothes with minor difficulty and only a few curses. She’d dispensed with all but the lightest of corsets years ago—they constricted her movements— so she had no difficult laces to deal with, just a general stiffness. She glanced around her comfortable bedroom. Someone else had come in and laid her fire, another had dealt with her ruined clothes. Where in the world was Rosie?

She had no difficulty understanding yesterday’s mistake—Rosie was fresh the city, coming out only a few weeks ago and taking up her first position at Starlings Manor. She would hardly be the one to know shortcuts, and she must have gotten the directions wrong. Although, considering that the one place she’d go would be to the Dovecote to visit her old friends, it seemed odd that she’d be so mistaken about it.

It also made sense that, realizing her mistake, she’d run off. Rosie had been one of the youngest they’d found on the streets. By her age she was well-experienced—at sixteen she’d been selling her body for five years—but she’d retained a curious sort of innocence that would have been unusual in a ten-year-old, and God help them, they’d recovered ten-year-olds on the streets.

The younger girls were sent to schools and decent families, and only half of them returned to the street. Melisande bewailed that so many did, but Emma viewed the matter more pragmatically. When they’d first begun they’d only saved a handful.

Her shoes were nowhere to be found, and she vaguely remembered the squelching mess as she’d picked her way through the muddy field. She slid on stockings and tied them, then looked down. She could go into Melisande’s dressing room and filch a pair of slippers, but Melisande’s feet were smaller, and she’d end up hobbling. She didn’t bother with the small bustles that were just going out of style, nor was she tempted by the new, wide crinoline cages, so her lone remaining gown—a simple one of an unfortunate rose color that flattered her much too well—hung close to her body and down to the floor. With luck no one would ever notice she was without shoes.

“Ha,” she said out loud, the sound startling in the stillness of the early afternoon. Brandon would know. The man was the very devil.

It would be too late to leave today, and she had no choice but to accept it. Her arrival downstairs would, however, signal her recovery. She would leave the next morning if she had to walk all the way back to London. The longer she remained here the more likely it was that Brandon would remember, and she doubted he’d be happy about it. She should have told him, she should have brushed it off as a stray coincidence. Instead she’d held the truth to her breast and yet treated him with far too much intimacy. She’d been an idiot, but then, it hadn’t been entirely her fault. The moment she’d seen him she’d tried to leave. He had never been at any family gathering, not in the last three years since Benedick and Melisande had fallen in love, and apparently not much before that. He’d been a soldier, never at home. His sudden appearance in the church had

shocked and numbed her. If only she could still maintain that deadness of spirit, instead of the roiling, twisting ache deep inside.

Shoes or no, she was going downstairs. She paused in the door, glancing back at her room. It was safe, warm, a place of study and reflection and better sleep than she knew anywhere else.

It was also now a place of writhing torment and sleepless nights, and she wondered if she’d ever feel safe here again.

The rare, sunny day was encouraging, though dark clouds lingered ominously in the distance, and there was no sign of Melisande or her guests when Emma reached the main floor, clinging to the railing as long as no one could see her. Melisande’s favorite green salon was empty, as well as the larger drawing room, and looking out the floor-length windows that fronted the house, she could see a rousing and obstreperous game of croquet being held in the still-muddy lawn, the women’s skirts splashed liberally with mud that would take a maid hours of labor to remove. The men weren’t in sight.

“You’re becoming a humbug, Emma Cadbury,” she informed herself out loud. “You’re in trouble when you start finding fault with simple pleasures.”

Emma Cadbury didn’t reply. It wasn’t her real name, of course. She’d taken it in honor of what had once been her sole pleasure in life—cups of steaming hot chocolate. The Quaker, John Cadbury, sold the very best chocolate in town, as well as tea and her other delight, coffee, and when she’d been prodded for a last name it had been the first to come to mind, though her family name, Brown, had been anonymous enough to use safely.

“You should be in bed.”

The deep voice startled her, the words setting up the all-too-familiar churning inside her, and she turned to look at Brandon Rohan. He was dressed casually—no carefully-tied neckcloth, his unfashionably long hair awry—and she imagined that was what he’d look like when he was home in the wilds of Scotland.

“You should be out there playing croquet,” she countered, sinking just slightly to make sure her stockinged feet were covered. He’d kissed her. The memory, which she had managed to put from her mind, came sweeping back, along with so many other memories, and her cheeks felt warm. Impossible, she reminded herself. Whores don’t blush.

His eyes narrowed, as if he recognized her move. “It’s too muddy,” he said. “My leg’s not strong enough to support me if I slid.”

His casual acknowledgement of his wounds surprised her. No one ever talked about anything as personal as scars, of course, but given his rapid descent into self-destruction after he left the hospital she had assumed his leg would be a matter of sensitivity as well. He certainly made a concerted effort to disguise any hindrance or discomfort, but she was too well-versed in the surgery not to recognize just how difficult it might be.

Not sure what best to say, she simply nodded. “I was feeling trapped in my room,” she offered. “I’m stronger than most of the women you know, and I heal quickly. I’m suffering from no more than slight discomfort and hiding in my bedroom was growing tedious.”

He cocked his head, looking at her. “Then why don’t you go out and join the rollicking festivities?”

“I’m not a fool, Mr. Rohan. My ribs are bruised and I feel rather like a large cur has taken me by the scruff of the neck and shaken me thoroughly. I believe spending the afternoon curled up with a cup of tea would suit me very well, particularly since I intend to spend tomorrow in a coach on my way back to London.”

His eyes narrowed. “Is that wise?”

“Of course it is. I’m perfectly fit to travel,” she snapped, then wanted to kick herself. She was angry again, when she really shouldn’t be. As far as he knew she had no reason to be hostile, which was simply the truth. With luck he might have forgotten all about that midnight kiss. . .

What kind of idiot had she become? Of course he hadn’t forgotten, and her only defense was to distract him from that ridiculously potent memory. “Indeed, I’m feeling quite well,” she said, belying her recent assurances. “Though perhaps I should go out and join them.”

“You can’t without shoes,” he said, and she wanted to do something childish like stamp her stockinged feet. She’d known he would notice.

“My shoes have disappeared,” she said stiffly.

“I imagine they have. They were caked with mud and blood. And there’s no way you can be feeling as sprightly as you maintain—I’ve seen grown men laid flat by what you went through.”

“Men are notoriously bad patients.”

There was something ridiculously melting about his rare smiles. Only one side of his mouth turned up, the other frozen in place with scar tissue, the devil and angel in his face incredibly alluring. “I won’t deny it. I imagine I was a baby like all the rest.”

She was about to assure him that he was a far better patient than he supposed, but at the last second remembered there’d be no way she could know. She smiled politely and lied. “I would have no idea.”