Chapter Two

J oss busied himself lighting the stove in the small room. Lady Marchebanks' bolt hole in the Mint had been quite a find all those months back. That it remained undisturbed was a blessing. There was no food, no provisions. But there was a stove for warmth and blankets. They could get by there till the morning.

Once the fire was blazing inside the little stove, he lit one of the lanterns perched on a table. Then, with light, he turned. What he saw made him curse. She was no longer shivering. Henrietta, Lady Ernsdale, was positively purple with the cold that had seeped through her sodden clothing. Without preamble, he barked a single command. "Strip."

She looked mutinous for only a split second before making her very best effort to do as instructed. But every attempt to free the buttons of that coarse gown was foiled by her stiff, frozen fingers.

"Damn it all!" Even as he was uttering the curse, he was moving towards her. It had been a very long time since he'd undressed a woman. That he was undressing her now for such very unpleasant reasons did not stop his body from stirring. Even near frozen, dirty from the river, and haunted by what she had endured, Lady Ernsdale was one of the most beautiful women he'd ever seen.

"I'm sorry," she mumbled, her speech sluggish and slurred.

That effectively dampened his ardor. He was beginning to realize just how severely the frigid water had affected her. "It's the cold," he explained. "It clouds your brain. It can drive you mad if you cannot get hold of yourself. But first things first, we need to get you warmed up."

As the rough fabric of the dress slithered to the floor, he realized that she wore nothing beneath it. Logically, he understood that every garment she'd been wearing at the time of her abduction had been stripped from her and sold by the vultures who'd taken her. But even with the cold that had tinged her skin an unnatural shade of blue, he could see where the rough fabric had abraded her delicate flesh. There were bruises, scrapes, and scratches all over her. It infuriated him. It was also more than just his natural inclination to be protective of women, and particularly innocent ones such as Lady Ernsdale. His response to her was something different—other. Proprietary. Something he had no right to be where she was concerned. Whatever the hell it was, it was a waste of energy. They were worlds apart, and it ought to stay that way. It would stay that way.

He glanced at her face and saw a slight smile curving her lips. "What is it?" His voice sounded gruff, his tone too sharp to have spoken to her thusly.

"I was afraid to drown," she managed. "But there are worse ways to die. Freezing to death might be one of them."

"Fuck." The moment he said it, he regretted it. That wasn't the sort of word he ought to use in front of her. "You're not going to freeze to death. I won't allow it." To be certain of that, he draped one of the blankets about her shoulders and maneuvered her closer to the small box stove which now provided a cheery blaze.

"What is this place?" she asked.

Telling her that it was a former hideout for traitors and murderers seemed like it would not be for the best. So he offered an abbreviated explanation. "It was the home of a dead woman." He moved away from her then, leaving her in front of the stove as he moved behind her to remove his own soaked clothes. He would use one of the blankets to cover himself solely for her benefit.

"Oh, that's terrible. Did she die here?" She sounded so utterly horrified by the possibility.

"No. She was already dead before she moved in," he answered as he pulled his shirt over his head. He didn't bother to explain that she'd been dead from the first moment she'd elected to betray her country for nothing more than a bit of coin.

Once he tossed his filthy shirt to the floor, he removed his boots, then dropped his pants. As he rose, he looked back at her over his shoulder. She was no longer facing the stove, but was looking at him in a way that—well, it wasn't good for either of them. Admiration was one thing. Attraction was another altogether. But awareness, the tension that developed between two people when those other feelings were both mutual and acknowledged, that was dangerous.

Still, he took a moment to study her. The curve of her shoulder, the slope of her breasts barely concealed beneath the blanket, the length of her pale, slim legs—it was all bared to him. And none of it should ever be for his eyes. She was not for the likes of him.

To break the spell, he joked, "Careful, Lady Ernsdale. You'll put me to blush."

"I don't think so. From what I can see you have absolutely nothing to be embarrassed about."

Like the male of any species, he had his vanity. And she'd certainly stroked it, whether that had been her intent or not. He couldn't say whether or not she had been purposely flirtatious or if he was simply hearing in her words what he wished. What was the adage? If wishes were horses, then beggars would ride. He was very much the beggar in their situation. It wasn't a fact he could afford to forget.

Turning away from her, he spread their clothing out over the other pieces of furniture in the room so that it would dry during what was left of the night. And then he turned back, forgetting for just a moment that it wasn't simply his nakedness which might be shocking to her. Her sharply indrawn gasp was all the reminder he needed.

He turned once more, but this time what she saw made her gasp not in appreciation but in horror. He knew what she'd seen, of course. He saw it every time he dressed or bathed. The large chunks of muscle and flesh torn away at his shoulder from Bechard's pistol ball. All the smaller scars that surrounded it from where the fragments had to be cut out. Highcliff had informed them at a later date that it was Bechard's practice to use iron rather than steel to promote fragmentation. He crafted those pistol balls in such a way that they would break apart and do as much damage as possible. As a result, his shoulder was simply ravaged. Through sheer force of will, he had some use of his arm, but not enough. Not enough to do and be what he once had been.

"It's ugly as hell, but I don't have the luxury of covering it right now." The explanation came out short and sharper than it ought to have. He was reluctant to meet her gaze, reluctant to see her face etched with either pity or disgust.

Hesitantly, she asked, "Does it pain you still? The scars are still very red... and very new."

He dared glance up at her then, and he didn't see either of the things that he had feared. Concern, curiosity, appreciation. All of those things were plainly visible to him on her far too expressive and revealing face. And they only further complicated the unfortunate attraction he had developed for her. Not simply because of her courage or her beauty, but because of all that he'd learned about her while retracing her steps. She helped others. She genuinely cared for the wellbeing of those most in society would have snubbed entirely, including those like himself. Bastards from the street who'd thieved, pickpocketed, and done all manner of terrible things for the sole sake of survival. Yet, from everyone he had spoken to of her, he'd heard only of her kindness, of her lack of judgement. The simple truth was that everyone talked of charity, while few ever truly displayed it. But she did.

Attraction. But not simply that. No. There was desire there. It fired his blood when he looked at her, and not even the chill in that small room could prevent his body's response to it. "I'm learning, Lady Ernsdale, to ignore all manner of discomforts. Now lie down before the fire. I'll get us some blankets from the chest, and we'll stay here until our clothes are dry and you've thawed a bit. Once day breaks, we'll make our way out of the Mint and get you back to your sister."

*

Henrietta did as he said. Not because she didn't wish to continue looking at him. She did. So very much. Long limbs, sinewy muscle, broad shoulders that tapered to a slightly leaner waist. There was no fat on him. Not an ounce of it. Nor would a tailor ever need to pad his clothes to make him look like a truly prime specimen of masculinity. The Scottish nanny they'd had as children would have called him a braw, bonnie man. And she would have been very, very right.

By virtue of being a married woman, she'd been permitted to see certain works in the British Museum that, as a younger and still unwed lady, she had been previously denied. And she understood why. In truth, she hadn't thought men could actually look like that. Her husband, on the very few occasions when he had actually made an attempt to consummate their marriage, had certainly born no similarity to them. But he did. Mr. Joshua Ettinger. Private Inquiry Agent. And no mere fig leaf would have served to conceal his masculinity.

There was no small amount of curiosity in her about the act that should have no longer been a mystery to her. But alas, she was married to a man who could never show her such things. Even if he could, she certainly wouldn't want him to. And she could only imagine that the differences in such an intimate experience with Mr. Ettinger—versus one with her husband—would be tantamount to daylight and dark. They were not simply opposite in appearance, but in every way that a man might be measured.

She wished she knew more of such matters, that she could speak with another woman about them. Honoria would be of no aid to her. Her sister's marriage had been just as wretched as her own. As for the women they associated with, the so-called ladies of the night, they could speak to pleasure and had often done so. But that was only part of it, wasn't it? The strange awareness, the crackling connection that seemed to exist between them, that was something else entirely. And the transactional nature of what those other women experienced when with a man seemed to be very far removed from her present experience.

How long had it been since she'd been intrigued by a man? Not since she had been a much younger and infinitely more hopeful woman. In truth, she'd been nothing more than a girl then. It was the loss of innocence which marked the passage from girlhood to womanhood, and there were, sadly, more ways to lose one's innocence than simply sacrificing virginity.

It seemed a lifetime ago that she'd been a young woman just moving into society. There had been flirtations, of course, and some degree of interest in her. In some cases, there had been reciprocity of that interest, but nothing that compared to what she currently felt for the man who occupied this small room with her.

Was it simply because he'd rescued her? That was likely part of it. She wasn't so foolish as to think it had not swayed her. Life and death situations forged deep bonds. Any man who'd been to war would certainly agree with that assessment. But it was more than that. He'd been so steady, so constant since that first fraught meeting while she'd battled her fear and the river itself. His calm had seeped into her, had let her feel secure in a way that she never had with anyone else.

When he laid down behind her, his large frame wrapping around her, she became conscious of the heat of his body, of the firmness of muscle under skin that was surprisingly soft when everything about him appeared so very hard. He covered them with one of the moth-eaten blankets, and his arm remained draped over her. Though he made no other move, it was the most natural thing in the world to relax against him. The rightness she felt at letting him shelter her completely as she absorbed his heat and strength was a problem to be picked at and dissected another time.

The river hadn't claimed her. Neither had the cold. Somehow, against all odds, she had survived the ordeal and would be reunited with her sister soon. And in the meantime, she could pretend. She could pretend that she wasn't married to a man like Ernsdale. That, instead, she was married to a man like the one who now held her cradled against his broad chest.

With that thought playing in her mind, she drifted to sleep. It was the first peaceful sleep she'd been blessed with in a very long time.