Hepburn grinned. Clarice could see his glee. He gestured them in, closer and closer, and when Toothless charged him with the knife, Hepburn stepped aside, caught his wrist, and twisted.
When she heard the bones snap, Clarice’s stomach turned.
Toothless went down screaming, writhing in agony.
Above the noise Clarice heard Hepburn saying, “You were on my estate last night, weren’t you?”
No. Clarice had seen the man on the estate. It wasn’t one of these men.
“I dunna even know who ye are.” Baldy backed away as Hepburn stalked forward.
“Liar.” Hepburn flexed his fists. “You dared to spy on my home.”
“I’m from Edinburgh. I dunna know who ye are, and I’m na’ a spy. I’m an honest thief, I am.” Hepburn’s blow caught Baldy’s ear so hard, his head snapped sideways.
Like a prizefighter, Baldy slipped under Hepburn’s guard and landed him a blow on the chin.
Before Clarice could do more than choke off a gasp, Hepburn dodged the next hit, avoiding Baldy’s hamlike hands, and placed two punches to Baldy’s nose. Blood spurted, and Hepburn said steadily, “Blackguard. You were watching my house.”
Baldy tried to smash him to the ground.
Hepburn weaved away and clipped Baldy’s eye. “Who paid you to watch the house?”
Baldy staggered back. “Ye’re a crazy whoreson, ye know that?”
“I know.” Hepburn hit him again. “Who?”
“I ne’er been t’ yer house.” Wheeling, Baldy tried to run.
Hepburn’s foot shot out. He tripped him. Waited until Baldy lurched to his feet. Tripped him again. Standing over him, Hepburn asked, “Were you going to rob me?”
Baldy’s arm swept under Hepburn’s knees.
Hepburn did a somersault and came back to his feet. Reaching down, he grabbed Baldy and dragged him up to stand on his feet. “What were you going to steal?” He clipped Baldy on the chin.
“Nothing. I vow. Nothing.” Baldy was weaving, punching, trying to strike Hepburn.
Hepburn punched him in the chest, boxed his ear, smashed his nose.
Blinded by his own blood, Baldy fell to the ground and gasped. “Don’t know ye.”
Hepburn stood staring at the men on the ground, chest heaving, his expression demonic. To the writhing Baldy he said, “I’m the earl of Hepburn. These are my people that you killed, that you robbed.”
Blubbering, Baldy promised, “Ne’er again.”
“That’s right. Never again.” Leaning down, Hepburn pulled him up by his shirt and punched him again.
Clarice couldn’t watch anymore. She rode to his side. “Lord Hepburn!” She slid from the saddle. “Lord Hepburn!” She caught his arm as he prepared to hit the now-unconscious man. “Lord Hepburn, stop. You have to stop!” The sour taste of bile coated her throat, and her voice quivered abominably.
Lifting his head, Hepburn stared at her as if he’d never seen her before. His hair stood on end. His sleeve had been slashed by the knife. Blood sheeted his arm. He looked as if the devil himself had taken possession of his soul, and she feared he would hit her too.
Then his chest rose in a long, slow breath. His face cleared. He dropped his arm. He dropped the body. In a voice that sounded frighteningly calm and normal, he instructed, “Your Highness, ride back to MacKenzie Manor and send someone for MacGee. I’ll tend to him until they get back.”
“But”—she indicated his wound—“my lord, you’re hurt.”
Glancing at his arm indifferently, he said, “I’ve had worse. MacGee hasn’t, poor bastard.” He whistled for Blaize and the stallion trotted over.
Hepburn lifted her into the saddle, and the touch made her shiver in terror. But not revulsion, God help her. Never revulsion.
“If we don’t get MacGee help, he’s going to die.” Hepburn slapped Blaize’s rump to start him off. “Hurry.”
Fifteen
A princess performs needlework to create an object of beauty, and to display her beautiful hands and graceful gestures.
—THE DOWAGER QUEEN OF BEAUMONTAGNE
From the window of Hepburn’s study, Clarice watched Robert ride in, bloody, bruised, and apparently unfazed. She marked his progress through the corridors by the female shrieks of horror and his low, reassuring murmur. She stood in the twilight shadows as he entered the room, and she heard him say, “I’m fine, Millicent. I don’t need a surgeon to stitch up such a small scratch. I must look at the mail that arrived this afternoon, then I promise I’ll rest. Go back to your guests. God knows they need you more than I.” He shut and locked the door in his sister’s anxious face and made his way toward his desk, where the mail was stacked on a silver salver.
Clarice took the moment to study him. He sported a slight puffiness around his eyes, a little bruising at his jaw, but all in all, for a man who had been in a vicious fight only a few hours before, he looked very good. Except for that slash on his arm—it needed tending.
Without lifting his head, he said, “Don’t hover there, Your Highness, come out and care for me. That is what you intended, isn’t it?”
He hadn’t appeared to, but he had noticed the table she’d set up with her scissors, her sewing kit, and the basin of warm water. He had noticed her too, and as she stepped into the light, he looked directly at her.
His eyes were red-rimmed.
He was still in a rage.
Her heart speeded up. She wanted to run. She wanted to stay. She wanted to make sure he was all right. She didn’t care. She had seen him at his worst, in an uncontrollable rage, a rage so deep and murderous he would have gladly killed. And she’d seen him at his best, for he’d been fighting for his people.
But the composure and compassion Grandmamma had taught her was deeply ingrained, and he…
With great deliberation he looked away, putting a distance between them that had nothing to do with proximity and everything to do with rebuff.
So she managed to speak with serenity. “How is MacGee?”
“His wife’s dead, but he’ll live.” With a sneer at the pile of mail, Hepburn moved toward her. “He’s with the surgeon in town.”
With much satisfaction she noted Hepburn wasn’t going to deny his injuries to her.
“You’ve got blood on your hands from handling MacGee.” She dipped Hepburn’s hand into the basin of water. Red oozed off his knuckles—and oozed, and oozed. It was his blood, she realized, Hepburn’s blood.
Of course. The way he’d battered those men had been fierce and brutal. How could he not have hurt his hands?
She said, “I’ll wrap your fingers as soon as I stitch the slash on your arm. Remove your shirt.”
He didn’t move. He stood there as if he hadn’t heard her, or as if she were speaking a foreign language.
She reached for his wrecked cravat, intending to help him, but so swiftly she never saw him move, he knocked her hands away. With his right hand he grabbed the gaping slash in his left sleeve, ripped the material off, and tossed it away. “There.”
Modesty? From the man who only last night urged her toward his bed? She picked up soft strips of cotton, dampened them, and gently wiped off the dried blood from his wound. She didn’t believe it.
“Where did a princess learn to stitch a knife wound?” He stood with his head hanging. His chest rose and fell in hard breaths, and his voice was guttural. Yet the question was reasonable.
“Grandmamma isn’t a woman who suffers fools lightly.” Carefully Clarice touched the edges of the wound, trying to see how deep the knife had gashed. The muscle was mostly intact, but the skin curled back and would take more stitches than she’d realized, which made his indifference all the more incredible. He had to be in intense pain. Absentmindedly she continued. “Grandmamma taught all of us girls to sew, and when the revolution started, she told us that we might have to work among the wounded. She said it was our duty to our loyal soldiers. She said we would be the symbols that they were fighting for.”
; “And did you work among your loyal subjects?”
“No. Grandmamma said we should stay and die for our country. My father thought not. He sent us to England. Sometimes I wish we hadn’t gone…but that’s foolishness, I suppose. I suppose, if we had stayed, we would be dead too. As long as we’re alive, there’s hope that—” She caught herself. She didn’t like to talk about hope. She didn’t like to feel hope. It made an otherwise perilous life almost unbearable.
She especially didn’t want Hepburn to know that in the deepest, darkest corner of her heart, a tiny flame of optimism never died, for she feared that somehow he would use that flame against her, just as he had used her affection for Blaize to ensnare her into the madness of his charade.
She urged him toward a chair beside the table. “Won’t you sit while I place the stitches?”
“No.” The muscle in his jaw flexed as he stared straight ahead. “I’ll stand.”
“As you wish.” Ah, love was a burden almost past bearing, yet when Clarice looked at him standing there, wounded in body and soul, she experienced longings that stirred her heart more powerfully than any other emotion in her life.
Not that her feelings were love. She wasn’t fool enough to think that. But she craved and hated him. When she was gone from this place, she would dream of him still, for he had invaded her soul with his touch and his kisses and his jewel-bright eyes.
Now she had to touch him. Heal him. And do it without alerting him to her affection, for he showed no such fondness to her. Indeed, he stood completely still, ignoring her as if she were a piece of the furniture. Threading her needle with the catgut, she tried a jest. “Shall I use a fancy cross-stitch?”
“Just sew it up.” He watched his own fingers as he flexed them. “How many sisters do you have?”
Shock rippled through her. “Sisters?”
“You said you had sisters.”
“No, I didn’t.” She didn’t. She hadn’t.
“You said, All of us girls.” He took his hand out of the water and dabbed it dry with a towel. “You’re from Beaumontagne.”
Fear lit a swift flame in her gut. “You don’t know that!”
“I do now.”
He had tricked her. He’d tricked her. Now he knew the name of her country and he could sell her to the villains who wished her dead. He’d discovered another threat he could hold over her head.
She didn’t hesitate when she jabbed the first hole in his skin.
He barely flinched. “So I’m right. The first day I saw you…I wondered. The English don’t know much about your little country, but when I was on the Peninsula, we soldiers noted that there was a look about women from Beaumontagne, a freshness about them.”
She could scarcely speak for fear. “Due to my creams.”
“And you, of course, are a princess of Beaumontagne.” His tone mocked her. “With sisters who live…where?”
He didn’t know about Amy. Clarice took a strong breath. Amy was safe. “My sisters are none of your concern.”
She risked another glance at Hepburn. And this man wouldn’t betray her. Not by accident anyway, and if she did as he told her, she hoped to come out relatively unscathed.
Of course, as far as she was concerned, he could travel the road to Hades and beyond. He was a rude, crude, beastly male who deserved nothing from her.
Yet he’d saved MacGee’s life. Clarice knew he wouldn’t get help if she didn’t give it to him, so she would render him aid whether he wished it or not.
Stretching the edges of his skin together, she pulled them tight with the thread. As she tied off each stitch, she demanded, “How did you know I was from Beaumontagne?”
“You said Blaize was half Arabian and half Beaumontagne. Not very many people know there’s a tiny country called Beaumontagne, much less that they breed horses there.”
“How do you know about Beaumontagne? And the horses?” Her fingers trembled. “How do you know these things?”
Prudently he caught her hand and held it. “I went to war on the Peninsula. I traveled all over Spain and Portugal. I went into the Pyrenees and, among other places, I visited Andorra and I visited Beaumontagne.”
She dug her fingernails into his flesh. “Then you know about the revolution.”
A pang of homesickness struck at the heart of her. The newspapers report so little. “Tell me—is the country still in turmoil? Or is Queen Claudia firmly in control?”
“I don’t know.”
She wanted to shake him until he gave her information. “What do you mean, you don’t know? You were there.”
“Riding in, riding out, in the dark of night.” He eased his hand from hers. “Drinking in inns, listening for news of Napoleon’s army.”
She had waited for years to be called back to Beaumontagne. She had listened for tidbits of news. She had longed to go to the embassy in London and ask questions, but she didn’t dare. Godfrey had said neither Clarice nor Amy was safe from assassins, and while she was willing to take a chance with her own life, she dared not expose Amy to imprisonment and possible death. Now disappointment tasted bitter on her tongue, and she lashed at Hepburn with the most ridiculous accusation she could imagine. “What were you, some kind of spy?”
“No.”
No. Of course not. English noblemen were not spies. They considered such secretive work beneath them. They would rather dress in fancy uniforms, ride fine horses, and slash helpless foot soldiers with their swords.
Then, in a flat tone Hepburn confessed, “I was shoddier than a spy. I was lower than a spy. The conscripts in the army performed more respectable missions than I did.”
She stared at him in astonishment. Heat rolled off him in waves. His tousled hair stood up in clumps. And while she didn’t doubt him, she didn’t understand. “You’re a man of consequence. How is such a thing possible?”
He laughed, a dry, coughing laugh. “Someone had to do the dirty work, and I got very good at it.”
“What kind of dirty work?”
“The kind that stains a man’s soul.” He indicated the half-stitched wound on his arm. “You should have been a surgeon in the army. I’ve never had such neat sewing done on me before.”
“How many wounds have you had?”
“A few.”
A few. Of course. When a man fought with the kind of disregard to pain Hepburn showed, he would be injured.
She resumed her work and reflected on him. How swiftly he put conclusions together. How cleverly he had first tried to seduce her into doing his will, then, when that didn’t work, to blackmail her. Now he manipulated her into confessing her background. She wanted to stab the needle in him just for fun—except she suspected he wouldn’t feel the pain. But she knew her duty—she had to treat his wounds. Her dedication wasn’t personal. She would do as much for a dog who’d been hit by a wagon.
She finished the stitching. Opening one of her jars, she dabbed her prized salve on him.
He watched, his eyes shadowed by his lashes. “What’s that?”
She didn’t like the way he asked, as if he suspected her of poisoning him, and she snapped, “A healing unguent. It’ll keep away the infection.”
“Why don’t you sell that in your demonstration?”
“It’s impossible to get here.” She finished and wrapped his arm in a long strip of cotton. “This is my last jar.” With precious little left.
“You shouldn’t be wasting it on me,” he rumbled.
“But Grandmamma instructed us to place others’ welfare before our own, and I can’t discard her teachings—no matter how much I’d like to.” And while it was true, Clarice would have liked to do no more for Hepburn than necessary, she couldn’t bear to imagine him developing a fever and falling into unconsciousness. She shuddered to imagine this man who fought like a berserker, and lived on the thin edge of desperation, still and cold in death. And if that death occurred because she had failed to do all in her power to heal him….
“Mustn’t disobey Grandmamm
a,” he jibed.
Ingrate. Cad. His mockery incensed her.
Taking his other hand from the water, she examined the bruised knuckles. Pressing the joints one by one, she watched to see if he winced. But he remained blank-faced. So be it. If he’d broken a bone, he’d have to suffer. After smearing her salve on the scrapes, she wrapped the worst of the sores in soft white cotton. “There. I leave you to go to your bed.”
“Not yet.”
That deep, brooding tone cut no mustard with her, and she asked briskly, “Are you hurt somewhere I can’t see? No? Then my work is done.”
He extended his large hand to her. “Earlier today…we made a deal. Your cooperation for Blaize. We never shook hands.”
She stared at that hand, bloody and bandaged, steady as a rock, and belated caution curled in her gut. Did he never forget anything? Did he always insist that his partners, willing or not, seal their agreement with the ancient contract? Did he imagine she had some outdated sense of honor that would hold her to his demands as long as she shook his hand? “You hold Blaize in your stables. You already have my cooperation.”
“Nevertheless, I’ll have your hand on the deal.”
Maybe that dark, brooding tone did work for her, for she fought the sudden rising of two different desires—one to flee, one to fight. She took deep breaths, still staring at the hand, then at him. He stared at his hand too, waiting, waiting….
And, blast him, he was right. She did suffer with an outdated sense of honor. His blackmail would hold her only as long as he held Blaize. But the handshake would detain her until the charade was finished to his satisfaction.
To his satisfaction…
Slowly she reached out her hand and put it in his. The shock of the contact ran up her arm, lifted the hair on her head, slithered down her spine.
His fingers curled around hers. For the first time since she’d begun her work, his gaze rose and met hers—and singed her with its heat.
She recognized this man. This was Hepburn without any of his masks. This was the warrior who had today fought for a dead woman and her wounded husband.
Some Enchanted Evening: The Lost Princesses #1 Page 14