by Kim Bowman
“Ah, so you are Lord Devon’s resource.”
“You look so like your mother, at first I imagined it was she.” Sophia noted Aunt Louisa’s disdainful choice of words: your mother instead of Lady Chauncey.
Wilhelm caught her gaze and shot her an expression meaning, Do you mind?
Oh. Her argument with Aunt Louisa had grown conspicuous. Sophia looked sideways at Aunt Louisa and widened her eyes in exasperation. Your aunt started it.
Sir Vorlay’s cold stare was aimed at her again. He sat next to Lord Devon, watery-eyed with a sallow complexion under his riot of bristly whiskers. He looked like he belonged in a seedy East London pub. She remembered him leering at her the last time he’d visited.
“Why is that man tolerated here? I thought he was on the outs with Lord Devon?”
Aunt Louisa clucked. “I detest him as well. Blame Wilhelm’s dratted sentiment for his old battalion mates. Any member is welcome at Rougemont, so he says, and some take advantage.”
“I don’t like the look of him.”
“If he spills whiskey on the sofa once more, I might box his ears myself.”
Sir Vorlay glared at Sophia again, and she pointedly turned her gaze to Lord Devon. She watched him take a gulp from his snifter, of something too clear and too amber to be claret. He drained the glass, his throat working as he swallowed, then kept his eyes closed, supposedly while the burn washed over him. Definitely not the sherry she’d set out in the social rooms in an effort to aid his temperance.
“Oh, no,” Aunt Louisa groused. “He is drinking again. ’Tis your fault, Miss Duncombe. He must be taking the rejection badly, fool that he is.”
Sophia had the same thought. “So you would rather I married him?”
“Perhaps you should, after all.”
Sophia coughed, hiding behind her linen. “Just like that? Now you think I should marry him?”
“A thought occurred to me just now. If it took Wilhelm thirty-and-five years to choose a woman, I can scarcely wait another thirty-and-five for him to find another. Philip is a nincompoop, bless his heart — he shan’t have Rougemont. Wilhelm is the last of the Montegue family line. And I want grandbabies.”
Sophia hardly knew what to say. She finally answered, “I fear I would prove a disappointment on all counts.”
Wilhelm caught her eye as he shifted in his chair, quite obviously bored by his guests. Do something, or I will, his expression warned.
Sophia rose and went for the service tray on the buffet. She placed her own half-full wine glass on the tray then lowered it as she approached Lord Devon so he could discard his empty snifter. That detestable Sir Vorlay leaned over and placed his snifter on the tray too, a few swallows of odorous whiskey left swirling on the bottom. Sophia dug the toe of her slipper into the rug and staged losing her balance. Wilhelm grabbed her arm to steady her, which sent Vorlay’s whiskey down the front of her dress while the tray toppled into Lord Devon’s lap, spilling her wine right on target.
Wilhelm shot out of his chair, drawing the eyes of every guest to his soaked groin.
“Lord Devon! Forgive me, I am so clumsy!” Sophia pressed a hand to her throat, making an effort to appear aghast while remembering her false French accent for the benefit of the company.
“The fault is mine, my lady. Alas, I have ruined your lovely dress.” Allow me to remove it for you, his eyes said. He turned to his guests, taking Sophia’s arm. “Do excuse us.”
Us? Us! Her cheeks heated with embarrassment. Certain everyone imagined precisely what Lord Devon implied, she left the room on his arm, silently cursing him with every name she could conjure.
“Thank you.” He kissed her temple.
“I am sorry about your trousers.”
“It was worth it.” He unlocked the door to his apartments and led Sophia inside as though it was perfectly normal to do so. “Does this gown have one of those automatic fasteners?”
“Don’t even think of it, Wilhelm.”
“That whiskey has the finish of a rotting corpse. You may change your mind out of necessity, darling.”
“I can manage, thank you,” she said through a clenched jaw. If I have to cut it off myself with a rusty saw. If she let Wilhelm open the back of her dress, she knew what would come next.
“At least unfasten my buttons for me. Martin is busy with the drawing room guests.” In turn he dropped his tie, vest, and jacket onto the floor.
“You want me to undress you?”
“Blasted contrary motion.” His expression betrayed no sinister intentions, and he did need help with his clothing, she supposed.
The six steps she took to close the space between them felt like walking the pirate’s plank. Sophia returned Wilhelm’s challenging look, opening his collar then tugging the shirttails from his trousers to expose the row of buttons. The hair on his chest narrowed from the fan across his blocky muscles into a trail to his waistband, and her knuckles brushed it all the way down as she opened the buttons.
He stood still, the sound of his even breath loud in the silent, cavernous room. She pushed his shirt over his shoulders, down his arms, and stifled a gasp as she saw his torso bared in the lamplight.
Disfigured, his gossiping neighbors had called him. A gross exaggeration, but something dreadful had happened to him. Many somethings. Wilhelm stood frozen, allowing her to study him, gape at him. Most noticeable? The jagged red line around one shoulder disappearing down his back and a circular scar high on the other shoulder. A bullet wound? Reflecting pale silver in the light were thin knife cuts and burn marks scattered over the whole of his torso, and other marks she couldn’t identify. She remembered noticing a few on his face and neck before, but she’d never imagined that kind of abuse.
Her voice emerged as a croak, “What happened to you, Wilhelm?” She lifted her hand to touch a semi-circular burn scar marring the ridged pattern of muscle across his ribs. He flinched then allowed the contact.
“Quarrel with a feisty woman?”
“Wilhelm…”
“Would it please you if I answered hot knives, whips, needles, and hooks, and devices with no name on this side of the world?”
She glanced up to find his eyes flinty; he was a thousand miles away.
The large scars looked brutal enough, but the smaller marks, symmetrical, in long tracks, made her heart sink with dread. She wanted to know, yet doubted she could bear it if she did. Her throat felt swollen as she swallowed.
“How did you bear it?” She moved her hands to his shoulders where star-shaped scars like Sadie’s dotted over his collar.
He gave a cold laugh and snorted. “They had barely begun with me, Sophia. I was rescued before they started on my teeth. And still that would have been nothing. I may appear broken to you, but I feel damned lucky.”
Sophia blinked, wondering if her mangled back could be considered fortunate by his reckoning. Yes, she decided, since she too had escaped the worst of what her tormentors had intended. The reminder made the skin across her back tingle and her muscles tense, the memory of pain in myriad flavors still too fresh in her mind. Part of her expected to relive the experience with a macabre sense of foreboding.
But no, she had improved. Weeks since she’d panicked during waking hours. Not that she had any less fear, but its power over her had waned. She would be ungrateful to deny Wilhelm credit in that.
“Have you finished gawking?”
“Sorry, Wilhelm, I was only taken aback.” Her shock made no sense, considering she’d heard so many whispers of his wartime espionage, capture, and torture… Here was proof.
She trailed her fingers down his arm, taking care to brush over the small bumps and marks as though they escaped her notice. She freed his fists from the sleeves turned inside out, keeping the simple gold cufflinks in her hand then dropping his shirt onto the pile of clothing on the floor. She placed his cufflinks in their proper compartment inside the bureau; she knew his rooms as well as her own. She’d cleaned them for months, after all.
Sophia turned and watched him tousle the slicked formal style from his hair, raking the pomade from the wavy strands so it appeared sand-colored again instead of molasses.
Mesmerizing, the smooth motion of muscle beneath supple light-golden skin. She had seen hundreds of naked men in art, but never in the flesh, and it dazzled her, the fluid movement tempered with leashed power. His form was excessively masculine yet appealing with the promise of warmth and comfort. Difficult to insist she admired him only for his intelligence and loyalty. With every passing moment she became aware of a serious longing to do something unmentionable to him, in the dark.
Maddening. Oh, she’d said it aloud.
“What?”
“You are utterly desirable, Wilhelm. Not broken. There, I confessed it.”
His wicked pirate grin made her heart leap. “Capital. Now will you get me out of these trousers? I don’t like wine enough to wear it indefinitely.”
“Oh, no. I am not—”
“Sophia, take pity on a man with sodden drawers.” He tucked his hands behind his head in a gesture of surrender, but it only made her stare at his chest. Saints, but he was magnificent. “I swear I will behave myself. And you can use the bathhouse first.”
“Again, no. I say a half hour, and you mistakenly arrive in a quarter hour? You first. And I am excused from the drawing room for the evening. Deal?”
“Anything you say.”
She approached him with the wariness of a hare skirting a wolf. Her bravado had fled the moment his shirt had come off. So she’d still not yet recovered from the sight. The first trouser button put up a fight, making her grasp both sides of the fabric while Wilhelm smirked. It came free with a low-pitched pop, and she feared she might faint — feverishly aware of his shoulders framing her, his heat, his breath on her neck, of her traitorous hands yanking his trousers apart, for the love of all that was holy!
By the time she freed the fourth button, Wilhelm’s hubris had vanished. The strain made his neck flex and his lips purse. The way he looked down at her with hooded eyes made her womb heat and clench. Unbearable!
“Sordid business, this,” she complained, popping the final button.
“The bloody Russians have nothing on you, darling.”
An inappropriate jest, but she chuckled anyway, stepping aside. “You need a valet.”
“I trust only Martin. You see why, don’t you?”
She nodded, finding it unnecessary to comment. She avoided a lady’s maid for the same reason. Servants talk, and her past was her own concern.
Deciding nothing could be worse than unfastening his trousers, she presented him her back, grateful he took the cue to lower the zipping fastener. Like the pitiful coward she was, Sophia fled to the connecting door without a word. Of course Wilhelm didn’t follow. Moments later she heard him leave for the bathhouse.
The fates had been marginally kind; one of the servants had left a low fire in the grate. She shucked her gown and tossed it in. An explosion of blue flames startled a weak yelp from her, then the fire waned and consumed her whiskey-soaked dress.
Finally she heard Wilhelm return to his rooms. On her way to the bathhouse, a feeling of vulnerability, of being watched by malevolent eyes, crept over her. She held the sides of her robe shut at her neck and turned, half-expecting… Nothing. She saw nothing.
Except the orange light of a cigar. Her eyes adjusted, and she discerned the shadowed outline of Sir Vorlay, standing on the terrace outside the drawing room, watching her.
Her instincts shrieked in alarm, and Sophia let etiquette fly to the wind as she called for Fritz. The furry prince — he arrived in record time, but leaping about and appearing far too jolly when she needed a menacing guard dog. At least Vorlay would understand her message.
Sophia shivered with discomfort and made a point of locking the bolt on the door when she reached the bathhouse after sending Fritz out to patrol. She set the lamp on a bench and made certain the curtains had been drawn closed over the front windows.
Scrubbing “rotting corpse”-scented whiskey from her skin could have taken all night, but she dared linger what seemed like only a quarter hour. Sophia bundled her toweling and toiletries. When she rounded the corner of the last partition, she halted and swallowed a cry of shock. Sir Vorlay stood before her, blocking the door to the bathhouse. With a twisted smirk on his face, he dangled a key in his fingers.
Reacting first on instinct, she yelled to the dogs as loudly as she could the commands, “Wächter, kommt! Gefahr!” Guardians, come! Danger!
Vorlay grimaced at her shouting then gloated. “Miss Duncombe. I have a message from your father.”
He stalked toward her, and Sophia’s heart sank as she felt the cold marble wall at her back. Not again, she vowed, anger boiling in her veins. Not again!
Sophia could already hear barking in the distance and knew she only had to stall Vorlay. She drew a breath to shout the commands again, but Vorlay sprang at her, dragging her to the ground. He tore at her robe. She lashed out with her hands and managed to scratch his face, drawing blood. Vorlay roared and snatched her wrists with one hand while he pummeled her jaw and shoulders with his other fist. Sophia screamed, and he slapped her on the mouth.
Through numbed lips she shouted, “Kommt! Jetzt angreifen!” Enter! Attack now!
Vorlay grabbed her by the throat. Each beat of her pulse fought against suffocating pressure. She felt Vorlay’s knees slam into her torso and part her legs, and her mind roiled in panic. The strong half of her conscience shrieked at herself to fight, to resist to the death. The other half merely ceased to function, transporting her to that night at the Eastleigh hothouse. One and the same, she recognized with detached horror.
On the edge of consciousness, she heard the welcome sound of shattering glass and a deafening chorus of barking and snarling. Vorlay lurched forward and released his grip on her throat as the dogs attacked from behind. She rolled away, gasping, her head spinning. The familiar sight of blood dripping onto the floor jerked her back to her senses.
Sophia coughed, and it made her throat feel as though it had been shredded by fork tines, which made her cough more and wheeze for breath. She concentrated on inhaling air, on pulling herself up to stand. Searing bolts of pain shot through her torso, nearly doubling her over. She wanted to curl into a ball until the flaming rays of nervy aching subsided, but she had to escape. A stinging pain in her side punished her with each shallow breath. Sophia shuffled to the door and wrestled it open when it seemed to weigh a thousand pounds, her ribs screaming under the strain.
She registered the gruesome spectacle of the dogs having their way with Vorlay. All four had answered her summons; Wilhelm had trained them well. Only seconds passed while she made a decision. Impossible to think clearly with her head throbbing and rage clouding her judgment, but she finally decided not to let the dogs kill Vorlay. One pinned him by the throat while the others mangled his limbs. He flailed and let out shocked gasps as the dogs bit and tore at him, tossing him about like a child’s toy. They’d smelled his malice and her fear and reacted with a frenzy.
She called to them in a gravelly voice, “Genug! Haltet an!” Enough! Desist!
Somehow they heard her; the noise ceased, save for a few frustrated growls.
“Hier ins Glied treten!”Form ranks here. She coughed again then rasped, “Folgen Sie und schützen.” Follow and protect. The four guard dogs executed the orders with the precision of soldiers, making a diamond formation around her with Fritz at her right. She looked to see Vorlay groaning and bloodied, struggling to sit up. She turned in disgust and hobbled away from the bathhouse, one arm supported gingerly by Fritz’s tall neck.
She thought she would never reach the house. At the east door she paused to catch her breath and commanded three of the dogs to patrol. With the help of Fritz’s strong back, she made her way through the empty east wing of the house.
Faint chattering voices and clinking glasses came from the drawing room party. W
ilhelm had probably gone down to host. At the moment, he was what she wanted most and least, a paradox she couldn’t process. She had to get to her room — the only task she could handle now. She was losing her composure, and next she would lose her mind. At her door, she pulled the lever and Fritz pushed it open. Sophia was grateful she hadn’t locked it, because she had no idea where she’d dropped her keys.
Her thoughts scattered. She fought panic, trying to regain control of her mind. She knew she needed to pack her things and flee Rougemont, but she couldn’t force a rational thought. A tiny voice in her mind ordered her to bolt her door. It was her last act of sanity.
She collapsed on the bed and allowed Fritz to join her. She tried to remain calm, but a year’s worth of pent-up terror washed over her. Her father had found her. He’d used one of Lord Devon’s friends to hunt and punish her. The devil himself could not be far behind.
She coaxed Fritz with words of praise in a shaky voice, and he let her hug his neck far too tightly. A small victory — no tears breached her eyelids, which were sealed shut. Sophia had already shed her last tear for Lord Chauncey. Her energy would be far better spent planning her escape. Plotting revenge would be even better.
She would go. Tomorrow.
Chapter Fifteen
On The Fallacy of Provoking Lord Devon’s Wrath
Wilhelm drummed his fingers on the desk. So many matters out of place. The sum of them nagged his mind, his instincts prompting him something was amiss. His instincts had never been wrong.
Sir Vorlay behaved suspiciously. He’d left the drawing room early the previous evening but hadn’t returned. That morning the guards reported a vandal had broken a bathhouse window. As Wilhelm had investigated, he thought he smelled stale blood. Three of the dogs lumbered around, whining. Where was the fourth dog? If the pack had raised alarm over the intruder, Wilhelm hadn’t heard it, and that struck him as odd, too.