Lords of Honor-The Collection

by Christi Caldwell

  “Your Grace!” His doctor came charging over from the opposite end of the hall with an alacrity and ease that would have made him grit his teeth not even a week ago. He dropped his head into his hands. And now he lay upon his backside, woolgathering about a woman. Nay, not just any woman. Lily.

  “I am fine,” he mumbled as the other man came down on a knee beside him.

  “Your movements were more precise, but still too quick.”

  It was not the pace or the pain that had brought Derek to his proverbial knees—or in this case his arse. It was her. Why did that truth not terrify him as it ought?

  Dr. Carlson leaned out and inspected the throbbing muscles of Derek’s thigh. He gave his head a shake, his expression contemplative. “They are no tighter than they usually are.” The young doctor furrowed his brow. “Perhaps we might be best served retiring for the remainder of the day.”

  “No,” Derek growled. He shoved himself to his feet and cursed as his leg went out from under him. Dr. Carlson took him by the arm and steadied him. A dull flush heated his neck. No matter how many days or years passed, he’d never grow accustomed to having become this man, unable to use his own body in the simplest of ways. “I am fine,” he gritted out.

  The doctor hesitated and then with a slow nod, strode briskly down the hall to his previous spot. “You’ve made great strides, Your Grace,” he called with an ease no one had demonstrated through the years. Except Lily.

  He gave a noncommittal grunt. Though, in truth, the doctor did not merely issue false praise. Nor was that the type of doctor Carlson was. The day he’d returned from Toulouse, Derek had been confined to first a bed and then an invalid chair, and then resolved to either end his own life before forever remaining in that godforsaken piece of furniture or he’d climbed out. And promptly fallen.

  Ultimately he’d found Carlson. No, this progress was real. They both knew the truth of that. Yet today, Derek was not trained on his painful efforts or even his own failings.

  From where he stood at the opposite end of the hall, Dr. Carlson called out. “Are you all right, Your Grace?”

  “Fine.” Derek gritted his teeth through the pain of using ligaments that no longer wished to be used. No matter how many times he stretched the muscles of his thighs and conditioned his body, the pain would not go away. Perhaps it would always be there. At one time, that truth had crippled him in ways that moved beyond the pain of old battlefield injuries. Now, there was a calm acceptance in knowing this was who he was. Beast to some. But not to all. Not to those who mattered.

  The dimple-cheeked Flora and spirited governess who saw to that girl’s care slipped in and he found himself smiling once more. Derek stopped.

  “Are you smiling, Your Grace?”

  “No,” he muttered. For the acceptance he’d developed these past days, in who he was and what he’d become, he didn’t think he’d ever return to the easy-going, charming gentleman he’d once been. And that was all right, too. Time changed them all. Lily had proven that.

  The familiar silence reigned once more as Derek strode with his painfully uneven gait down the length of the corridor. In the past, where the quiet had been a balm to his broken soul, now he craved the peel of laughter and tart-mouthed replies from tempting lips. Yes, in the past, each of these agonizing steps would have consumed him in a bitter fury. Now, she consumed him. Thoughts of her. A wave of desire slammed into him; a hungering that came from more than that beautiful gift of her body last night, but rather was born of her. He cast a glance past Dr. Carlson’s shoulder. Where was she even now? Her responsibilities, no doubt, had her in the nursery…

  “You are shouting a good deal less since I last saw you,” his doctor called from his position under the portrait of Derek in his youth.

  Yes. Yes he had been. Or perhaps she was exploring the household corridors, as she’d been wont to do since her arrival…

  “Nor are you thundering for me to quit my questioning,” Dr. Carlson added.

  “I bloody well should be,” he muttered, wringing a booming laugh from the other man.

  Carlson folded his arms at his chest and never took his gaze off Derek’s purposeful movements. “It is my opinion that such a transformation can be attributed to but one thing.”

  He would prefer the other man keep his personal opinions to nothing more than the professional sphere of Derek’s recovery and therapy regimen. Days ago, he would have hurled those very words to divert him away from his inquiries. This time, he remained silent.

  “It is invariably a lady who muddies the waters of our lives,” the doctor mused aloud.

  Perhaps it was years without friendship and dialogue, but Derek who would have normally sent the man to the devil for such musings, shot back. “What do you know of it?”

  “More than you perhaps think,” the doctor said with a half grin. “But enough to know this change to your disposition could most likely be explained by the appearance of a certain…” He quirked an eyebrow. “Governess.”

  Derek shot his eyebrows up. What in blazes did the man know of Lily Benedict’s role here?

  “Lady Flora was quite enlightening.” He inclined his head.

  A silent curse stuck in his throat. His niece chattered worse than a magpie.

  Footsteps sounded down the hall and Derek looked away grateful for the sudden interruption. His butler, Harris, stood at the end, his cheeks their familiar ashen hue as he shuffled back and forth on his feet.

  Derek withdrew a handkerchief and dusted his sweat-dampened brow. “Harris,” he called out.

  Even with the space between them and one useless socket where his left eye had been, the other man’s flash of shock registered. “You called me Harris again,” the man blurted.

  From the corner of his eye he detected the doctor’s knowing look. Derek resisted the urge to yank at his loosened cravat. “It is your name,” he mumbled. A name he’d resisted speaking to maintain that carefully crafted façade of indifference and coldness. Lily Benedict was capable of the kind of magic fey creatures were possessed of, and God help him, she’d woven a spell that had brought him back to life.

  A small smile formed on the other man’s face. “Indeed it is, Your Grace.” Then clearing his throat, he said, “Mr. Davies has arrived. I-I know y-your feelings on unexpected meetings and as such have told him you are not receiving visitors,” the man’s words ran together. “He, however, i-insisted. Should I—”

  He sighed. “Show him to my office shortly.”

  “O-of course.” The man sketched a bow and then backed from the hallway.

  Derek stalked over to his jacket and shrugged into it. “I say we are finished here, Carlson.” Ignoring the knowing glint in the young doctor’s eyes, Derek, with the use of the serpent-headed piece, fetched his discarded garments. “I am not thinking about Lil—Mrs. Benedict.” His skin heated, like he was a boy just out of the schoolroom.

  His insolent doctor spread his hands before him. “Ah, but I didn’t say that you were.”

  Gritting his teeth through the difficulty of his movements, Derek stomped past the grinning man and set out in search of the lady who’d forced him out into the living, once more. With the aid of his walking stick, he limped through the winding corridors and reached his office.

  “Where are you going?”

  Derek stumbled and he caught himself against the wall to keep from falling.

  His sister’s daughter stood in the middle of the hall. Curiosity set her eyes aglitter. His world had been infiltrated; there was nothing else for it—a spirited siren, a tenacious man-of-affairs, an insolent doctor, and this mischievous child. Odd, there was none of the age-old fury at that truth.

  He strode into his room, and found his chair. “Shouldn’t you be with,” Lily, “your governess?” The mere utterance of her name sent an explosion of heat unfurling inside his chest, a lightness that freed him in ways he’d been chained to for so very long.

  Flora picked her way tentatively toward him. She feared
him. It read in the pale hue of her skin and the slight tremble to her fingertips. Her reaction hit him like a punch to the gut. Even as hers was the common and expected reaction.

  Yet, afraid of him, as she was, she’d still brave his company. Instead of taunting her with the evidence of his disfigurement as he’d done in the past, Derek angled his face in a way to shield her from the scarred portion of his visage.

  “Mrs. Benedict is gone.”

  His heart stilled and forgetting his previous resolve to keep his face averted, he swung his attention to the girl. “What do you mean, gone?” Did that raspy, panicked inquiry belong to him?

  Fear wreathed her cheeks. “She went out early this morning.” Flora went still and her lower lip trembled ever so slightly. “Do you believe she’ll not come back?”

  Gone? Unease settled like a stone in his belly. Where in blazes would Lily go?

  “It is not Sunday,” Flora confirmed with a nod. “And you’ve only given Mrs. Benedict Sundays free, so she should be here.”

  “I—” Derek furrowed his brow. “How in hell do you know such a thing?”

  A twinkle replaced the prior fear radiating from her blue eyes. “I heard it when you spoke with her.”

  He swallowed a curse. Christ. The girl was better suited for the Home Office than any nursery. His cravat suddenly grew tight and he scoured his mind, trying to figure just what in the hell else the girl had overheard.

  She hefted herself into the leather winged back chair opposite his desk and began pumping her legs furiously.

  “I-I am certain she will return shortly.” His panicked heartbeat made a mockery of that empty assurance he issued for both his and Flora’s benefit. He cleared his throat. “Aren’t there other…?” She cocked her head, looking at him expectantly. “Children’s things you should be doing?” What was it children did? He no longer recalled those most innocent of times.

  “I am alone. The servants are busy.” Flora shrugged.

  “And so you choose to keep me company?”

  She grinned. “And so I chose to keep you company.” As she glanced about his office, her smile dipped. With her gaze she took in the cane that had so displeased her and the hearth crackling in the fireplace. Flora settled her stare on the bronze and iron ormolu inkwell and frowned. “Lions,” she sighed.

  He followed her gaze to the gold lion lid atop that gold and black base. “Do you have problems with lions and snakes?” he drawled, sitting back in his chair.

  The girl abruptly stopped her distracted swinging movement and furrowed her brow contemplatively. “I prefer happier things.”

  He no longer knew what such things were. Except…Lily’s beguiling smile slid into his thoughts. No, that was not true. Not anymore. He felt adrift at sea; with these emotions he no longer knew which way was up and which was down.

  Uncomfortable with the tumultuous sentiments, he glanced over at the door, never longing for Davies’ presence more than he did this moment. This child forced him to acknowledge things within himself that he’d not allowed himself to in almost eight years. Surely Lily would return soon and he’d be spared from delving any further into the interests that made up this child. What if she doesn’t return? Panic cloyed at his throat.

  “Books and flowers.”

  He whipped his head back, just as his niece hopped to her feet. “I like books and flowers.” Of course. The urns filled with various blooms in his otherwise dark, dreary house. The servants had gathered the girls’ love of those flowers and filled his house with them. And truth be told, he’d not protested because there had been something purifying and hopeful in them. Something he’d never admit to a soul—not even this child. “My mother would read to me every morning amidst the gardens. She likes flowers,” Flora said pulling him to the moment. She dragged the tip of her toes back and forth over the floor. “Or rather, she liked flowers.”

  With those words, memories of running through the hills of Carlisle with Edeline slipped to the surface. His sister’s exuberant laugh trilled through his mind. A swell of pained emotion ran through him at the unnecessary reminder of her loss. The man he’d once been would have had all host of appropriate soothing responses; even for a child. Now, the man who’d dwelled too long in the shadows sat in silence.

  “That is why I’m named Flora, you know.”

  God, the girl was tenacious. She required no one’s assistance to keep a discourse flowing. In fact, she would have impressed any Society matron with her effortless skill. Disappointment lined her chubby face and his chest tightened. She wished him to respond. He’d been too long without words. He hardly knew the proper ones to assemble to raise a smile and erase hurt. Hell, he couldn’t even dull his own pain. Yet again, evidence of his humanity assaulted him. “Is it?” he asked.

  Her eyes went wide. Then, a slow, wide smile dimpled her cheeks. “Yes. Flora means flowers,” she instructed the way a governess delivering an important science lecture might. She came around the desk and stopped beside the arm of his chair. “Do you know what I believe, Uncle Derek?”

  Ah, God. There it was again. The vise squeezed all the harder, cutting off airflow.

  “What is it?” he asked, his tone gruffer than intended.

  Flora rested her palms on the edge of his desk, alongside those stacks of notes connecting him to his past. “I believe that is why Mrs. Benedict is meant to be here. Mama knew I would need someone to help.” Such innocent hope flared in her eyes that it sucked the remainder of the breath from his lungs. “And Mama knew you needed someone, too. And so she sent us a flower.”

  A flower. Lily Benedict.

  “Lily Benedict,” Flora said, in echo of his unspoken thoughts.

  The words were nothing more than the inane ramblings of a child who’d see hope when there was only darkness around them. Yet… He returned his gaze to her, still smiling and innocent in the face of great loss. Perhaps there was more reason to hope and be happy, after all.

  “Perhaps you might take me to a bookshop one day?” she asked tentatively. “With Mrs. Benedict. She promised we would go this week.”

  He cleared his throat, making a noncommittal sound. “Perhaps.” How to explain to this child that he, the man who bellowed and thundered to bring the townhouse down, turned numb with terror at the prospect of exiting these walls?

  His niece tapped her hand on the pile of notes sent ’round by Maxwell and Christian, bringing his attention to the surface of his desk. Anxiety leapt in his chest, at this tiny little interloper not only slipping past his defenses, but at having this world he’d hidden within invaded by another. She suddenly stopped her grating drumming. “What are these?” she curiously eyed the notes.

  Derek leaned over and swiped the pile. “Nothing. They are nothing,” he bit out. Nothing but reminders of the men he’d joined in a grand adventure to nowhere but sin and destruction.

  “They don’t look like nothing,” Flora continued, with a child’s relentlessness. “They look like letters.”

  He yanked open his desk drawer and tossed them inside.

  “Who wrote you letters? Was it your friend, the marquess?”

  The girl was going to give him a bloody megrim. Derek dug his fingertips into his temple to blot out the girl’s incessant questioning, when her last words penetrated his thoughts. He snapped his eyebrows into a single line. “Who…?”

  “The Marquess of St. Cyr?”

  A dull humming filled his ears. How did she know about…?

  “Mrs. Benedict and I met him at the park one day with his wife.” A taut energy pulsed through him. That man whose happiness he’d sought to end had met his charge in Hyde Park and knowing the good, always charming person Christian had been and the one papers purported him still to be, he would have been kind to the girl. He gripped the edge of his desk. When he’d been nothing but monstrous to that same couple who’d extended her that kindness. “She gave me a picture. The marchioness,” Flora clarified.

  “Did she?” he asked, his voice
rough.

  Uncaring that she invaded the space of one of the most feared peers in the realm, Flora came closer and all but climbed on his lap in a bid to read those notes.

  With a growl, he thrust the drawer closed with a loud click. “They are not your business.” Where in thunderation was Lily? By God he’d triple her wages and her pension if she pledged to never take another damned day off.

  Displeasure turned her lips down. “I think Mrs. Benedict is right.”

  He shook his head, not meaning to feed her curious statement, that he’d really rather not have her finish.

  “You are a good deal like Pup.”

  That blasted dog she’d likened him to. “Mrs. Benedict would be wise to focus on your studies and not on her damned comparisons,” he growled. Though, in truth, it would hardly matter. He’d sooner carve out his other eye than turn her out and the glimmer in his niece’s eyes indicated for her tender years, she knew as much, too.

  Disregarding his diatribe, Flora leaned up on tiptoe and peered closely at his disfigured face. “You’re always snarling and snapping and barking, but the marquess said you were once good fun.”

  His throat worked. He had been. Once upon a lifetime ago, he’d been charming and capable of easy laughter. I can still be that man. He pressed his eye closed, hungering for the slip of a dream dancing before him. He’d not believed so…until her. Derek forced his eye open and found Flora closely examining him. His stomach turned at this close scrutiny, so that he wanted to bound from his seat and tear from the room away from her bold study and seek out a new, undiscovered sanctuary. He’d never find peace with the monster that met him each morn. Derek forced himself to remain still.

  Then, she gave a little nod. “Yes. You are just like Pup, but do you know what, Uncle Derek?” She didn’t give him an opportunity to respond, which was good, because this slip of a child had him at an absolute loss. “You pretend you hate everyone, but you really do care.”

  He didn’t care about a bloody person. Derek opened his mouth to disabuse her of that notion, but the lie withered on his lips.