by Gaelen Foley
He swallowed the mouthful of stew, then licked his lips. “Delicious,” he remarked with a stare that made her wonder if he was talking about the food. She looked away but could feel him studying her. “Your turn to answer a question for me, I think.”
“You’re in no position,” she chided, though she was intrigued by his interest in her.
“How did your husband die?” he asked bluntly, scrutinizing her as he waited for her response.
The question startled her. “In the war.”
“Combat?”
She shook her head. “Fever hit the camp.”
He must have noticed something darker in her demeanor than mere wifely grief. His fiery stare intensified.
“What is it?” he murmured.
Gin abruptly remembered that Order agents were trained to read people, and right now, he was reading her.
She didn’t like it.
Her father used to do that, search her out as if he wished to comprehend her every mood.
Difficult to hide anything from these men.
“Nothing.” She fed him another spoonful of food to silence his questions. It was not as if she could tell him that her husband’s death was her fault, indirectly. How could she ever tell anyone that she was responsible?
At least, she felt responsible.
But that was between herself, her dead husband, and their Maker. She’d have to answer for it someday, in the next world, if she ever saw Burke again.
Until then, she hid her guilt away.
Nick saw her refusal to talk about it and shrugged the question off. “As you wish.”
When he had finished the beef stew, she gave him the chicken pie. This was not quite as messy a dish; he could manage it on his own. So she returned to her own seat and leaned against the squabs, gazing out the window.
After another hour passed, she reached in boredom for her newspaper. “You were reading something in your cell. Would you like your book?”
He shrugged. “Why not.”
Because of his chains, she fetched it for him. The groom had stowed the box of Nick’s things in the compartment under the opposite seat. She lifted the lid, exposing the storage area. She immediately spotted the book he had been reading. It was right on top of the box.
She picked it up and read the cover. A Journal of the Voyages and Travels of a Corps of Discovery, by Sergeant Patrick Gass, 1807. When she saw what it was, she handed it to him with a rueful half smile. The caged warrior had obviously spent those months locked up in his cell dreaming of the ultimate in liberty.
“You find my choice of reading material amusing, Lady Burke?”
“Not at all. I just don’t know where President Jefferson found men mad enough to want to go out into that wilderness.”
“I’d go,” he said.
She laughed. “Of course you would. Not I, thank you very much.”
“Ah, come. Does it not intrigue you just a little? Wondering what might be out there . . . ?”
“Not in the least,” she assured him with an arch smile. “I am a creature of civilization. The Americans are welcome to their wilderness. I am looking forward to Paris, actually, once we get our game piece.”
He snorted. “Philistine,” he teased.
She smiled back at him. “Barbarian,” she answered.
Then they both settled into their seats side by side and read together in relative contentment.
Every now and then, Nick sneaked a glance at her from over the edge of his Lewis and Clark book. “So, um, where are we going?” he asked hastily when she caught him gazing at her once again.
“To Deepwell, my estate in the North Riding. Won’t be long now.”
“Ah, Yorkshire. I have always appreciated the North,” he remarked. “Good people. Who mind their own affairs.”
“And where are you from?” she asked, turning to him.
“But my lady, surely you already know. You seem to know everything about me.” He arched a brow, waiting for her to tell him how she knew so many details.
Surely, Virgil had not told her all their life stories over tea.
But the baroness just looked at him, unwilling to share her sources. Then she lifted her newspaper again and turned the page.
Nick snorted under his breath and turned to stare out the window at the landscape again. He soon became absorbed in it, his very soul starved for the autumn beauty that unfurled before him.
Sun rays angled through a moody sky and lit up the sweeping green valley below, dotted with woolly white sheep.
The woods around the edges of the valley were clad in all the colors of autumn: the ash trees golden, the oaks maroon, chestnut trees a glorious orange; and on the distant brow of the next emerald hill, the sad medieval ruins of an abbey with its scattering of ancient gravestones lying all around like broken teeth.
The carriage rumbled on, winding through a quaint stone hamlet. They passed through the angled shadow of a weathered stone marker at the cross, then out the other end of the little village, taking a country road.
It followed the ridge he had seen from the last highway, out into the countryside. From there, they climbed a hill. The tired horses slowed a bit.
“Here we are,” Lady Burke murmured when, at last, the carriage turned in through a pair of towering wrought-iron gates and proceeded up the wooded drive to the stately manor house ahead.
The grounds of her estate struck him as especially beautiful.
Everywhere he turned his gaze, the landscape seemed carefully orchestrated to delight the eye and inspire the soul. Either Capability Brown had created a masterpiece here, or Nick had merely been imprisoned too long.
Then he frowned, wrinkling his nose. “Bloody hell, that smells worse than I do. I think you’ve got a dead deer out there somewhere in the park.”
“No, that’s the odor from the hot springs on the property. It’s in a limestone cave, over there.” She quickly pointed out the mossy and mysterious opening of a cave in the wooded hillside as they drove past. “I’m told the water contains sulfur, iron, magnesium. Bathing in it has been known to cure all sorts of ills. Everything from gout to infertility.”
“Really?” he murmured in surprise as the cave mouth disappeared behind the trees. “Rather like the waters at Bath, then?”
She nodded. “There are several such springs throughout the area. I’m just lucky enough to have one on my property.”
“Except for the smell.”
“You get used to it. Smells like home to me.” She chuckled at his skeptical glance. “My husband’s ancestors discovered it in the late 1500s. You are welcome to take the waters if you like, before we set out on our mission.”
“Not if I come out smelling like that.”
“I daresay it would be an improvement to how you smell right now, my lord,” she said dryly.
He scowled at her.
She laughed. “You should try it. It’s good for you! Besides, it feels wonderful.”
“I see.” He eyed her in guarded amusement. “So you got me out of the dungeon to bring me to a health spa. Not bad. Not bad a’tall.”
They drove on toward the house.
Nick was glad to note that, thankfully, her husband’s ancestors had had the good sense to set the mansion far enough away from the “healthful” odors of the sulfur spring.
When the coachman brought the weary horses to a halt in front of the house, Lady Burke turned to Nick with an earnest, searching gaze.
“I’d like to take the shackles off you if you give me your word that you won’t run.” Her neatly manicured fingertip came down to rest on the chain between his wrists. “I know it hurts your pride, and I have no desire to subject you to anything worse than you’ve already been through. So can I count on you to honor our agreement and not try to escape?”
He looked
into her eyes. It had been a long time since anyone had put any value in his word of honor. “Of course,” he mumbled. “You have my word, of course, my lady.”
Where else would I go?
He had no family, other than a mother who had always had better things to do them worry about him.
He still had the loyalty of his friends, his former teammates, but he did not want them to see him in this condition. “I’m not going anywhere,” he assured her in a low tone, holding her stare. “You helped me; I help you.”
The softening around her tender lips did strange things to his insides. She slipped the key to his chains out of her décolleté where she had hidden it close to her heart. She held his gaze and thrust it into the hole. Nick swallowed hard, wanting her to the point of pain as she turned the key and made the iron lock pop.
As the manacles released, he nearly groaned.
She removed the little key from the manacles and handed it to him. He leaned down and unlocked the cuffs around his ankles.
The iron shackles dropped to the carriage floor, an unutterable weight taken from him, like a very anchor that had been holding him underwater, placed there by all those who were just waiting for him to drown. Straightening up, he gave her back the key. “Thank you,” he said in a low, earnest tone.
Again the hint of a silken smile tugged at her lips. “After all you’ve done, you deserve better than to have my staff see you in chains.”
Nick searched her face for any sign of irony. He found none. Yet for his part, he barely knew what she was talking about—“everything he had done.”
All he could remember these days was the bad imputed to his account. The guilt. The disappointment he was to those who had invested so much in him. Prison had a way of making a man forget the good about himself if he had ever really known it in the first place.
Then the carriage door opened.
Lady Burke alighted, her hand resting on that of her groom. Nick rubbed his chafed wrists as he stepped down after her, leaving his shackles behind as he stepped out into the sunlight.
“This way.” The baroness turned to him with a steadying gaze, as if she knew how disoriented he felt as he stood there in the drive, a free man, more or less, for the first time in months.
Damn. It was so moving to taste freedom again that he, Nick Forrester, trained assassin, hardest of the hard, had a lump in his throat.
A sunbeam caressed his cheeks as he turned his face to the open sky above him.
“Come.” Lady Burke touched his elbow gently after a moment. “Welcome to Deepwood, my lord. If you’ll follow me?”
He opened his eyes and found her watching him. Her curious stare brought him back to earth, then he trailed after her as she went ahead of him into her grand, porticoed mansion.
Nick was almost beginning to feel like a real human being again as she introduced him to the butler, Mason; the housekeeper, Mrs. Hill; and the first footman, Edward, who would be looking after him.
Young, squeaky-clean Edward looked slightly terrified to have been assigned this duty, but he needn’t have worried. Nick had no plans of causing trouble.
Indeed, it seemed Virgil’s daughter had done the impossible—had inspired the old Scot’s problem agent to be a good boy.
And that in itself, thought Nick, was probably cause for alarm. Then he trailed after her, damned near ready to do whatever she said.
Chapter 3
Gin watched him climb the stairs with a weary, prowling stride, like the pitiful big cats kept on public display at the Tower of London’s menagerie. Embittered and broken as the animals became from too many years in a stone cell, they were still capable of mauling a well-meaning keeper on occasion.
She knew she would have to be on her toes with him, and yet he was beautiful, dangerous as he was, with an innate nobility. “Lord Forrester?” she called, as he followed Edward to the landing of the staircase.
He turned. “Yes, my lady?”
“Do you have a favorite dessert, by chance?”
He did not seem to comprehend the question.
“Dinner is served at seven, and since you are our guest, we would like to make you happy.”
“Anything,” he forced out with a catch in his voice, as though he had become so unaccustomed to kindness that he almost preferred cruelty. At least cruelty was predictable. “Anything,” he repeated in a stronger tone, clearing his throat slightly.
“Very well.”
Edward continued up the steps. Nick started to follow, then hesitated. “I have always been rather partial in autumn to a baked apple pudding in pastry.”
“Ah, apple pie?” she answered with a startled smile.
He nodded. “As it is also known. But it’s not important—”
“I’ll see what I can do.”
He smiled back cautiously, then they went on their way and soon disappeared as Edward showed him up to his room. As Gin stood there, pondering the presence of this hard, dangerous man in her home—and hoping she wasn’t making a big mistake by bringing him here—she got the feeling he did not quite know what to make of her gentleness with him. It was not difficult to see that his mode of life had often been unfair to him and robbed him of all ability to trust.
Blazes, the only reason he had the connections she so desperately needed was because the Order had wanted him to walk the line between spy for the Crown and criminal. Who could be surprised that moving in that world would eventually affect him?
Well, she thought, he ought not to place too much trust in her, either. Her expression darkened. After all, she had only told him the bare minimum about her quest.
With that, she summoned Mrs. Hill. “Have Cook prepare an apple pie for our guest. Also to ensure that large quantities of food are available over the next couple of days. I fear the baron has been much deprived of late.”
“Yes, my lady.”
“Mason.” She next turned to the butler. “Send down to the village for Dr. Baldwell to come and examine my guest.”
“Right away, my lady.” Mason hesitated with a look of concern. “Is Lord Forrester ill, ma’am? If there’s anything we can do to make him more comfortable—”
“No, it’s all right. He’s spent too much time in unhealthful surroundings of late. I just want the physician to look him over and assure me about the state of his health before I send him into danger.”
Her staff knew the nature of her investigations, and though they worried for her safety and rather disapproved, they were unshakably loyal.
“Very good, ma’am.” Mason took leave of her and went to send one of the younger servants off to the village to fetch Dr. Baldwell.
Nick shed his filthy prison clothes and wrapped a towel around his waist, then went into the bathing room, where the tub was almost full. His architecturally inclined friend Trevor would’ve been so impressed with the hot running water at Lady Burke’s estate, he thought.
The water that came out of the pipes was ordinary well water, not the mysterious healing flows from the hot springs outside. But no matter.
Nick shut the door, removed the towel, and stepped into the hot water, feeling like a veritable king as he lowered himself into it.
He bathed with gusto, submerging himself under the suds, washing his hair, soaping himself all over, and getting the stink and the coldness of the dungeon off him, hopefully never to return.
It was already starting to feel like it all had been nothing but a bad dream.
Meanwhile, in the next room, Edward dutifully aired out the three sets of clothes that had been stored in Nick’s box of belongings during his incarceration.
The tidy young footman pressed his shirts, coats, cravats, and trousers, then shined his boots for him in the next room. This done, he left to go and burn Nick’s prison clothes, as ordered.
In the bathing tub, meanwhile,
Nick took a razor in one hand and a mirror in the other and gave himself a careful shave. It seemed a great luxury.
During his sentence, he had only been permitted to use his razor once a week, and he had to give it back as soon as he was finished; knowing his skill with a blade, the guards took many precautions about such things.
He was not a vain man, but he had no intention of letting himself start to look like some half-wild hermit from a Wordsworth poem. He’d got accustomed to shaving in near darkness, so the sunshine streaming in through the window astonished him with its beauty—and made his task much easier.
In due time, he emerged from the bathing room, feeling like a new man. With a towel wrapped around his waist once more, he walked, barefoot, across the luxurious bedchamber to the chest of drawers with a mirror.
There were a couple of bottles of masculine cologne on the dresser. Nick smelled each of them and chose one with a faint scent of frankincense and citrus. But before slapping it on himself, he paused and looked over at Edward, who presently returned. “Say, did Baron Burke used to wear this scent?” he inquired.
He did not wish to smell like her dead husband.
“No, sir,” the lad answered in surprise. “Those are just for guests.”
“I see.” Nick arched a brow at him. “And does Her Ladyship get a lot of male guests here at Deepwood?”
Edward blanched. “That’s not what I meant, sir. Sometimes the young master brings his friends home from school. The young gentlemen often use this guest room.”
“The ‘young master’?” Nick echoed in confusion.
“The current Lord Burke, sir. Phillip.”
Phillip? he wondered, intrigued.
“Sir, might I ask which of these clothes you prefer to wear tonight to dinner?”
Still wary about all this, Nick prowled over and inspected his three choices. He winced at the sight of his full-dress military uniform; it was the last thing he had worn before they’d put him in his cell.
He had been escorted by the Order’s kilted guards straight from the Regent’s ceremony at Westminster Abbey, honoring them for their service with showy medals and all pomp and circumstance, immediately north to the Order’s Scottish headquarters and down to the gloomy dungeon to pay for his misdeeds.