A Season to Be Sinful

by Jo Goodman

  “No.” She offered up her own candid gaze. “Do you want to know if I have ever done so?”

  That she would put the question to him so baldly was unexpected, but then Sherry supposed it was no more than he deserved. It caused him more in the way of discomfort to admit that he did want to know and that not one of his reasons included simple curiosity. The silence following her question lay between them for a long moment as Sherry considered his response.

  “Only if you want to tell me,” he said at last. “Do you?”

  “No.”

  “Very well.” He owned to a measure of disappointment but no surprise. “Then we will not speak of it again.” He noticed that she was not immediately relieved by his words but rather more skeptical of them. “I am not used to being disbelieved.”

  “And I have little experience believing.”

  Sherry was quite certain she had not meant to be affecting. It was perhaps that she offered these words in so matter-of-fact a manner that he found them as poignant an expression of one’s aloneness as he had ever heard.

  “It seems to me that it can begin now,” he said a shade huskily. “Trusting and being trusted.”

  Lily searched his face. “Why?”

  “Why should you trust me?”

  “Why should I want to?”

  “Ahh,” he said. “Well, there you have me.”

  “My question does not offend you? I find that curious.”

  “So do I, but there it is. I cannot say whether your life will be in any way improved by trusting me, only that I will give you no cause to regret it.”

  “That is an expansive promise and perhaps more than you can properly deliver. You will be relieved to know that I will not hold you to it.”

  “So you are already choosing to mistrust me.”

  Lily’s lips curved upward in response to his faintly provoking grin. “I suppose I am.”

  Shrugging amiably as if this were of no import, Sherry asked, “Why do you think you fainted?”

  “I fear I exerted myself overmuch.” It was not the truth as she understood it, but it was the only answer that would serve. She did not want to tell him that it had been emotion of a certain kind that had overwhelmed her, not exhaustion. “As I recall, you warned me against it.” It was Lily’s experience that appealing to a man’s sense that he had been right was never wrong.

  “So I did. I don’t imagine you will be any more likely to take my good advice in the future.”

  “I don’t suppose so, no.”

  “You are of a bloody independent mind, Miss Rose.”

  “Yes,” she said. “Sometimes to my detriment.” She gave him an arch look. “Is it so different for you, my lord?”

  Honesty compelled him to admit that it wasn’t. “But I believe it is a trait of character more suited to men than women.”

  “And I believe an orangutan will attack the town. That does not make it so.”

  Sherry grinned appreciatively. “One hopes not,” he said, “but I take your meaning.” His eyes wandered to her extraordinarily colored hair. The copper accents were turned a deep shade of red and orange by the candlelight. He noticed that short tendrils of hair at her nape and temple were darker at their tip, spiked rather than curling. Damp instead of dry. To be certain of what he was seeing, he lifted his hand and touched one such strand clinging to her cheek.

  Lily flinched. “What are you doing?”

  Sherry withdrew his hand, though not with alacrity. “Your hair is wet.”

  She used her fingers like a rake through her thick, unevenly cropped hair and found it was so. “Yes, it is.”

  “What possessed you to have a bath drawn for the boys here? Arrangements could have been made for them to—” He stopped. There was no change in Lily’s features that pointed out the error in his thinking, yet he knew suddenly that he was in the wrong of it. “You did not order the bath drawn for them, did you?”

  She shook her head. The small movement made her aware again of the ache at the back of her skull, and she slipped one hand under her nape to massage the area lightly. “I cannot imagine who among your servants would be moved to obey any order that I would give them,” she said a shade wearily.

  Sherry rose from the bed and used the bell pull to ring for a maid. Offering no explanation for his actions, he returned to Lily’s side but this time chose the chair where he’d sat that morning. “So it was the boys who drew the bath for you?”

  “Yes. Pray, do not punish them for it. They did not conceive the idea on their own.”

  “You asked them to do it?” Her slight hesitation led him to the truth. “I think I comprehend what happened,” he said. “You mentioned that you would enjoy a bath, and that was sufficient to stir them to action.”

  Lily’s faint smile confirmed that he had nearly divined how the thing had come about. “I am not certain I told them I would enjoy it, only that I envied them for having had one. They were complaining, you see, that someone named Dunnet was going to give them another proper scrubbing.”

  Sherry chuckled. “Is there anything so onerous to a boy than soap and water?”

  “Even when the boy was you, my lord?”

  Her patent skepticism made his grin deepen. “Never doubt it. In support of your surprise, I will tell you that I do not believe I was ever as dirty behind the ears as the lads are. Nanny Dory would have said they could feed an Irishman for a month with the potatoes they could grow. Her estimation of my own crop was that it would only serve that Irishman a week.”

  Lily did not try to modulate her laughter, though she knew it would set her head throbbing again. Still smiling through her pain, she removed her hand from under her neck and placed it across her eyes, then rubbed her temples with the thumb and middle finger. She heard the door to the bedchamber open and Sherry acknowledge someone’s entry. Lily lifted her hand only that fraction necessary to see who it was.

  “A packet of headache powders,” Sherry told the maid. “If Ponsonby has none, then see that some are purchased from the chemist straightaway.”

  “Yes, m’lord.” She bobbed a curtsey and was gone.

  Lily recognized the maid as the same one who had been moved to call her a baggage only that morning. She was not in expectation of receiving the headache remedy anytime soon. Lily let her hand fall away from her eyes once the maid was gone. She turned her head slightly to better see Lord Sheridan. “It was kind of you to ask for the powders, m’lord, but your servants can only resent such attention paid to me.”

  “What a ridiculous notion.”

  She shrugged.

  “Why do you suggest it?” he asked.

  Lily regretted that she had placed the idea in his mind. Clearly it would not have occurred to him. “Forgive me,” she said. “I should not have done so.”

  Sherry was having none of it. “If there is something you are in want of saying, then say it.”

  “I should not be here, my lord, that is all I meant.”

  “Indeed, you should not,” he said flatly. “You should be dead.”

  “I did not mean—”

  His hand sliced the air, cutting her off. “There is but one reason that I have set you up here and that is for my comfort and convenience. A box bed in the servants hall might have been all that was required for your care, but it would have been deuced disagreeable for me to go there. If there is, as you say, resentment, then it is because I have not acknowledged to anyone that you saved my life, not because you are not deserving of attention.”

  Lily blinked. Her lips parted around a soft expulsion of air. “Oh.”

  He cocked one eyebrow. “Precisely.” He stood then, responding to the scratching at the door, and crossed the room. After accepting delivery of the powders, he carried the packet to the dressing room and mixed the powder with water from the pitcher. Lily was sitting up in bed when he returned to her side. He held out the glass to her. “Drink it quickly before it settles. Every drop.”

  Lily did as she was directed. Th
e bitter taste made her want to gag. She gasped a little, pulling a face as she swallowed the last mouthful.

  Sherry took the glass from her, rinsed it out, and brought another with nothing but water in it. “This will help remove the taste.”

  She accepted it gratefully and drank. He was right; it did help. “Thank you.”

  He nodded and waited for her to drink her fill before he took the glass and set it on the bedside table. “You will rest now?”

  Lily liked that for once he framed his order as a question. She glanced at the clock on the mantel. It was not so very late. If she were serving drinks at the Blue Ruination, the brawling would not yet have begun. “I think I will, yes.” At least for a little while, she thought, until the worst of her headache passed.

  “Good. I will express my wishes that you are not to be disturbed, especially by the young ruffians. I’m of a mind to make them say their prayers this evening. A cleansing on the inside will do them no more harm than one on the—”

  “No!”

  Sherry’s astonishment was not feigned. Lily had thrown off her bedcovers and risen up on her knees. She was all fury and scorn, and it looked to him as if she meant to launch herself in his direction. He raised a hand to stay that precipitous action.

  “You will not!” she said tightly. “I will stick you myself if you approach them about saying their prayers. I swear it.” She edged closer when he did not back away. “Say you believe me. Say you know I will do it.”

  A shutter closed over Sherry’s dark eyes, and a vertical crease appeared between his brows. He stood his ground with his hands open at his side, palms out, careful not to betray himself with any movement that could be perceived as a threat. The violent mood that was upon her was unknown to him outside of an asylum, yet there was a clear intelligence working here that he’d found lacking in the poor creatures at Bedlam. In contrast to those lunatics, Lily seemed to know what she was about. This was the bared-teeth ferocity of a mother protecting her young, of that he was no longer in doubt. What was less clear to him was how he had become a danger to her and, in turn, what danger she might be to him.

  “I believe you,” he said calmly. He watched Lily’s feverishly bright eyes make a narrow study of him. He could not be sure she had even understood his response. She was judging him by the weight of his words, the gravity of his tone, and the manner in which he stood before her, open and clearly without intent to harm. “I know you will do it.”

  She said nothing for a moment but did not relax her posture. “If you would have someone say their prayers, then you will come to me.”

  Sherry judged it the wiser course to agree, but he had no clear understanding of her meaning. Careful not to reveal his confusion, Sherry maintained his neutral expression and nodded.

  “I have already been taught how to pray,” Lily said. “You will not teach the boys.”

  It was odd, Sherry thought, that she no longer spoke of the children saying their prayers but of teaching them to do so. He tried to make sense of the workings of her mind, of why prayer would raise such a fierce and incensed response. He wondered about those ten years she had spent in the care of nuns at the abbey school. L’Abbaye de Sacré Coeur. Had she thrown off all her religious instruction since leaving? He had no understanding of how she had come to London from Paris, and not just any part of London, he reminded himself, but the mean and squalid streets of Holborn. Living there would sorely test the faith of a devout man. Lily must have wondered if she have been abandoned by her Lord.

  “I will leave their instruction to you,” he said, still cautious of his tone.

  Lily sneered. “As if I would instruct them in such. They are better served by pinching pockets than the other.”

  “Very well. It shall be as you wish.”

  It required a second thorough assessment before Lily nodded. She sat back a fraction. “We understand each other, then.”

  “We do,” Sherry lied.

  “Good.”

  Sherry had no familiarity with being dismissed in his own home—even Lady Rivendale and Cybelline were not so bold—but that was his distinct impression of what Lily had just done. Loath to make a retreat with his tail between his legs, Sherry nevertheless understood the wisdom of not provoking her further with his presence. He inclined his head, careful not to mock her with a smile, and bid her good evening.

  It was only when he was safely on the other side of the door that he permitted himself the welcome relief of a steadying breath. Out of the corner of his eye he saw his valet step into the hallway from the servants’ stairs.

  “Is everything all right, my lord?” Kearns inquired as he approached. “If you will permit me to say so, you look as if you’re sickening for something.”

  “Pleurisy.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “I hope it isn’t pleurisy,” Sherry said, collecting himself. “I believe I will have a drink in the library, Kearns.”

  “Very good, sir. I understand the hemlock is of a particularly fine vintage.”

  Sherry did not fox himself on drink, though he had rather more than was his custom. The whisky fogged his mind more than cleared it. Occasionally he would arrive at some idea he considered particularly brilliant, only to discover that he could not hold it long enough to make it the subject of study. Worse, he sometimes realized there were but three ideas and he was simply returning to them.

  He slept for a while in the large wing chair in front of the fireplace. When he stirred it was to find that someone—Lane most likely—had seen to it that a small fire was laid and a rug was placed across his lap. He was not comforted by this coddling of the servants—quite the opposite, in fact. That he was looked after in this way made him feel decades older than his twenty-eight years, well into decrepitude. He should be afforded the same opportunity to suffer the consequences of other young men who drank deep in their cups. There was a certain dignity, he was coming to understand, to being able to make a perfect cake of oneself. He had never done so, but he was fashioning the opinion that it might have something to recommend it.

  When he woke again, he had a most painful crick in his neck. All thoughts of suffering the consequence of drink vanished, and he wondered why no one had thought to put a pillow between his head and the wing of the chair. Rubbing the back of his neck with his palm, his eyes fell on the small fringed pillow on the floor beside him. He smiled ruefully. It seemed someone had thought further to his comfort, and he had been too churlish to accept it.

  “Ahh, you are awake.”

  Sherry blinked as Lily stepped out of the shadowed recess beside the fireplace. He did not have immediate recognition of her voice, but his eyes knew her. The embers backlit her hair and made it glow in a dark copper penumbra about her head. Her features remained largely invisible to him so it was his keen memory of them that drew in the outline of her lush mouth and the exotic tilt of her green eyes. He knew the shape of her cheekbones and the exact distance from the nose to her mouth and from her mouth to her chin. It was a face of perfect proportion and startling symmetry.

  The lingering effects of drink allowed him to acknowledge what he had resisted before: she was easily one of the loveliest women he had ever seen, and he was drawn to her in a way that was outside his experience.

  “I woke and could not find sleep again,” she said quietly. “I see it was not the same for you. You stirred once before. I thought you would rouse yourself then, but you went straightaway to sleep.”

  “The drink helped, I’m sure.”

  She nodded. “Are you still foxed?”

  “I never was. I do not seem to have an intemperate nature.”

  Lily thought he sounded a shade disappointed. “Unlike me.” For want of something to do in the aftermath of this confession, she tightened the sateen sash of the robe she was wearing. She’d found it in the armoire in her room and availed herself of its modest protection when she ventured downstairs. The sleeves were too long and the quilted cuffs lay against the back o
f her fingers. To keep from tripping on the hem, she had tugged the length of the robe upward and secured the extra fabric above the belt. “I hope you will not mind,” she said, “but Midge told me earlier where I would find the library.”

  “You have been here long?” She’d said she had seen him stir before. How many minutes had passed since then? Judging by the stiffness in his neck, he had slept for more than a few.

  “Not so long,” she said vaguely. “I have been reviewing your collection.”

  “A better pastime than watching me sleep.”

  “More edifying, at least.”

  “I should hope so,” he said slowly, uncertain what she’d meant by this last remark. Had she been watching him or not? “Have you made your selection?”

  “I think I would like Delphine.”

  “Madame de Staël?”

  “Yes. That is the one.”

  “Very well. Take it.” He uncurled his legs from their awkward position under the chair and stretched. “It is in the original French, though I suppose that presents no problem for you.”

  “No,” she said softly. “It doesn’t.”

  “Who are you, Lily Rose?”

  “It seems to me you know.”

  “Lily Rose is merely a name, perhaps not even yours. It is not you.” He studied her a moment longer. “I want to know you.”

  “No, you don’t.”

  “Contrary creature. Did I not just say so?” He did not think he mistook her smile for anything but rueful as she turned away. “You must have been a sore trial to the sisters of Sacred Heart.”

  Lily ran her index finger along the shelf where she remembered seeing the novel she wanted. “I possessed that happy talent,” she said idly. “Here it is. Delphine.” She carefully removed the book and cradled it in one arm as she lifted the cover and studied the title page. She glanced over at Sheridan. “Thank you, my lord. It is a great gift to be allowed to read again.”