Phoebe slowed, chest heaving, eyes on the place where the gunman had disappeared, the whip still raised high.
Lewis ran past her, into the darkness, and the sight of him snapped her out of the strange world she had inhabited for a few moments.
She turned, and found Wittaker getting slowly to his feet, his gaze on her.
“That was…” He cleared his throat.
“Loud?” She gave a choking laugh, and lowered her arm.
“How I image Boudica looked when she faced down the Romans.” He took a step closer to her. “It was magnificent.”
She shook her head, and her gaze snapped back to the side street at the sound of footsteps. “I never realized I could be such a banshee.”
Lewis emerged into the light. “Gone,” he said.
“Thank you, Lewis.” She turned back to Wittaker. “His Grace has been shot. We need to get him into the house.”
Wittaker lifted his arm, and winced. “I don’t think it’s very serious.”
She ignored him and slipped an arm around his back.
“Lewis, I kicked one of that rogue’s guns into the street. Could you retrieve it?”
As Lewis stepped into the road, searching for it, Wittaker bent his head.
“I can support myself perfectly well.” The heat of his breath brushed her ear.
“I know. I just…” She drew a deep breath, drawing the scent of him into her lungs, and decided on the truth, for once. “I need to touch you. My brain seems to require it to prove to me that you are alive and mostly fine.” She looked away from him, to where Lewis was bending down to pick something up.
Wittaker drew her a little closer. “I’m very happy to oblige. And honored to have your regard.”
She looked up at him, startled. “Well, of course you do.”
As Lewis walked toward them, a gun dangling from his fingers, Wittaker straightened, but his hand tightened its hold on her shoulder and she thought, for the first time, he relaxed against her.
Chapter Twenty-four
Miss Hillier’s butler was a man of many talents, James noted.
He’d gone ahead of them as Miss Hillier helped James back to the house, and by the time she’d ushered him into the library, Lewis was ready with bandages, salve and hot water.
“I’ve informed your aunt you are well, and will be up to see her shortly.” Lewis arranged his medical supplies on a low table by the fire, and James noticed he was careful to keep his eyes from where Miss Hillier stood, with her arm still around him.
He felt the loss of her warmth as mention of her aunt made her pull abruptly away. No doubt exactly the effect Lewis had been going for.
“Aunt Dorothy.” Miss Hillier looked upward at the ceiling, as if her aunt might be right above her, watching. “I completely forgot…”
“If you would leave us for a few minutes, my lady, perhaps go and reassure your aunt, I will make sure the wound is dressed.” Lewis couldn’t quite keep the satisfaction from his voice.
She frowned at the butler, as if she heard it, too, and stepped close to James again. Instead of putting her arm around him, though, she peered at his blood-stained sleeve. “I think we need a doctor.”
Lewis set the cloth he was holding down. “I promise you I can do it just as well.”
They both looked at James for a decision.
He found he very much did not want a doctor. Not only would it stir up even more trouble for Miss Hillier, but a doctor could be followed home and coerced or bribed. He didn’t want anyone knowing how slight his injury was.
Better they think him badly hurt and less of a threat.
“You know what you’re doing?” he asked Lewis. There was something competent about Miss Hillier’s man that James trusted.
“I was a stretcher bearer in the American Revolutionary War, Your Grace. I’ve treated many shot wounds in my time.”
“All right, then.”
Miss Hillier looked hard at Lewis. “You’ll let me know if it’s worse than you think?”
Lewis nodded, and she gave James a last, worried look before she walked from the room, closing the door softly behind her to give them privacy.
Lewis pulled out a footstool for James to sit on, and helped him out of his coat and jacket. They both looked at his left sleeve. It was dark with blood, already hardened almost to black, and the shirt was stuck fast to his skin.
Lewis took a sponge and dribbled warm water over the wound, loosening the fabric until he could lift it from his arm without it pulling.
He eased the ruined shirt over James’s shoulders, and James saw the bullet had only grazed him, a shallow groove that ran across his upper arm. It would be painful and annoying, but if treated correctly, it wouldn’t slow him down.
“This is the second disturbing incident involving strange attackers at Home House in two days, Your Grace.” Lewis kept his gaze on his work as he sponged the blood away. “You wouldn’t happen to know anything about it?”
The question was respectfully asked, but James knew Lewis was tense, waiting for some set-down for his impertinence.
“I know a fair bit, actually.” He watched Lewis take some salve off the table and stiffened at the sting as he applied it to the open wound.
It would be useful to have an ally here, someone who obviously knew how to handle himself and who would keep a watchful eye.
Not that he planned to leave Miss Hillier to her own devices after tonight’s débâcle.
“Lord Sheldrake was involved in something illegal.”
Lewis nearly dropped the roll of bandages he was holding. “I knew this would somehow come back to that blackguard.”
James leaned back and lifted his arm as Lewis began to bandage him. “You didn’t trust him?”
“Looked the place over like a pawnshop owner.” Lewis shut his mouth with a click, as if he realized he was walking a dangerous line, talking disrespectfully about a marquess to a duke.
“I can imagine.” James kept his tone dry. “I can’t tell you what the scheme he was involved in was, but I think some of his associates believe he sent something important to Miss Hillier for safe keeping, or at the least, mentioned some of his illegal plans to her.”
“That letter from Sheldrake…on Tuesday. The morning you first came calling.” Lewis paused, almost done with the bandaging. “Miss Hillier was attacked that very evening.”
“Quite.” James waited for him to tie the bandage firmly in place and looked down at the neat job. “Thank you, Lewis.” He eyed his ruined shirt and decided not to put it on. “Might I ask you to send a footman to my house to fetch me a change of clothes?”
Lewis frowned. “You want to stay here?”
James rose, every muscle aching from his roll on the hard cobbles, and stood beside the fire in just his trousers and boots. “I find I can’t leave Miss Hillier alone after what happened this evening. That bullet was aimed at her. If I hadn’t swung her down with both hands, if I had helped her out in the usual way…” He clenched a hand on the mantlepiece and forced himself back under control. “I could sleep in here. These French doors are the obvious choice if they want to break in.”
Lewis gathered up the things he’d brought in on a tray, his posture stiff.
“You don’t approve? I won’t go anywhere near Miss Hillier’s bedroom.” James wanted to be annoyed at the man, but found it surprisingly hard.
“It’s not for me to say, Your Grace.” Lewis’s voice was over-polite.
James waited until Lewis was looking at him. “You have a very definite opinion about it. One I respect you enough to hear. Let’s have it.”
Lewis hesitated, then blew out a breath. “The look of it, Your Grace. Because of the betrothal being broken, there is already so much trouble for her.” He set the tray back on the table. “I’ll sleep in here. And I’ll have one of the footmen sleep on the landing. She’ll be protected.”
James hesitated. The need to protect Miss Hillier was a compulsion he found difficult to s
hake. The silence stretched out as Lewis waited for him to answer.
The fire crackled and the scent of apple wood teased his nose. Lewis shifted and the highly polished leather shoes on his feet creaked.
James sighed. “Very well.”
Lewis gave a satisfied nod as he walked toward the door, tray in hand. “I’ll find a shirt for you to wear home, Your Grace.”
James was left in silence, and lulled by the warm glow of the fire he leant against the wall with his good shoulder, suddenly drained.
A noise at the door forced him to look up, and Miss Hillier stood just inside the room. She seemed strangely fixed in place.
James looked down and realized he was still in nothing but his trousers and boots.
“I’m…” She cleared her throat. “I should have knocked. My apologies.” She spun, hand reaching for the handle.
“Wait.”
She stopped. Turned slowly back, her gaze fixed carefully on his boots.
He wanted to break through to her. There was something shimmering in her eyes, something just out of his reach and he wanted to force it out, shake her out of her shell. “What happened to the woman who invited me into her bed chamber in her night shift? The woman who went into my arms this afternoon?”
Her gaze flew up to his. “That was…different.” She clasped her hands in front of her and brought them up between her breasts. “I didn’t know you so well, then.”
He gave a low chuckle. “Surely that should have made the invitation less likely, not more so?”
She let her hands fall to her sides. “I trusted…” She looked away, a flush building on her cheeks.
He frowned. “You trusted me then, but now you do not?” The pain of that was worse than the stinging groove the bullet had carved into his skin.
She shook her head, looking him in the eye again. “No. Everything you’ve done since I’ve met you has increased my trust in you. It is myself I no longer trust.”
She stood quite still, head bowed, and he found his feet also cemented in place.
Very slowly she raised her head again. “I am that woman who invited you to climb up to her bedroom window. Who pressed herself against you in the garden. And I know…” Her eyes were on his chest, and the look in them made him push off the wall.
She took a step back at his sudden movement, and he stilled so as not to startle her again.
She caught his gaze with hers. “I know there are things I haven’t experienced. Things I want to explore which I have been unable to. And you will think me most unladylike, but I find, after tonight, I am no longer considered a lady, and I was only grudgingly assigned that designation before. So I will be honest with you, Your Grace. If you would like it…” Her voice went down an octave, “I would welcome you as my lover.”
He knew he must look like a man hit once too many times in the boxing ring.
He had wanted to break through to her, to uncover the part of herself that he’d sensed was just below the surface, out of his reach. He had never expected an invitation to her inner-most sanctum.
She looked at his body again and blushed. “After you are recovered from your injury, of course. And you have completed your work for the Crown.” Her last words tumbled over each other in a rush.
James wanted to laugh at her belated attempt to work in a little time for herself to get used to the idea, or for him to back out of it.
He wanted to tell her how dangerous it was to offer herself to a man with that kind of look in her eyes.
And, Fairbanks was right. He wanted to take her up against the wall.
“My lady?” Lewis stood in the doorway, just behind her, a crisp white shirt in his hand. “Everything all right?”
She seemed to come out of the moment with a blink. “I think so.” She glanced at him nervously and he sent her a slow smile.
“Everything is most definitely all right.”
Chapter Twenty-five
Wittaker’s chest was now covered in a white shirt Lewis had borrowed from one of the footmen, but even sitting with a man in shirt sleeves was scandalous.
Phoebe shrugged off the thought. What was one more scandalous action in a day of them?
She took a sip of the hot tea Lewis had provided and tried to repress the shiver she felt at being so close to him in such an intimate setting.
“Cold?”
She looked up to find Wittaker watching at her intently from his place by the fire. He had the gun Lewis had retrieved from the street in his hands.
She shook her head, but she did lean closer to the flames. She didn’t want him to know how much he could affect her.
She groped for a subject. “If you hadn’t swung me out of the coach, if you’d just taken my hand and helped me down, I might be dead.”
He moved toward her and sat down in the arm chair opposite, placing the attacker’s pistol on the table beside the chair. “I would say it was luck, or chance, but it was neither.” He looked down at the tea that had been poured for him and pushed the cup away. “Why did you look that way, in the carriage? Like I had hurt you?”
She forced herself to meet his eyes. She couldn’t keep looking away. Hiding herself. “It felt wrong, the way you were acting. It wasn’t you, but it was, and it made me upset.” She shrugged. “It was silly of me, I know. You were only doing what you had to do. But it wasn’t real.”
He stared at her for a long time, until eventually she was unable to sit still. She rose up and went to the sideboard, and brought back a crystal decanter of brandy and a glass, instead of the tea he so obviously didn’t want.
“It certainly felt that way. For a long time. That nothing was quite real.” He spoke quietly as he poured himself a small amount of amber liquid. “But no one noticed, including me.”
“What changed?” She leaned back in the chair and watched as he drank the brandy in a single swallow, at the way his throat worked, and the glimpse of skin she could see revealed by his unbuttoned shirt.
“It will sound mad, but I hired a chef.” He quirked a smile. He still held the crystal glass in his hand, and he tipped it this way and that, so the light of the fire danced rainbows over the wall. “He forced me to be present. To be honest. And then he came to me for help, and I almost failed him. All because I was so busy pretending to be someone else, I’d forgotten what I was doing it for.”
She couldn’t tell from his face how the incident he was talking about affected him, but his hand shook a little as he set his glass down.
“So you stopped pretending, and now you’re having to force yourself to pretend again?” She was sorry his father was not still alive, so she could flay him for what he’d done to his son.
He shrugged. “I know now I can’t do the work any longer, even if there was a need beyond this current affair with the Prime Minister. I don’t have the patience for it. And I find I have other…interests.”
He looked up at her, and for a beat the offer she had made him, and his clear acceptance of that offer, lay in the air between them, sensuous as the feel of silk against skin.
She shifted, not sure whether to run or stay, and he slid from his chair onto his knees and was suddenly in front of her, cupping her face in his hands.
“Shhh.” He glanced at the door. “I am going to kiss you. It will not be for as long as I would like because Lewis will only leave us alone for ten minutes at most at a time, self-appointed guard dog that he is.” He slid his hands deep into her hair, and tilted her head. “We can taste each other, to begin with.” The words were whispered against her lips, and then his mouth was on hers.
She had imagined being kissed.
Even when he could have done so, Sheldrake had not kissed her, and she had been worryingly relieved about it, even though she had yearned for the touch of a man’s hands, a man’s lips, on her. Had been impatient for it, as she saw her contemporaries married off, some seemingly in loving relationships.
She had known then that her marriage would neither be happy, nor fulfill
ing.
It had not made the yearning inside her, the wish for something more, any easier to bear. Every year that passed, she felt a growing frustration, a deep-seated need for a physical release she barely understood, but desperately wanted to discover.
But now, under Wittaker’s hands, she felt wonder and a warmth blooming inside her, and she arched closer to him, her own hands coming up to rest on the strong column of his neck, to slide up to caress the outer shell of his ears as his tongue tasted her.
She made a sound of delight, and he wrenched back from her, a flush on his cheeks. His hands trembled as he raised them again and brought them up to rest on either side of her face.
“I’m sorry. I have to stop now.” His voice was at least an octave lower. He cleared his throat and pushed away, back into his chair.
When he looked at her again, his eyes were burning so hot, she felt their touch on her like a second fire in the room.
And still, she shivered.
“Tomorrow…” He cleared his throat again, slid clenched hands along his thighs. “Tomorrow I’ll send some of the men who work for me to watch your house.”
“What will you be doing?” She took his attempt at distraction gratefully.
“There is only one day left until Bellingham’s trial if Gibbs continues on the course he’s set, and I learned some things today which I need to pursue.”
“I would rather go with you than stay at home.” She saw his face, his almost automatic refusal, but she would not be at the mercy of fate any longer. She’d just had her first, heady taste of what it felt like to take control of her own desires, and she loved it.
“Send your men to watch anyway, to see who may try against me again, but if I’m not at home, I’ll be even safer. We can surely get me out of the house and into your carriage without being seen tomorrow. I know I might not be able to accompany you to every place you need to go, but I can wait in the carriage where I can’t join you, and surely I’ll be safer there? You’re going to pretend to be recovering from your wounds at home, aren’t you? So whoever is watching us will think both of us are at home.”
A Dangerous Madness Page 13