Clearly Jack was shaken, and after five months, a few hours wasn’t going to make a damned lot of difference. He didn’t have many friends, and he valued Jack as the closest among them. “Fine.”
“Thank you. Now, have you and Kero eaten?” Jack asked, turning to face them for the fifth time since they’d entered the house. “No, I don’t suppose you have. You’ll eat anything, I know, but what does she prefer?”
Just short of the closed doors to the drawing room, Bennett stopped again. “How the devil do you know Kero’s name?”
Jack frowned. “How do you think I know? And be forewarned, we’re reading the book tonight. I know it’s been out for weeks, but I…Well, I figured I shouldn’t be the last one to know what exactly happened to you. Even though it apparently didn’t. Happen, I mean.”
Shaking his head and beginning to wonder if the brief meal he’d eaten hours ago in Bristol had been poisoned and he was actually at this moment chained to the floor of some room in Bedlam, Bennett swallowed his frustration and growing annoyance and walked behind Jack into the drawing room. He could be patient and mostly pleasant for a few minutes. He stopped in his tracks. Or not.
“—isn’t a misuse of the word ‘savagery,’ Flip,” a hatchet-faced woman with a dress up practically to her chin was saying. “Three people were murdered. That is savage.”
Nearly two dozen people, mostly female, sat about the drawing room, all of them with open books in their hands. Several of them were mumbling to one another, while closer to the door a younger man and woman made eyes at each other over the books’ spines. So now he’d moved from Bedlam to some sort of lending library of the insane.
“I have to disagree, Wilhelmina,” a sweet voice said from the left half of the room, somewhere he couldn’t quite see. He liked the sound of the voice, though it might have been because he hadn’t heard a cultured female accent in over three years. That said, the Wilhelmina chit hadn’t stirred him in the slightest—though that might have been due to the excessive chin ruffles.
Chestnut hair beneath a blue hat came into view for a moment, then vanished as the wide fellow on the sofa shifted. Bennett took a step sideways, trying to get her into view again.
“Savagery implies the use of more force than is strictly necessary,” she continued. “In this instance, Captain Wolfe had to kill those three men or his party would have been discovered and attacked. And he had to do it silently. Hence the knife and the spear. That is not savagery. It is practicality.”
He agreed with that. Savagery was more a matter of perspective and circumstance than most people seemed to think. Again, though, that was something that could await contemplation until later—except that no one should have known that he’d faced down three men with a knife and a spear. That had happened nearly a year ago, and he’d been back in London for less than an hour. “What are you playing at?” he asked Jack in a low voice. “And who is—”
A pretty blond-haired girl with large brown eyes stood. “Who is your very handsome friend, John?” she cooed, smiling.
Ah now, that chit was worth a bit of distraction. Before he could respond, though, Jack took him by the arm and led him into the center of the room. Bennett didn’t like that; it was hardly a defensible position. With a scowl, he pulled free of the grip.
Jack cleared his throat. “Friends, fellow reading club members, this is my friend, Captain Sir Bennett Wolfe. The news of his death was evidently premature.”
In as coordinated a move as he’d ever seen from anyone other than the military, the members of Jack’s book club launched to their feet. Roaring, chattering, even one shriek—good God, they looked like a pack of baboons—they surged toward him. Christ. He’d seen baboons in concert take down a leopard. Kero screeched and leapt onto the nearest shelf. For a moment he contemplated joining her there.
He’d been mobbed before by admiring readers, and he’d taken advantage of more than one female who found his books and the adventures therein heroic and arousing. But this was not fun. He’d returned too recently, and he’d been away for too long. He backed up—and knocked squarely into someone, sending her to the floor.
Bennett turned around. The chestnut-haired chit. Immediately he reached a hand down, gripping her fingers, and hauled her back to her feet. The pretty brown eyes that gazed at him made her the other lady’s relation—a sister, most likely—but the similarity ended there. Where the other one had been tall and willowy and blond and stunning, she was more petite, and more…curved. Not fat, but she had a bit of meat on her bones. As though she enjoyed the taste of food.
For some reason he found that compelling. Of course he had quite an appetite himself. And not just for food. “You smell like lemons,” he said, wanting to hear her speak again.
Lady Phillipa Eddison pulled her fingers free from the large, well-built man looking down at her and attempted to settle her nerves. “Thank you,” she replied, hoping he’d just handed her a compliment.
An instant later she frowned, then had to wipe that expression away. Thank you. Was that what one said upon first meeting a famous explorer, a man whose work she admired and a man who, until recently—until two minutes ago, actually—had been deceased?
“You’re Bennett Wolfe,” she continued. Oh, good heavens. Shut up, Flip.
“I am,” he agreed.
She looked at him again, harder. No one, Captain Wolfe included, had ever spent many words describing him, but she imagined that this man looked very much like a famous explorer should. Tall he was, but it wasn’t only that. He wasn’t fat at all, but he still appeared…mountainous. Broad-shouldered, clearly well-muscled even beneath what looked like a very well-used brown jacket and some sort of buckskin trousers and leather-looking boots.
With skin darkened by sunlight brighter than that found in England and eyes of deep, perfect, emerald, he seemed to radiate power. Confidence. And it abruptly didn’t surprise her that this man could have taken on three native warriors and defeated them with a knife and a spear.
A shiver of warmth ran up her spine. Bennett Wolfe. It couldn’t be he, and yet she knew it was. The man who had explored a good part of eastern Africa, Egypt, and now the Congo. Dusky hair of uncertain length that looked as though it had been combed through by, well, by a monkey, a long gait, and that air of utter self-possession. He couldn’t be anyone else but himself.
“The last time Bennett Wolfe was in London I was only seventeen,” she heard herself say. For a fleeting moment she wished her sister, Olivia, would walk up behind her and smack her in the head before she could say something even more idiotic.
“The last time Bennett Wolfe was in London I was only twenty-six,” he commented, ignoring the questions—some of them not very polite—being put to him by the club’s other members.
“I mean to say, I wasn’t out yet, and that’s why we haven’t met. Until now, of course.” She’d regretted that ever since, and especially in the five months since she’d learned of his death. A man of the Renaissance—well-educated, well-spoken, able to write very eloquently and to speak several languages. A man of science and of the arts. She swallowed. Her hero, in a manner of speaking. After all, she’d read both of his books numerous times, and even this last one, authored by David Langley but at least discussing Bennett Wolfe, had graced her bed stand for the month since it had been published. And that was despite her skepticism over some of the passages.
Phillipa shook herself. The man himself was standing there, looking at her. And now she was babbling at him like an utter Bedlamite. This was not the intellectual, scientific conversation she’d imagined having with Bennett Wolfe if they’d ever chanced to meet. “I’m reading your book. I mean, the new book. We all are. Reading it.”
A furrow appeared between his eyebrows. “What new b—”
John abruptly appeared between them, making her jump. “Bennett, I see you’ve met Flip. Lady Phillipa Eddison, Captain Sir Bennett Wolfe.”
The captain inclined his head. He still didn’t seem
to note that anyone else remained in the room at all. “Phillipa.”
The sound made her shiver again. She was fully aware that she had one of the least romantic-sounding names in history, with the possible exception of poor Wilhelmina, and she’d rather liked not being thought of as flighty and frilly before anyone actually met her. But she also liked the way he’d said her name, even if he hadn’t addressed her properly—as though a kiss went along with it.
“Flip’s something of a scholar where you’re concerned, you know,” John went on. “She even understood that complicated twaddle you went into in your Serengeti book about longer daylight in the equatorial regions equaling more plant growth.”
“Did she now?” Captain Wolfe said smoothly, his gaze still on her. He held out one hand. “May I have a look at the book you’re all reading?”
“Bennett, join me in the library for a moment, why don’t you?” John broke in again.
“No.” Green eyes didn’t shift away from her for so much as a second.
“I have something I need to—”
“No.”
Phillipa hesitated, stopped more by the tight look that John had assumed than by the fact that the book was precious to her and she didn’t want to give it up, even to the man it most concerned. Well, with the exception of Captain Langley, of course. Squaring her shoulders, she set the book in his hand. Their fingers brushed, and another slight shiver went up her spine, as it had when he’d first picked her up off the floor. This was, of course, her first time meeting a dead man. A very large, vital, warm-skinned dead man.
He held her gaze for another beat, then finally he lowered his head to look at the book. His sun- darkened complexion lightened by several shades, and his fingers clenched around the book so hard that she could see the whites of his knuckles.
“Across the Continent: Adventures in the Congo,” he read in a hard, dark voice. “By David Langley? That damned fool couldn’t put two words tog—”
“Into the library, Bennett. Now.”
She’d never heard Lord John speak so forcefully. Even with that, it took Captain Wolfe a moment before he turned on his heel and led the way out of the room, John on his heels, the monkey back on his shoulder, and her book still clenched in his hand.
In the doorway John stopped to look back at the crowd still standing around them. “My apologies, everyone. We’ll have to end our meeting a bit early tonight.”
Whatever was afoot, and as much time as she’d spent imagining herself adventuring alongside Bennett Wolfe and David Langley, for a moment she was glad to be someone else entirely. Clearly something was wrong. More wrong, even, than Captain Wolfe being thought deceased.
“Flip, can you believe it?” her sister asked as she finally emerged from the chattering crowd. “Bennett Wolfe! And to think, I almost didn’t let you talk me into joining you here tonight.”
Phillipa eyed her statuesque, willowy, blond, preternaturally lovely older sister. “As I recall, Olivia, you wanted to come because Lady Emery has a new pianoforte. You kicked me in the ankle when John announced we wouldn’t be meeting in the music room.”
Olivia flipped a hand at her. “Oh, that hardly signifies. We were here. We witnessed Captain Wolfe’s return.” Livi clasped her fingers together and danced up onto her toes. “And the rest of these people don’t know anyone significant, so we’ll be the first to tell, oh, just everyone!”
“John and his parents are significant,” Phillipa reminded her. “More importantly, John is Captain Wolfe’s dear friend.”
“Yes, yes, that’s true!” Olivia did another little prancing step that she managed to make look elegant and impetuous all at the same time. “You know, I’m going to invite John to my picnic on Thursday. And I’ll make certain he knows that the captain is to join us. After all, Captain Wolfe hasn’t been in London for a very long time, and he’s certain to want to make new acquaintances.”
“A picnic. After braving the dangers of Africa? He’d expire from boredom, Livi.”
“If you don’t like it, then you needn’t join us, Flip.”
Of course she would attend the picnic. For one thing, she rather wanted to have an intellectual discussion with Captain Wolfe that didn’t involve her sounding like someone who’d been kicked in the head by a horse. The most exciting bit of information for her, beyond the news of his return, would be the knowledge of whether he planned to write a book of his own about his and Langley’s Congo experiences. Which brought her to another point. Captain Wolfe still had her book. And she wanted it back.
Chapter Two
I had thought the eastern savannahs of Africa rife with thorns, but there they were at least visible—every edible plant, covered. Here in the jungle, however, thorns are more insidious. They hide along tender-looking vines and are imbedded in soft-looking tree barks and their protruding roots, prickling and poking with reckless abandon. Damned annoying things.
THE JOURNALS OF CAPTAIN BENNETT WOLFE
Now calm yourself, Bennett,” Jack said, closing the library door behind them and then striding to the bottle of scotch sitting on the worktable. “I waited three weeks after the thing was published before I even purchased a volume. Nearly everyone else has read it by now. As I said, I didn’t want to be the last man in London to know what had happened to you.”
Bennett noted Jack’s quick-paced confession only marginally. Mainly he glared at the book in his hands and willed it to vanish amid the smell of sulfur-scented smoke. Damned Langley. Now he needed to open it and look, even though the crawling of his skin already told him what lay inside.
“So I apologize for purchasing something that doesn’t characterize you as you deserve,” Jack continued, “but you honestly can’t blame me for my interest.”
A glass of amber-colored liquid appeared before his face. Good scotch—the only kind the Marquis of Emery ever allowed under his roof. Bennett took the glass and downed it in one burning swallow.
“See, there you are. Not so bad after all, eh?”
“Shut up for a bloody minute, will you, Jack? You chatter more than the monkey, and make less sense.”
“Oh. Very well, then.”
Bennett paced to the window and back again, then once more. Finally, grinding his jaw hard enough to flatten his teeth, he opened the leather-bound cover. For a heartbeat, hope touched him. A foreword from his uncle, Lord Fennington. Perhaps somewhere Langley had acquired a bit of literary acumen and a soul, and he’d managed to keep his eye on task long enough to write down the tale of his experiences in the Congo.
But then he turned to the first chapter. And there it was. Hope ground into burning dust and blew away. He cursed, not even certain which language he was speaking. Whatever it was, Jack took a step away from him.
“What is it?” his friend finally asked.
“You didn’t happen to notice a certain similarity in style between my books and this bloody thing?” he growled. He flipped through more pages, seeing sketches, translations, maps—all his. Except that someone else’s name was printed all over them.
“A similarity? I suppose so. It’s a book about adventure and exploration, and you’re in it. What—”
“I wrote it. This”—and he slammed the book closed—“is mine.” Snapping his arm forward, he hurled the book through the library window. Glass shattered, raining into the air and glinting red in the light from the fireplace. Kero screeched again, practically climbing onto the top of his head.
“Damnation!” Jack ran to the window, leaning outside. “What the devil was that for?”
“I’m angry.”
“I see that. Thank God you didn’t kill anyone,” the marquis’s son commented, facing into the room again. “And now you have to purchase Flip another edition. She was quite fond of that book.”
“Generally I find you fairly amusing,” Bennett snapped back, “but I worked for three years to put that ‘edition’ together. My journals, my observations, my conclusions.”
“But how—”
<
br /> “How do you think? Langley stole the lot of it.” Kero patted him on the cheek, no doubt attempting to reassure him. He rolled his shoulders, giving her tail a gentle tug. None of this was her fault, at least.
Pouring himself another glass of scotch, Jack sat heavily in one of the hearth chairs. A second later the library door slammed open. “My lord,” the butler said, an alarmed expression on his face. “I heard something break. Do you require assistance?”
“There’s a book down in the garden,” Jack re turned. “Please have someone retrieve it for me. And we’ll need to have the window replaced.”
The butler nodded. “I’ll see to it at once, my lord.”
As soon as the door closed again, Jack took another drink. “I hope you understand,” he said, “this is a great deal for me to take in this evening. An hour ago I thought you were dead, and now you’re both alive and the victim of some sort of thievery involving the most popular book in England.”
“You think I’m lying?” Bennett narrowed his eyes. He’d never been a patient man, and tonight he felt stretched beyond all tolerance. “I may have had a spear through my middle, but all of my wits survived.”
“But are you certain? According to the book, you were delirious, and you both knew you wouldn’t survive. It was quite touching. You insisted that Captain Langley take the few surviving notes and sketches you had, so that your journey would have some meaning. Langley sat by your bedside in a filthy jungle hut until you stopped breathing, and then he made the heartrending decision to return to England alone.”
“That is a cartload of horseshit.”
Jack sat silently for a long moment. “If you say your journals were stolen, then I believe you. But read the book, Bennett. Because I don’t think it’s anything you would have written.”
The Care and Taming of a Rogue Page 2