“He did save me.” Beatrice looked down at her slippers. Lord Hope’s sanity was the very subject she’d been grappling with when Uncle Reggie had interrupted her. “Perhaps he was merely confused by the suddenness of the events. Perhaps he spoke in haste when he talked of Indians.”
“Or perhaps he’s mad.” Uncle Reggie’s voice softened at her look. “I know he saved your life, and don’t think I’m not grateful the bastard risked his life for you. But is it safe to have him in the house? What if he wakes one morning and decides I’m an Indian—or you?”
“He seems sane otherwise.”
“Does he, Bea?”
“Yes. Mostly anyway.” Beatrice sat in the chair before her worktable and bit her lip. “I don’t think he’d ever hurt me or you, Uncle, truly, no matter his state of mind.”
“Humph. I don’t know if I share your optimism.” Uncle Reggie wandered over and peered at her work. “Ah, you’ve started a new project. What is it?”
“Aunt Mary’s old prayer book.”
He gently touched a finger to the disassembled book. “I well remember how she used to carry it to church in the country. It belonged to her great-great-grandmother, you know.”
“I remember her telling me,” Beatrice said softly. “The cover was quite worn through, the spine had cracked, and the pages were coming loose from the stitching. I thought to restitch it and then rebind it in a blue calfskin. It’ll be good as new.”
He nodded. “She would’ve liked that. It’s good of you to take such care of her things.”
Beatrice looked at her hands, remembering Aunt Mary’s kind blue eyes, the softness of her cheeks, and the way she used to laugh full-throatedly. Their household had never been the same without her. Since Aunt Mary’s death, Uncle Reggie had become a less-humorous man, more prone to quick judgments, less able to understand or sympathize with other people’s intentions.
“I enjoy it,” she said. “I only wish she were here to see the result.”
“As do I, m’dear, as do I.” He patted the pages once more and then moved away from her table. “I think I must send him away, Bea, for your safety.”
She sighed, knowing they’d returned to the subject of Lord Hope. “He doesn’t present any danger to me.”
“Bea,” Uncle Reggie said gently, “I know you like to put things to rights, but some things can’t be fixed, and I’m afraid a man this wild is one of them.”
Beatrice set her lips stubbornly. “I think we must consider how it’ll appear if we toss him out of Blanchard House and he regains the title. He won’t look favorably on us.”
Uncle Reggie stiffened. “He won’t get the title—I won’t let him.”
“But, Uncle—”
“No, I’m firm on this, Bea,” he said with the sternness he rarely showed her. “I’ll not let that madman take our home from us. I vowed to your aunt Mary that I’d provide for you properly, and I intend to do so. I’ll agree to let him stay here, but only so I can keep an eye on him and gather proof that he’s not fit for the title.”
And with that, he closed the door to her room firmly.
Beatrice looked down at Aunt Mary’s prayer book. If she didn’t do something, there soon would be bloodshed in her house. Uncle Reggie was adamant, but perhaps she could make Lord Hope see that her uncle was only a stubborn old man.
“UNCLE REGGIE COULDN’T possibly have sent someone to kill you,” Miss Corning said for the third or possibly fourth time. “I’m telling you that you don’t know him. He’s really the sweetest thing imaginable.”
“Maybe to you,” Reynaud replied as he sharpened his long knife, “but you’re not the one displacing him from a title—and monies—he thought were his.”
He examined her from under his eyebrows. Did she think him a madman? Was she afraid to be in his company? What had she thought of his actions just hours before?
But despite his watchfulness, all he saw was irritation on Miss Corning’s face.
“You’re not listening to me.” She paced from the window of his bedroom to where he sat on the edge of the bed and stood before him, arms akimbo like a cook scolding the butcher’s boy. “Even if Uncle Reggie wanted to kill you—which, as I keep telling you, he never would—he’d not be stupid enough to stage an assassination in front of his own house.”
“My house,” Reynaud growled. She’d been haranguing him for the last half hour and showed no signs of stopping.
“You,” Miss Corning stated through gritted teeth, “are impossible.”
“No, I am correct,” he answered. “And you simply don’t want to acknowledge the fact that your uncle may not be nearly as sweet as you think.”
“I—” she began again, her tone indicating she might very well continue the argument until doomsday.
But Reynaud had had enough. He threw aside the knife and whetstone and rose from the bed, nearly in her face. “Besides, if you really did consider me impossible, you would never have kissed me.”
She skittered back, and he felt a spear of rage shoot through him. She should not fear him. It wasn’t right.
Then her lush mouth parted in what looked like outrage. For a moment she couldn’t speak, and then she burst out, “It was you who kissed me!”
He took a step toward her. She took a step back. He stalked her silently across the room, waiting for fear to turn her eyes dark. Hadn’t she realized what he’d shouted, out there by the carriage?
Didn’t she know he was mad?
He bent over her, leaning down until the wisps of hair near her ear brushed his lips, inhaling the scent of sweet English flowers. “You returned the kiss; don’t think I didn’t notice.”
And he had. Her soft lips had opened beneath his for just a fraction of a second before he’d turned and run toward the wounded footman. That kiss would be burned in his memory forever. He angled his head and looked into her eyes.
Instead of going dark with fear, they were snapping with green sparks. “I thought you were about to die!”
Foolish girl.
“Tell yourself that if it assuages your delicate sensibilities,” he murmured, “but the fact remains that you. Kissed. Me.”
“What an arrogant thing to say,” she whispered.
“Granted.” He inhaled. Her skin smelled clean and womanly, with that hint of a flowery soap that Indian women never had. It was a nostalgic scent for him, conjuring the memory of other civilized women he’d once known—his mother, his sister, forgotten young girls he’d squired to balls long ago. She smelled of England itself, and for some reason he found the thought unbearably arousing and at the same time utterly frightening. She had no defenses against him.
He no longer belonged in her world. “But did you enjoy the kiss?”
“And if I did?” she whispered.
He brushed his lips—softly, delicately—against her jaw. “Then I pity you. You should run screaming from me. Can’t you see the monster I am?”
She looked up at him with brave clear gray eyes. “You’re not a monster.”
He closed his eyes, not wanting to see her face, not wanting to take advantage of that purity. “You don’t know me. You don’t know what I’ve done.”
“Then tell me,” she said urgently. “What happened in the Colonies? Where have you been for seven years?”
“No.” Brown eyes stared up through a mask of blood. He was too late. He pushed away from her, afraid she’d see the demons laughing behind his eyes.
“Why not?” she called. “Why can’t you tell me? I can never understand you until I’ve heard what happened to you.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” he snapped. “There’s no need for you to understand me.”
She threw her hands in the air. “You’re impossible!”
“And we are back where we started.” He sighed.
She frowned at him, her gray eyes sparking with displeasure as she tapped one small foot. “Very well,” she said at last, “I’ll lay aside the matter of your past for now, but you can’t ignore the fact that someone tried to kill you today.”
“I’m not.” He turned and gathered the knife, whetstone, and the piece of leather he’d been using to sharpen the knife. “I don’t think it’s any of your concern.”
“How can it not be my concern?” she demanded. “I was there. I saw that third shot. The first two might have been random, but the third was most definitely aimed at you.”
“And again, I say that this is none of your business.”
He stowed the whetstone and leather in the top of a chest of drawers, but he hung the knife at his waist. He’d had it for seven long years, used it to butcher deer and bear, and once, years ago now, he’d killed a man with it. The knife wasn’t a friend—he had no emotional attachment to it—but it had served him well, and he felt safer, more whole, with it at his side.
He looked curiously at Miss Corning, still standing by the bed across the room. “Why do you persist?”
“Because I care,” she said, “no matter how much you try to hold me at arm’s length, I still can’t help but care. And because I am the only one who might get you to understand that Uncle Reggie had nothing to do with the shooting. Think: If it wasn’t Uncle Reggie, then someone else has tried to kill you.”
“And who do you think that might be?”
“I don’t know.” She hugged her waist and shivered. “Do you?”
He frowned down at the top of the chest of drawers. It held only a basin and a pitcher of water—nothing like the furniture that’d been in his old rooms in this house. But then again it was richly appointed compared to the wigwams he’d lived in for many years. For a brief moment, he felt dizzy with displacement. Did he belong anywhere anymore? The demons surged forward to take control.
Then he shook his head, shoving them back. “Vale said he’d been looking for the traitor for a year now. He’s obsessed with the search. And he said the traitor had a French mother. My mother was French.”
“Would Lord Vale have you killed if he thought you the traitor?”
Reynaud remembered the man he’d known, a laughing man, a friend to everyone he met. That Vale would never have done such a thing, but then again, that Vale was from the past. Would Vale kill him if he thought he’d betrayed the regiment at Spinner’s Falls? A man might change in many ways in seven years, but could Vale turn into a killer of friends?
“No.” He answered his own silent question. “No, Jasper would never do that.”
“Then who would?” she asked quietly. “If another of the survivors of the massacre thought you were the traitor, would they kill you?”
“I don’t know.” He frowned, thinking, and then shook his head in frustration. “I don’t even know who survived the massacre besides Vale and a man called Samuel Hartley.” Dammit! He wished he could call on Vale for help, but after yesterday afternoon, it seemed impossible. “I don’t know who to trust.”
He looked at her, the full realization dawning on him. “I’m not sure there is anyone I can trust.”
“THEY SAY THE bullet came within inches of his face,” the Duke of Lister drawled, cradling a goblet of wine between his large pale hands.
“At least that close.” Blanchard frowned. “There was blood on his cheek. Although I think that was from a splinter striking him.”
“Pity it wasn’t closer,” Hasselthorpe said as he swirled the wine in his glass. The burgundy liquid was so dark it was nearly black. Like a glass of blood. He set it down on the table beside his chair in sudden distaste. “Had the bullet smashed his skull, you, Lord Blanchard, would have no fear for your title.”