Ross stopped speaking, too troubled to continue. Any mention of Eleanor was unbearably difficult and private. Yet he did not want to withhold any part of his past from Sophia.
“What happened?” she whispered.
Ross felt something unlocking in his head. All his rigid self-control seemed to have dissolved. He began to tell her the things he had never confessed to anyone—he found it impossible to hold anything back from her.
“The day her labor pains began, I knew that something was wrong. Eleanor didn’t bear the pain well. She became too weak to push. The labor lasted twenty-four hours, and as the second day began… God, it was a hellish nightmare. I sent for more doctors, and all four of them argued about what should be done for my wife. She was in hideous pain—she begged me to help her. I would have done anything. Anything.” He wasn’t aware that his fists were clenched until he felt Sophia’s hands rub softly over the backs of them, soothing the knotted muscles and cords. “The only thing the doctors could agree on was that the baby was too large. I had to make a choice… Of course I told them to save Eleanor… but that meant they had to—” He broke off, his breath catching. It was impossible for him to tell her what they had done next. There were no words. “There was so much blood. Eleanor screamed and begged me to stop them. She wanted to die, give the baby a chance to live, but I couldn’t let her go. And so they both…” Ross paused and fought to control his choppy breathing.
There was no movement or sound from Sophia. He thought that he had disgusted her, had said too much. She must be horrified.
“I made the wrong choice,” he muttered. “They both died because of it.” The coolness of the room, so enjoyable before, now made him shiver. He was numb, sick, frozen.
The cloth was removed from his forehead, and Sophia stroked his face. “It wasn’t your fault,” she said. “Surely you know that.”
Clearly, she didn’t understand the whole of the story. Ross tried to make her see the depth of his selfishness. “I shouldn’t have married Eleanor. She would still be alive if I had left her alone.”
“You don’t know that for certain. But if that is true, and you had never married her, what would her life have been like? Cocooned, kept away from the world, unfulfilled, unloved.” Sophia drew the covers higher around him and went to fetch a blanket from the bottom drawer of the dresser. She laid the weight of the quilted fabric over him and resumed her seat by the bed. “You did not force Eleanor to marry you. I am certain that she understood the chance she was taking. But the risk was worth it to Eleanor, because for the time that you were married, she was happy and loved. She lived as she wished to. Surely she would not wish you to blame yourself for what happened.”
“It does not matter that she wouldn’t have blamed me,” he said gruffly. “I know where the fault lies—directly with me.”
“Naturally you would think so,” came Sophia’s wry response. “You seem to believe that you are omnipotent, and that everything good and bad should be attributed to you. How difficult it must be for you to accept that some things are simply beyond your influence.”
Her tender mockery was curiously comforting. As Ross stared into her eyes, he was conscious of an encroaching sense of relief. Although he didn’t want to accept the feeling, he couldn’t quite dismiss it.
“You are just a man, after all,” she added. “Not some godlike being.”
Just a man.
Of course he knew that. However, it wasn’t until this moment that Ross acknowledged the burden he had felt to convince the entire world otherwise. He had done everything humanly possible to prove that he was invulnerable, and for the most part, he had succeeded. It was nearly a requirement of his position. People wanted to believe that the Chief Magistrate of Bow Street was all-powerful; they wanted to know that while they rested in their beds at night, he was working ceaselessly to protect them. And for years Ross had lived in isolation as a result. No one truly knew or understood him. But for the first time in his adult life, he had found someone who did not regard him with awe. She treated him as if he were an ordinary man.
Sophia left the bedside and moved about the room, quietly straightening articles on the washstand, folding discarded cloths and towels. Ross watched her with predatory intensity, thinking of what he would do to her, with her, when he had recovered his strength. Surely she had no idea about the turn of his thoughts, or she would not be quite so calm.
Chapter 8
“You are a terrible patient,” Sophia exclaimed when she saw that Ross was dressed and out of bed. “Dr. Linley said that you should stay abed at least another day.”“He doesn’t know everything,” Ross replied, working his feet into his shoes.
“Neither do you!” Exasperated and worried, she followed his movements as he went to his dresser and searched in the top drawer for a fresh cravat. “What are you planning to do?”
“I’m going to my office for an hour or so.”
“No doubt you’ll spend the entire day working!” In the past four days since Ross had been shot, it had been increasingly difficult for Sophia to make him rest. As his strength returned and his shoulder mended, he wanted to resume his usual breakneck pace. To keep him still, Sophia had brought piles of paperwork from his office, and had taken reams of notes while he dictated in bed, or in a chair by the hearth. She had served his meals and spent hours reading to him. Often she watched over him while he dozed, her gaze taking in every detail of his sleep-softened face, the way his hair tumbled onto his forehead, the relaxed lines of his mouth.
Sophia had become familiar with his scent, how his throat moved when he drank his coffee, the dense texture of his muscles beneath her fingers as she changed his wound dressing. The bristle of his jaw before he shaved. The rusty catch of his laughter, as if he were not used to making the sound. The way his black hair sprang in unruly waves before he brushed them smooth each morning. The way he surprised her with kisses when she collected his tray or straightened the pillows behind him… kisses like dark, sweet conspiracies, his hands gripping her with gentle insistence.
And instead of denying him, she responded with abandon.
To Sophia’s shame, she had begun to have lurid fantasies about him. One night she had dreamed that she climbed into Ross’s bed and laid her na*ed body full-length against his. She had awakened to discover that her sheets were damp with perspiration, her heart was thumping, and the place between her legs was alive with sensation. For the first time in her life, she had put her fingers to that throbbing peak and stroked gently. Delight shot through her loins as she imagined that Ross was touching her again, his mouth tugging at her breast, his fingers working skillfully between her thighs. Steeped in shame and guilt, she continued to stimulate herself, discovering that the more she rubbed, the sharper the pleasure became, until it ended in a wash of heat that drew a shaken moan from her lips.
Rolling onto her stomach, Sophia lay there dazed and puzzled. The feeling ebbed and her body became pleasantly heavy, and she wondered how she could face Ross the next day. She had never known such a feeling, a physical need that was alarming in its urgency.
In addition to her sexual attraction to Ross, Sophia felt an inescapable liking for him. She was fascinated by the quirks of his character. When confronted with an unpleasant duty, he did not try to avoid it, but instead threw himself into it with singular determination. Duty meant everything to him. If called on to wear a hair shirt for the sake of his dependents, he would have donned one without question.
She was amused by the fact that although Ross never lied, he shaded the truth to suit his purposes. If he ever raised his voice, for example, he asserted that he was not shouting but being “emphatic.” He denied being stubborn and instead described himself as “firm.” Neither was he dominating, only “decisive.” Sophia laughed outright at his claims and discovered, to her delight, that he was not certain how to react. He was not a man whom anyone dared to tease, and Sophia sensed his cautious enjoyment of her baiting.
As they talked in the quiet evening hours, Sophia had shared the few memories she had of her own childhood: the feel of her father’s whiskers when he had kissed her good night… a family picnic… the stories her mother had read to her. And the time when she and her little brother had mixed water into her mother’s face powder and played with the paste, and how they had been sent to bed without supper.
Ross was able to draw more confessions from her despite her effort to hold them back. Before she quite realized it, she had found herself telling him about the months after her parents’ death, when she and John had run wild in the village. “We were horrible little fiends,” she had said, sitting in the bedside chair with her knees curled up and her arms locked around them. “We played nasty tricks, and vandalized shops and homes, and stole…” She paused and rubbed her forehead to ease a sudden pinching ache.
“What did you steal?”
“Food, mostly. We were always hungry. The families that tried to look after us did not have much to spare. When our behavior became too wicked to tolerate, they washed their hands of us.” She hugged her knees more tightly. “It was my fault. John was too young to know better, but there was no excuse for my behavior. I should have guided him, taken care of him…”
“You were a child.” Ross spoke with apparent carefulness, as if he understood the weight of the guilt that threatened to crush her. “It wasn’t your fault.”
She smiled without humor, not accepting the consolation.
“Sophia,” he asked quietly, “how did John die?”
She stiffened as she fought the temptation to tell him. That deep, soft voice was asking for the key to her soul. And if she gave it to him, he would scorn and punish her, and she would shrivel into nothing.
Rather than answer him, she had laughed unsteadily and invented some excuse to leave the room.
Now, as Ross extracted a dark silk cravat from the dresser, Sophia’s thoughts were forced back to the present. The fact that Ross had taken it upon himself to leave his sickbed provided her with a welcome distraction, and she pounced on it eagerly.
“You will overtax yourself and collapse,” she predicted. “And you will get no sympathy from me. You should heed the doctor’s advice and rest!”
Standing before the looking glass, Ross tied the cravat with a slight wince of discomfort. “I’m not going to collapse,” he said evenly. “But I have to leave this room, or I will go mad.” His silvery gaze met hers in the reflective glass. “There is only one way you will get me back into that bed—and I don’t think you are ready for that yet.”
Sophia looked away from him immediately, turning hot with embarrassment. It was a sign of how familiar they had become, that he would acknowledge his desire for her so openly. “You must at least have some breakfast,” she said. “I will go to the kitchen and make certain that Eliza has boiled the coffee.”
“Thank you.” The corners of his lips tilted in a wry smile, and he finished knotting his cravat with a deft tug.
Later that morning Sophia filed reports and depositions in the criminal records room while Ross conducted meetings in his office. Straightening the piles of paper before her, Sophia sighed despondently. During the first month of her employment, she had begun to copy information that she believed would be damaging to the Bow Street office and all who worked there. Most of it concerned mistakes that a few runners and constables had made, from procedural errors to mishandling of evidence. Ross had chosen to discipline the men privately, as the last thing the public office needed was a potentially ruinous scandal.
Sophia knew she had to gather much more information if she wanted sufficient ammunition to destroy Ross and his runners. For the past three weeks, however, she had done nothing to further her goal. To her self-disgust, she did not have the heart for it. She no longer wanted to hurt Ross. She despised herself for her own weakness, but she could not bring herself to betray him. She had come to care deeply about him despite her efforts to avoid it. Which meant that her poor brother’s death would never be answered with justice, and his short life would therefore have no meaning at all.
Gloomily Sophia sorted through files until Ernest appeared suddenly and interrupted her labors. “Miss Sydney, Sir Ross wants ye.”
She stared at the errand boy with immediate worry. “Why?”
“I don’t know, miss.”
“Where is Sir Ross? Is he all right?”
“ ‘E’s in ’is office, miss.” The boy left in his customary haste, off to perform more errands.
Sophia’s stomach flipped with anxiety as she wondered if Ross had pushed himself too hard. It was possible that he had somehow ruptured his wound, or succumbed to fever once more, or exhausted himself with too much activity. She went to the office in a headlong rush, ignoring the startled faces of barristers and clerks she pushed by in the narrow hallway.
The door to the Chief Magistrate’s office was open. Sophia crossed the threshold with swift strides. Ross was sitting at his desk, looking pale and a bit tired, his gaze lifting as he saw her. “Sophia, what—”
“I knew it was too soon for you to go back to work!” she exclaimed as she reached him. Impulsively she put her hands on him, feeling his forehead, the sides of his face. “Do you have fever? What is the matter? Has your shoulder started to bleed again, or is it—”
“Sophia,” he interrupted. His large hands wrapped around hers, his thumbs nestling in her soft palms. A reassuring smile touched his lips. “I’m fine. There is no need for concern.”
She stared at him closely, ascertaining for herself that he was all right. “Then why did you send for me?” she asked, bewildered.
Ross’s gaze moved to a point beyond her shoulder. To Sophia’s sudden consternation, she realized that they were not alone. Twisting, she glanced behind her and saw that Sir Grant was seated in the large leather visitor’s chair. The giant was watching the pair of them with startled interest. Sophia snatched her hands away from Ross’s and closed her eyes in humiliation.
“I’m sorry,” she muttered, wishing she could somehow disappear. “I—I overstepped my bounds, Sir Ross. Forgive me.”
He grinned at her embarrassment and spoke to Sir Grant. “Morgan, I have something to discuss with Miss Sydney.”
“Apparently so,” came Morgan’s dry rejoinder. He bowed briefly, his green eyes twinkling as he glanced at Sophia. The door closed behind him.