Her hope of a quick escape was dashed as he caught her wrist, and she couldn’t help her sudden wince of pain. The skinny old vicar had been rougher than she realized.
Brandon immediately released her, his thunderous look made more menacing with his half-ruined face. “Did he hurt you?” There was danger there, which startled her. The sweet, broken soldier in the hospital, the lost boy fighting addictions and evil companions in his brother’s house—this was a far cry from those very different incarnations of Brandon Rohan. This man was cold, strong and dangerous.
She lied, of course. “Heavens, no. I hurt my wrist yesterday. Just being clumsy, I imagine. If you’ll excuse me, Lord Brandon. . .” she said, edging away.
This time he didn’t stop her. “Certainly, Mrs. Cadbury.”
“I don’t expect we shall see each other again,” she said stiffly, pleased with herself.
“Don’t you? You may have your expectations dashed.”
She jerked her head up, startled by his enigmatic statement, but there was no answer she could make. “Well. . .good evening,” she said hurriedly, awkwardly, and walked away from him so quickly it was close to a run. He probably thought she was extremely odd, but that was of little consequence. As long as she didn’t see him again she’d be safe.
She wasn’t going to consider why she thought he was dangerous. True, he looked immensely strong compared to the frail invalid she’d seen before, but he’d been a charming, gentle man back when he hadn’t even known who he was. The return of his memory, even the depredations of the Heavenly Host, couldn’t change someone that much, could they? But there’d been that moment of inchoate rage when he suspected that the vicar had hurt her.
She wasn’t going to think about him, she told herself sternly. She would never see him again. The well-planned shrubbery closed about her, putting her out of his view, and she breathed a sigh of relief as she raced on.
Chapter 4
Brandon watched her run away from him, her dull gray skirts flying, her dark hair coming loose. She was moving as if the devil were at her heels, which shouldn’t surprise him. To her he was a stranger, a scarred, ferocious former soldier who loomed over her, manhandled her as that bastard Trowbridge had.
She thought she’d escaped him, and if he had any sense at all he’d let it be, and he was, after all, a sensible man.
He could control his bodily urges, and the good widow up in the Highlands would take him gladly and ask for nothing but pleasure in return. He could close his eyes, pretend that her red hair was a silky black, that her eyes were cool and gray and then stormy as he … . . .
Hell and damnation! He had no business fantasizing about his brother’s mysterious houseguest in such a way. He waited another minute, long enough for his inconvenient hard-on to subside, and then started back to the house, trying to keep his gait even. His leg was killing him, but he had no intention of giving in to the pain, of showing any sign of weakness. He had something important to do, and he had learned from Noonan and the harsh Scottish weather never to accept any limitations. He quickened his pace with no sign of his inner grimace and went in search of the good Mr. Trowbridge.
Instead he found his older brother bearing down on him, and the dream of exacting punishment vanished. It was time to atone for his sins, and he squared his shoulders, waiting.
Everything would have gone according to plan, Emma thought, if she’d been able to sleep. It was such a simple, biological act that so many people took for granted, and it was constantly denied her. In her studies at Temple Hospital she’d done some research on the mysteries of sleep, and she had a fairly good understanding of why it eluded her.
She’d been so young when she’d first arrived in London. Fifteen years old, with no more than a sixpence tucked in her shoe, she’d managed a ride with a farm cart that had deposited her down by the docks just at dusk. It had seemed like the greatest good fortune when the grandmotherly woman had taken one look at her, recognized a lost soul, and brought her home to her fancy house. There had been other young girls there, laughing, chattering, brightly dressed, but they hadn’t spoken to her, eyeing her with a kind of pity as they went about their toilette, and Emma, exhausted and frightened, didn’t stop to wonder what kind of place she was in. She’d been given a bath and a flimsy night robe, a warm drink, then tucked into a huge, luxurious bed, where she’d immediately dropped into the last safe sleep of her life.
Only to be awakened an hour later by pawing hands and laughing voices and pain and terror as she was passed from man to man, her virgin’s blood staining the soft linen sheets beneath her. She’d been drugged, she realized, and she’d been unable to fight them, unable to say a word, slowly letting the numbness take over. She’d learned to love that numbness, anything that would take her mind away from what her body was doing.
Unfortunately, understanding why she couldn’t sleep didn’t end the problem. She should be done with it by now, she’d told herself on numerous occasions as she’d walked the floors during those endless hours between dusk and dawn. The situation had been exacerbated by the profession she found herself in—blood and death were seldom conducive to restful sleep, even if she managed to save many of her patients.
The women were the most painful to her, slashed, strangled, maimed in horrifying ways by their customers. Emma had no illusions—she was no better than any of them. By the time she’d taken control of Mother Howe’s house at the tender age of twenty, sharing in the profits and the running of the place with the other women, she’d discovered that even on nights when the house was shuttered she still couldn’t sleep. Every time she closed her eyes she’d feel the hands pawing at her, the voices taunting her, feel the pain between her legs.
Some of her friends had learned to like it, but she never had. Some of her customers had been kinder than others, but she never grew accustomed to their possession of her body, the smell, the rutting noises they made. She tolerated some men, hated others, but as far as she could tell the only decent man alive in this world today was Melisande’s devoted husband Benedick.
That explained why she was wide awake in his household at three in the morning when everyone else was safely asleep. What it didn’t explain was why she was wanting Brandon Rohan’s hand on her arm once again.
The covers were on the floor, and she kicked them out of the way with her cold, bare feet. She’d forgotten to bring slippers, and her toes were freezing. Of course, she couldn’t sleep with cold feet, she reminded herself. What she needed was a warm brick and a not-too-exciting book. Those two remedies had always proven marginally successful, at least, and she knew from past visits how to acquire both things without bothering the servants. Benedick’s study was always unlocked, and he had any number of boring tomes. Bricks were in the kitchen, and she was self-sufficient enough to warm one herself—she didn’t need one of the harried maids to lose what little sleep they had just to wait on her.
She knew full well that laudanum would have done the trick. She had never serviced a man without the blessed, dulling effects of the drug, and more than anyone she’d understood Brandon’s craving when he’d been so lost. But it was vicious stuff, one needed more and more, and it had cost more than one young woman her life. Young Meggy’s death had changed everything—Emma had taken over the brothel, now floundering under the haphazard direction of Mother Howard’s truculent sister, and personally thrown all the laudanum into the filthy waters of the Thames. There would be some happy fish, she thought cynically, watching it dissolve. There would be unhappy women back at the house, including herself.
They’d gotten through it, all of them working together, and even if she stayed awake for weeks on end she would never touch the stuff again. She handled it and opium often enough in the hospital, and she viewed it impassively. She knew what it could and couldn’t do, how it felt, but by some unexpected grace she no longer wanted it. She avoided alcohol as well, just to be safe, but nights like this, when she hadn’t slept for what seemed like centuries, she found herself wishing she could try it.
Perhaps she could deal with the precipitous reappearance of Brandon Rohan the same way she’d dealt with the laudanum. Not by drowning him in the Thames, she thought with a quiet laugh, but simply by forswearing any time with him, any thought about him. Sooner or later the cravings would cease, wouldn’t they?
Cravings? What an absurd word for her strange affinity for the man. She’d worked it all out in her brain during the last three years—her quiet relationship with the broken young soldier had been untainted by the lif
e she had led. They hadn’t known anything about each other—he had forgotten everything, and she had chosen not to share. He called her Harpy, she’d called him “sir” in defiantly polite tones that belied the warmth of the connection they were forming. It had been like she was a child again, her relationship clean and simple, everything a possibility.
But it had been an illusion, a dream, and there was no way she could ever live that life again. Her world at the hospital was dark and squalid, enemies and obstruction all around her, but at least there she was helping. She simply had to keep at it and put the dream of Brandon out of her mind.
The night was silent. The sprawling country house wasn’t quite full, though Melisande had assembled a respectable house party to celebrate Alexandra’s christening. Emma knew most of them, and there wasn’t a ramshackle member in the bunch. No one would be wandering around in the wee hours, getting up to mischief. They’d all been here before, and they’d been well behaved. She’d be fine if she slipped out of her room in the middle of the night.