by Emma Wildes
The other solider had an absorbed interest in the fight, allowing the young Spanish girl to get up and away. She managed to scramble to her feet and run back into the house, clutching her torn clothing. As he dodged a deadly blow aimed right for his groin, Alex was vaguely grateful she was gone and therefore out of harm’s way.
Welsh was relentless and without honor. Alex tried hard not to follow his example.
Neither of them noticed when the girl, a shawl now around her bared shoulders, came back out of the house. The gleam of metal in her raised hands registered only dimly.
By this time they were face to face, and sweating. All around them the city heaved in turmoil, screams piercing the dawn again and again.
The shot came out of nowhere.
Alex felt at first as if he were stuck by some flying object, something that hit him hard and left him breathless. The blood soaking his shirt immediately brought reality crashing down.
Christ. He was shot. He knew the feeling a little too well.
It was bad. He had enough experience to sense that too. His sword clattered to the stones of the street, his whole arm going numb and useless.
Welsh loomed over him as his knees buckled. There was a gloating smile on the officer’s face. “Those stray bullets are hell, aren’t they, Ramsey? I owe someone with bad aim a favor. Well, Colonel”—the words were said softly in the turmoil—“it seems your order is cancelled after all—”
Alex couldn’t have called a warning even if he cared to when he saw the upraised knife in the girl’s hand dive downward and bury itself in the captain’s back. As he watched, Welsh’s expression changed from vindictive to twisted agony and he fell forward screaming, pitching across Alex’s body.
* * * *
The late afternoon sun slanted in the windows and laid quiet patterns across the trim grass of the lawn outside. April in Sussex meant a thickening of green in the countryside, and when Jessica Roweland looked out the window of her dormitory room, she could see tiny white flowers blooming in the tumbled remains of the nearby abbey ruins.
“I fear the yellow does nothing for you.”
With a laugh, Jessica turned from admiring the view and whirled in an exaggerated pirouette. “I was rather thinking that myself. Your brother might not fancy himself marrying someone who just stepped out of a bowl of tropical fruit.”
Rebecca giggled lightly, clapping her hand over her mouth. Her dark eyes shone with amusement. “Nathaniel tends to be a bit picky, it’s true.”
“Then perhaps I should change into a different gown.”
At the open wardrobe, Rebecca fingered several dresses thoughtfully before retrieving a rose silk trimmed with white satin. “Try this one, Jess.”
Quickly, Jessica shook her head and frowned. “That’s one of your new gowns. I don’t recall you even wearing it yet. I accept your older gowns with gratitude but that is enough charity on your part.”
“It isn’t charity.” Rebecca rolled her gaze heavenward. “We’re going to be sisters—real sisters and not just best friends—once you and my brother are married.”
Stepping out of the maligned yellow dress and moving to carefully hang it up, Jessica said, “I still cannot believe it sometimes. Your family has been so kind to me.”
Rebecca gave an unladylike snort at odds with her refined features and gracefully slender form, and tossed back her long, dark hair. “I hardly think Nathaniel would consider it kindness to fall head over heels in love with you. He simply couldn’t help himself. He tells everyone he meets how he is engaged to the loveliest girl on English soil.”
As she reached for her dressing gown, Jessica turned away and drew the soft, worn material over her chemise. References to her looks always made her uneasy, especially in the context of her recent engagement. Nathaniel Greene, Rebecca’s oldest brother, had swept her into a somewhat whirlwind romance that was the height of any young woman’s fantasy. He was handsome, attentive and, above all else, lavish with his compliments and apparent satisfaction over acquiring a wife whose physical beauty pleased him.
Acquiring, Jessica thought wryly as she crossed the room to drop down on the bed. That was the problem. Nathaniel managed his family’s business with shrewd competence. Acquiring was one of his favorite words. She just wasn’t sure she liked it applied to her, though as she had reminded herself often enough, she was indeed a lucky young woman to have captured his interest.
Yet, there was a cloud obscuring her happiness.
She murmured, “You do know I have heard the rumors, Beck.”
Rebecca tried unsuccessfully to look puzzled, her arched brows lifting. “Rumors? Pray what are the gossips whispering about now?”
Plucking at a loose thread on the quilt beneath her, Jessica tried to maintain an idle tone. “Nathaniel has a mistress. Her name is Elizabeth Frey, she’s an actress, and she lives in London…in a house he bought for her.”
Still standing by the wardrobe, Rebecca looked both stricken and vaguely defensive. Her slender hands smoothed the material of her skirt. “The depths some of these petty, jealous chits will stoop to, I mean really—”
“Actually, Robert told me in an unguarded moment the last time I saw him. You know how he is when he’s in his cups, which is often enough.”
Rebecca bit her lip and sank down into the chair next to the dressing table. She sighed. “I’ve heard it too. I don’t know what to say, Jess.”
Jessica propped her chin on her fist. “Do you think it is true?” She could not fathom how to feel about it. On one side of the coin he was a wealthy, handsome young man, and while she wasn’t worldly by any stretch of the imagination, she did know gentlemen were often allowed to do as they pleased while their wives looked the other way.
“I don’t really know.” It was an apologetic admission. “He wouldn’t be the first, would he? It’s just as fashionable for young men to have mistresses as it is for them to tie their cravat in a certain way.”
“What an unfair double standard. I’m sure he fully expects me to be an innocent on our wedding night.”
Instantly Rebecca was up out of her chair and across the room. She flung herself down on the bed and hugged Jessica. “Please don’t be angry with Nathaniel, Jess. He’s older and more experienced, certainly, but what man isn’t? Since you aren’t married yet, I’m sure he is just amusing himself, dreaming of you.”
“Believe me, that’s what I’ve been trying to tell myself, Beck.” Jessica blinked, not willing to show her friend just how deep the betrayal went.
Why was she even surprised, she asked herself, returning Rebecca’s hug. Once upon a time, she had believed in heroes.
But she now knew better. They just didn’t exist. Four years ago she had learned that the hard way.
* * * *
His eyelids were weighted with lead, his mouth full of twisted cotton.
The fire was all around, sending up a licking heat that singed his skin and laid siege to his sanity. Alex fought it, just as he’d fought the French troops for four years, with steely determination and ruthless will. He surged and writhed against that relentless inferno, tearing at the bonds that would keep him engulfed in the flames.
He couldn’t let it win.
But, damn it, he was so very, very tired.
So far he’d survived everything war had to offer. For four aching, terrible years, he’d survived. The blood, the smells, the sightless eyes that haunted his every dream. Cold, hard ground; biting, bitter winter; the rations that crawled with worms. He’d gone without blankets, without food, even without ammunition. Everything.
He’d even survived Albuera, when he thought all was finally lost, and delivered the news to Beresford himself that the battle was against them and Soult was going to be victorious.
Then the English had managed to march on and he’d gone with them.
To Badajoz. And that citadel had fallen.
But this fire was too much. It consumed him.
“Colonel, can you hear me?�
� Cool hands touched his face, fluttering with gentleness against his burning skin.
Alex opened his eyes. They hurt, the eyelids scraping dryly, but then his whole body seemed to hurt. He ached in places he didn’t even know he possessed.
“Colonel Ramsey?”
“Yes.” His voice was raspy, sounding disused. It was a struggle to focus.
A face swam into view. A plain, wide face creased in a frown of concern. A woman’s face, unknown, but kindly. “Praise the Lord, you’re awake.”
“Water,” he croaked. “Of course.”
The cool trickle was like a miracle. He swallowed as much as he could with effort and blinked again. “Where am I?”
She didn’t smile, wearing that same grave expression. “A hospital. Or what passes for one in the ruins of this town.”
“I was wounded.” Images of what had happened hovered just out of reach.
“You could certainly say that. You’ve had the fever for several days. How do you feel?”
“Like hell.” It slipped out and he instantly cleared his throat. “Excuse me, madam. I didn’t mean…that is, I guess I’ve been too long away from home among rough soldiers. Forgive me. My deepest apologies.” His head swam, but he tried to incline it anyway.
Finally, a crease of that somber mouth came. She chuckled. “Please, sir, I believe I’ve heard that and worse in the midst of this army. Though, I do remember enough to appreciate a fine gentleman with fine manners. I am Mrs. Bennet.”
“Captain Bennet’s wife?”
“For many years.” She moved a little, going out of his line of vision. A cool cloth was produced, and she came back to press it against his forehead. It felt like heaven.
“I assure you, Colonel, I have accompanied my husband into many a battle during this awful campaign. My nursing skills have become honed in the saddest of ways. If there is anything you need, please tell me. There are few enough physicians, but one will be through here eventually to look at your wounds and how they are healing.”
In his experience, the surgeons were harried and cynical men, overworked and all too used to death.
“Perhaps I should simply ask you, ma’am, with your experience. What do you think? Are they healing?”
“I think so. Now. Had you been capable of asking yesterday, my answer might have been quite different.”
“Wounds? I suppose that means more than one?” He closed his eyes and simply enjoyed the feel of gentle fingers against his brow.
“The left shoulder is the worst. A little lower you would be conversing with God and not myself. The one in your right thigh is just a flesh wound that needed some stitching, and there was a bullet graze along your right hand that is, at a guess, more painful than crippling. That’s all.”
He murmured, “It feels like quite enough. Tell me, the town…our men?”
“I prefer to not think of it, sir. Some were hanged at Lord Wellington’s orders. That I do know. My husband wouldn’t tell me more.”
He cleared his throat with effort. “I think I can understand why from what little I saw. What’s happening now?”
“After the victory, Colonel, Wellington is pursuing Marmont and pushing on toward Madrid.”
The victory. Satisfied, he drifted away.
* * * *
Alex shifted, reading the letter in his hand. Around him men lay in similar positions, propped on makeshift cots or lying on rough blankets laid on the stone floor, some awake, some moaning, some eerily still and unmoving. He’d gotten used to it quickly enough in his time in Spain and at least he was mending. Too many of them were carried out each day on stretchers draped with sheets.
“Bad news from home, Colonel Ramsey?”
At the deep voice, he looked up. To salute was impossible in his present state, so he simply nodded politely. “General.”
“You were frowning pretty fiercely, Alex.” General Pierson pulled up a camp stool and sat down, wearily stretching out his legs. Portly and middle-aged, he looked tired and a decade older than when Alex had met him a few years before. His red uniform was dusty and splattered with suspicious stains.
Alex smoothed the letter across his bended knee and shook his head. “My brother tries to keep me up to date on family matters—that is when his letters reach me at all. Apparently a neighbor is engaged to be married, that’s all.”
“It seems a far away life, doesn’t it, when such gossip matters?” A weary chuckle escaped Pierson’s lips.
“Yes, sir.”
“You said a neighbor. Can I assume a female neighbor?” One bushy brow lifted as the general asked the question.
Alex laughed but it really had nothing to do with mirth. “As it happens, yes.”
“Young, pretty?”
Affecting carefully cultivated indifference, Alex drawled, “Both. Actually, very pretty. Would I care otherwise?”
Pierson let out a hearty laugh, his thick shoulders quivering. “The officers’ wives will miss you, Ramsey. Their husbands may miss you on the field, but the ladies will miss your handsome face and charm in the camps.”
Alex stiffened. “Miss me? Sir, the—”
“You’re on leave, Colonel. As of this minute. You’ve been wounded in three different battles. You’ve not been home in years, or so I’ve been told. As little as we can spare you, you’re going back to England. This isn’t my decision either. I would selfishly keep you here, but the orders I received from London were very clear.”
Acutely aware of the crisscross of bandages across his bare chest, Alex fell silent. Home. Grayston Hall. Green fields and decent food and clean linens. His mother and her incessant parties. Marcus and Ariel and the children. There was a new nephew he’d never met. Marcus had finally produced a direct heir.
And Jessica Roweland—little Jess—she was now a woman and apparently engaged to be married. A mixed blessing, to be sure.
Quietly, he said, “Thank you, sir.”
Chapter 2
June, 1812 Berkshire, England
The public coach had let her off, and Jessica struggled with her trunk, dragging it behind with effort, feeling it bump her heels.
When she got home Robert was going to get a good tongue-lashing for forgetting her. Despite her letter reminding him of her impending arrival, he’d still neglected to send the carriage, leaving her to have to scramble for transportation on a public coach bound for Berkshire. The journey had been a nightmare. No chaperone, no money for food at their infrequent stops, nothing but her body squeezed between an elderly priest who mumbled and constantly wiped his nose, and a stout farmwife who babbled on about her very large family and smelled rather pungently like a wet chicken.
It had been quite miserable. This was better, even if she had to tug her trunk down the country lane as she trudged toward home. At least the air around her was fresh and clean, and the familiar surroundings were like a balm to her soul. She’d missed everything so much.
She realized that she hadn’t come home in over a year. Of course she’d had her reasons, but maybe that part of it had been her fault.
There had been Rebecca, such a dear friend, supplying companionship that Jessica sorely needed. And Nathaniel, of course. She’d spent every holiday with the Greene family for the past few years, preferring their busy household to rattling around her childhood home. All that was there for her were memories of the parents she’d lost and the hours spent watching Robert drink himself into an early grave.
Nathaniel wanted to marry her soon. He’d asked her brother last Christmas for her hand and was pushing for her to set a date.
Nathaniel, she thought pensively. With the dark, brooding good looks of a poet. Tall, athletic, every woman’s dream.
Or at least close to that dream. The whispers about Elizabeth Frey were a bit of disillusionment. She very much wanted to dismiss them as not being true.
The light evening wind ruffled her hair and cooled her face. Her hand began to get sore from lugging the weight of her baggage and she stopped to shi
ft her trunk, flexing her aching fingers as she started forward again.
She hadn’t heard anything from her brother recently, which was not an ominous sign because Robert was a horrible correspondent, except she was sure that he would write if some word had come of Alex Ramsey.
Alex Ramsey. Why did she have to think of him?
Not that she cared if Alex fell to a French bullet, she’d told herself often enough in the past four years. She’d been wrong about him her whole life, assigning him the role of gallant, taken in even as a child by his patent charm. In retrospect, with the hindsight of an adult, she knew now his casual and offhand kindness she’d misinterpreted as affection, and she, starved by the death of her parents and Robert’s self-absorption, had ridiculously built a vision of the man that did not exist.
Especially as the truth had been very much shoved in her face that night long ago, shattering her illusion into a thousand fragments.
He was a flagrant rake. A womanizer of the worst kind, insensitive and unrepentant. The kind of man who would dally with another man’s wife at his own going-away party thrown by his mother.
She once had idolized him. Now she loathed him.
Not in the four years since she’d seen him had she forgotten it, and Nathaniel’s indiscretions brought the whole ugly gamut of feelings back up to the surface, like poison weeping from a half-healed but still infected wound. Even Robert leaving her stranded didn’t smart like that old memory of betrayal.
