She fought them, but they came over and over, harsh tearing noises. She hated the sound. She couldn’t bear the pressure of holding them in any longer. She dropped to her knees and she cried in front of Porter. She never cried. Ever.
After a while, she could breathe again. She dried the tears and mucus from her face with her sleeve. Drawing deep breaths, trying to steady herself, she leaned back against the wall and stuck her chilled, aching legs out before her.
Something landed in her lap. She looked down to spy a large square of white linen. Fine. She would ruin his handkerchief instead. She picked it up and blew her nose with great energy. Then she offered it back.
“Consider it yours,” Porter said dryly.
Attie folded her arms and gazed at the man who had ruined her life. He sat opposite her, even to his extended legs and folded arms. The lantern sat just outside the door, casting a glow inside but not lighting either of them directly. Attie was grudgingly grateful for that. He’d heard her sobs, but that was somehow less humiliating than being watched.
She lifted her chin. Might as well get it over with. “You’re supposed to be the one with the musket ball in you.”
Ren found himself gazing with great sympathy at the little monster. He knew what it was like to fear losing everyone. It broke his heart that she had been pushed to this point. No child should ever have to take life and death into their own hands. It didn’t help that when filthy and rumpled, she looked more like Callie than ever, though there were already signs that the child would someday be a vastly more beautiful woman than either of her sisters.
If the rotten little beast lived that long.
He ought to leave her here and send one of her Worthington clan to fetch her. He knew nothing of children. Then again, he was fairly certain that Atalanta Worthington only bore a passing resemblance to a normal child. Good Lord, the names these people pinned on their unsuspecting offspring.
“‘Attie’ doesn’t suit you. I believe I shall call you ‘Rattie.’”
The look of horror on her face was laughable. “You will not!”
Ren gazed contemplatively at the ceiling. “Rattie, you tried to murder me. I believe that gives me the right to call you whatever I wish.”
She struggled with that for a long moment. As he suspected, she felt terrible about injuring her sister. On the other hand, she seemed to have no regrets about him, other than that she had missed the shot.
“Your family came to Amberdell looking for you.”
She looked away, sullen to the core.
“Your mother is very upset.”
Sullen stare. Sniffle.
Ren was very tired. He’d had a long and terrifying day. If he thought he would survive unscathed, he would toss the pint-sized murderess over his shoulder and cart her back to the bosom of her bedlamite kin.
Callie loved this beastly little person. Callie would want her miniature dignity preserved, he was sure. So, although he’d hardly spoken to a soul in years, it was up to him to coax the malicious urchin home.
“I killed a man once. I sent his own pike through his eye.”
He found himself impaled by her glinting eyes. Right. Blood and gore got her undivided attention.
“Of course, that was after he’d already killed me.”
She sent him a disbelieving sneer.
Ren poked a finger at the shoulder of his surcoat, right above the starburst of the entry-wound scar. “He drove it right through me first. I wrenched it out and turned it about. I sent it right through his thick skull.” He still occasionally relived the sickening sound of that blow, but he kept that detail to himself. “Then I died.”
“You didn’t die.”
Ren met her gaze. “I died. Then I was resurrected by some well-meaning bastard doctor.”
“Doctors are idiots.”
Ren snorted to hear Callie’s derisive remark mimicked in such lilting childish tones. “So I hear.”
“Then you lived in spite of everything.”
“No. I stayed almost dead for many weeks. Months, really. I don’t exactly know. I was somewhere else.”
Now he had her. “Where were you?”
“I can’t describe it.” He’d never tried, not to anyone. “It was dark and cold. So cold I was always numb. I liked being numb.”
Attie nodded. “Numb is better than…”
Better than feeling the pain of killing a beloved sister.
“Then I woke up and I wasn’t numb anymore. I was deeply upset about that. Then I found a mirror. There was further upset, as you can imagine.”
She nodded again. “You look like a doll I had once. Cas and Poll burned her in the dining room fire and Ellie tried to fix her with wax and paper pulp. She looked like hell.”
Ren nodded. It was a fair assessment. “Does my face frighten you?”
The child shot him a contemptuous glare. “Nothing frightens me. You just make me angry.”
“Because I took Callie away.”
“Calliope. Only family calls her ‘Callie.’”
“I’m family now. I’m her husband. That makes me your brother.” Dear Lord, was he really admitting that out loud?
She looked as horrified as he felt. “You are not! You’re … you’re nothing—nothing but Porter!”
Ren let out a long breath, gazing wearily at his brand-new little sister. “Rattie and Ren, sitting in a pile of sheep shit in the middle of nowhere, in the middle of the night. If I weren’t your brother, would I be here now, with you?”
She gaped at him like a fish, but it was obvious she had no proper argument to that.
He went on. “I told you that story so that you would know that you are not the first person to try to kill me. Forget about trying. It doesn’t take. But my vast experience has taught me not to take certain things personally. I won’t hold it against you—unless you upset Callie further with your self-important tomfoolery.”
Ren stood and brushed the malodorous straw from his trousers.
“Rattie, your family is worried about you and I’m bloody sick of this hut. If I can forgive you, it stands to reason that your parents and your siblings can see their way clear to doing so, as well. So get your bony little arse up on that gluttonous gelding and let us go back to the manor. I miss Callie. I want to see that she’s well.” When she didn’t move, he glared menacingly and pointed at the door. “Go. Now.”
She went, grabbing up the lantern on her way out. Ren was still congratulating himself on his firm hand when she kicked his horse into a trot and left him standing next to the sheep hut, in the dark.
Worthingtons!
Chapter 35
Halfway between sleep and waking, Callie tried to roll over and stretch in her usual manner. First, she felt a nauseating agony shoot through her midriff. Second, nothing happened. She didn’t move. She could feel her toes, wiggle them, hear them brush against the linens, but she had not the strength in her body to sit up.
Invalid.
She closed her eyes. “Bloody idiot doctors,” she hissed to herself in the dark. “I don’t believe a word of it.”
She heard a creak, then a step, then the light of a candle flared. She opened her eyes to see Ren leaning over the fire. He straightened, shielding the candle glare with his hand. “Callie?”
She tried to be brave but her body screamed. A sob escaped her. He came closer and set down the candle on a side table. She watched him pick up a bottle and a spoon.
“The laudanum will ease the pain,” he murmured.
She didn’t like the stuff, but she couldn’t bear the agony spiking through her. Opening her mouth, she took a spoonful of the sickly-sweet stuff. Forcing herself to swallow, she dug her fingers into the bedcovers, willing it to work quickly.
“I’ve had the strangest day,” Ren said conversationally.
Callie couldn’t hold back a disbelieving snort, though it made her catch her breath with pain. “Do … tell.”
“It all started when I went for a walk this morning
…”
As she listened to his deep voice, speaking so calmly, in such ordinary tones about her falling at his feet with a musket ball in her, about the doctor cutting the ball from her back, about his grim prediction—“but, as you and yours always say, doctors are idiots”—then, astonishingly, about her family and Attie’s disappearance.
Callie stirred. “Attie’s missing?”
Ren stroked her cheek reassuringly. “Attie is downstairs this very moment, ridding us all of the burden of too much cake. I would have insisted she bathe first, but I’ve completely lost control of my own house.”
Callie frowned. The laudanum was beginning to make the world blur about the edges. “But where did she go? How did she get here?”
She listened as Ren told her a ridiculous story about Attie and a musket and a sheep shit—er, no, it was a shed. A sheep shed. She wouldn’t have believed it at all—except it sounded precisely like something Attie would do. Furthermore, she’d never known Ren to exaggerate. That, apparently, was strictly a Worthington trait.
“So it was you who found her?”
Ren smoothed her grip on his hand. “It wasn’t terribly hard. I just had to imagine where I would go if I were a short, female, homicidal maniac.”
But Callie shushed him. “You found her and you made her come back? No one can make Attie do anything. Not without firepower.”
Ren kissed her forehead. “Callie, I didn’t stuff her in a sack and throw it over the back of my saddle, if that’s what you’re asking. In fact, I didn’t bring her back. She left me there in the pasture without my horse. It would have been a bloody long walk home if Dade hadn’t come back for me.”
Callie smiled. “You and Dade are getting on, then?”
“Hmm. We’ve agreed upon a mutually distant détente. I still think he’s an obnoxious prig, but having met the twins, I find myself sympathizing.”
Callie snuggled her face into his palm. She was feeling deliciously warm. “Cas and Poll are so creative,” she said dreamily. “Raising those two fiends was a bloody nightmare.”
“You should sleep.” He made as if to stand.
“No.” She grabbed his hand tightly. “Talk to me. It helps.”
“You should rest, Callie.”
She glared at him. “One pearl, one command.” She cast a glance at the little bowl on the dressing table. Six left.
His expression quizzically amused, he settled back into his seat. “Command?”
“Question,” she amended. “Six pearls, six questions.”
“Then will you rest?”
“Absolutely.” She rather thought she wasn’t to have much choice in the matter. The laudanum had seeped into her very bones, rendering them deliciously limp.
“Question number one. Who is that Simon fellow?”
He rubbed a hand over his face. “I cannot say.”
“Then I shall begin for you.” Callie raised a brow and recited the facts already known to her. “He is Sir Simon Raines. He found you and sent you to Amberdell, wounded and scarred, so obviously he feels some responsibility for that. His wife is Agatha Raines, who is quite concerned about my intentions toward Mr. Button.”
Ren’s lips twisted. “Button? Hmm.”
“Sir Simon brought the Royal Handful along to the ball—”
Ren frowned. “The who?”
“Didn’t you notice them? The big man, like a Viking, and those two blond beauties—Sir Simon, of course—and that hawk-faced man.”
Ren drew back. “I’d heard stories … but—”
“And I’m beginning to think some of the hired staff weren’t really servants,” Callie went on. “They didn’t seem the slightest bit taken aback by a flaming hell-bird in the center of the ballroom. Then again, Mama always says that ex-soldiers make the best butlers. Trial by fire, she claims.”
Ren blinked. She’d put all the clues together, clues he’d been too self-involved to notice until it was almost too late.
“And I know I’ve seen that big cook somewhere before … but I fear my mind is fuzzing over…”
Ren put his hand over hers. “Callie, stop.” What she’d deduced on her own could endanger her life! If she kept on with her questions, if the wrong party overheard—
So he told her. All of it, from the beginning when he’d been recruited at a gaming hell by an old schoolmate who knew his family was gone. The training, the missions—not the specifics, of course—the feeling of being part of something larger than himself, something important.
And then, the betrayal. His covert alias had been revealed by someone in the club, his life traded for money, along with the lives of many others. He’d been attacked, been left for dead, his life as he knew it gone forever.
She listened with hazel eyes wide and filled with pain for him. “But … they could not have all betrayed you? Why do you hate them so?”
He laughed shortly, a rusty, despairing sound. “I don’t hate them.”
She drew back to stare at him. “Oh, my heavens. You love them! You miss them!”
A shudder went through him. “I loved them once. I cannot trust them now. I miss them. I miss myself. I lost everything that night on the docks. When I see them—” He halted, his voice too tight to continue.
“When you see them, you see young Ren Porter, whole and strong?”
He closed his eyes and bent his forehead to hers. “No, I don’t see my former self. I see a hole where my former self used to be. That Ren is long dead.”
She was silent for a long while—an event unusual enough to drag his attention from his own thoughts. “What are you thinking?” It was bound to be something interesting, at the very least.
“I’m wondering what that maze behind the house used to look like. Those boxwoods are very old.”
Plants again. It must be the laudanum. Ren let out a laughing sigh. “They were kept in perfect precision in my old cousin’s day. This park was a showplace, I think. People would come from far away for a tour of the grounds and my cousin was always proud to show it off. To me, it was a playground for a brief summer in my boyhood. I set out to solve the maze the moment I stepped from the coach. It took me weeks to memorize it. I can still remember the way, even now.”
“It’s a classic design, quite possibly a Batty Langley original from the mid-eighteenth century, for the boxwoods certainly look old enough.” She brought her faraway gaze down and met his eyes with a smile. “And your younger self is not dead. You remember that maze as if you’d solved it yesterday.”
“I remember everything, Callie.” Ren brought her carefully into the circle of his arms. “At first I thought they were just nightmares. Then the shards and splinters of images began to mean something, began to knit themselves up into sense. I’ve lived here in the dark long enough to dream them again, awake and panicked and fighting for breath as I remember every single agonizing moment of being murdered.”
She snuggled closer. “Almost murdered.”
“Yes. Almost murdered.”
“So tell me. Tell me every single agonizing moment. Say it out loud.”
“No.”
“It might help.” She tilted her head to look up into his face. “I mean it, Ren. You know how it is when you tell an anecdote too many times? The first time you tell it, it is a strong memory and you seem to live it again, but then, after a while, what you remember more is the telling of it. The true memory steps back, further back every time, until you’re telling a memory of a memory of a memory. It becomes simply a story.”
“No.”
“But why?”
“Because it is not a story for a lady’s ears. Because it is past midnight. And because you are wounded and need your rest.”
“But what of those men? What if they’re still there in the village?”
His arms tightened. “I can face them if you stay by my side.”
Her hands slid beneath his waistcoat. “I shall stay as if glued.” Then she sighed. “I do like to touch you. Especially your bottom.”
She blinked slowly at his low bark of laughter. “Did I just say that out loud?”
“Yes, you did. I shall treasure it forever.”
She didn’t mind the amusement in his voice. She liked making him laugh.
“I like laughing with you.”
She’d like to make him laugh forever. Make him laugh, make him moan, make him roar out his orgasm whilst she sucked his cock—
“Callie, you’re talking in your sleep. I’d allow it, but your mother is due to take over my watch.”
Mama wouldn’t mind talking about orgasms.
“Well, I should mind it, very much. Why don’t you think about something else?”
She liked thinking about Ren. Dear, sad, strong Ren. She loved him so.
But Ren didn’t love her. He didn’t believe in her at all. He thought she would leave him and she wouldn’t, not ever. Not for anything or anyone. It broke her heart that he couldn’t believe.
She wept softly in her sleep, warm tears dropping into Ren’s palm.
She would never be able to make him believe.
A tender kiss upon her brow. I believe, Callie. I can be a bit thick, but finally, I believe.
And I vow, you shall never again be harmed because of me.
* * *
He’d lived a life of danger once, surviving on instinct and shrewdness. Since Callie had awoken him, he could feel it once more. It was a tickle on the back of his neck. It was a twitch between his shoulder blades.
It was a shattered ladder, a locked cellar door, a maddened horse.
Someone meant them harm.
* * *
The next morning, Ren found Dade in the stables, currying the elderly carriage horses and wearing a flowing lacy shirt from another century. Dade glanced at him ruefully. “I found in it one of the bedchambers. We didn’t take time to pack when Attie was missing. I haven’t anything else.”
“Shut up and listen.”
Dade drew back in resentment, but Ren had no time for brotherly camaraderie.
“I need you to take Callie away. Tomorrow. I’d have you go today, but I don’t think she should be moved again so soon. All of you, tomorrow. Get away from here.”
When She Said I Do Page 31
