Slightly Sinful

by Mary Balogh

  It seemed almost as if he had read her mind.

  “I am perhaps the most fortunate of men, Miss York,” he said. “We are frequently encouraged, are we not, to look on the bright side of every event, even the worst disaster? With the loss of my memory I find myself quite unencumbered by my past and all its burdens. I can be whoever I want to be. I can create myself anew and shape my future without any restraining influence from my past. What should I become, do you suppose? Or, perhaps more to the point, who should I become? What sort of person shall Jonathan Smith be?”

  She closed her eyes and swallowed. He spoke lightly still, as if he found his words amusing. She found them terrifying.

  “Only you can decide that,” she said softly.

  “Naked I was born into that other life I cannot remember,” he said, “and naked I have been born into this new life. I wonder if, when we are born the first time, we forget all that has gone before? William Wordsworth would have us believe it is so. Have you read any of his poetry, Miss York? His Immortality Ode? ‘Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting’?”

  “Now we know something else about you,” she said. “You read poetry.”

  “Perhaps I write it too,” he said. “Perhaps I go about declaiming bad verse wherever I go. Perhaps this demise and rebirth is the greatest favor I have ever done my contemporaries.”

  Rachel laughed aloud, and he removed his arm and laughed with her.

  “You, of course,” he said, “fell out of heaven through a hole in a cloud. I have decided that it is the only explanation.”

  She laughed again and looked down to brush an invisible speck from the skirt of her dress. Here she was again, alone with him, feeling the unwilling pull of his masculinity. But he was an invalid. She was his nurse.

  “And so,” he said, “I have been fortunate enough to enjoy two births in the course of one lifetime. Except that this time I do not have a mother to nourish and nurture me. I am on my own.”

  “Oh, no, do not speak that way,” she said, leaning forward in her chair. “We will support and help you, Mr. Smith. We will not abandon you.”

  Their eyes met and held. Neither spoke for what seemed a long time, but the air fairly crackled between them. Rachel wondered again if she was responsible and looked away.

  “Thank you,” he said. “You are extraordinarily kind. All of you are. But I have no intention of being a burden to you for longer than I absolutely must. I am already overmuch in your debt.”

  The conversation was threatening to become personal.

  “I’ll leave you alone,” she said. “I am sure you must need to rest.”

  “Stay.” He reached an arm across the bed toward her but lowered it to the bedcovers before she could begin to wonder if he expected her to take his hand in hers. “If you may, that is, and if you feel so inclined. I find your presence soothing.” He chuckled softly. “At least, sometimes I do.”

  He fell asleep almost instantly. She might have tiptoed from the room then. But she stayed where she was instead, gazing at him, wondering who he was, wondering what he would do when he had recovered sufficiently to leave the house.

  Wondering if it was normal to feel such a—such a physical attraction to a man one had saved from death.

  OVER THE NEXT WEEK ALLEYNE’S HEAD wounds healed sufficiently that he could move his head freely provided he did not jerk it suddenly in any direction. And he could sit up for increasingly lengthy spells without feeling dizzy. The worst of his bruises faded and his other aches and pains were gradually easing. His leg was healing more slowly, since the musket ball appeared to have done some damage to muscles or tendons in the thigh. Certainly he could not yet put any weight on it, and Geraldine had threatened to tie him to the bed if he so much as tried.

  “Naked,” she had added as she swept from the room, provoking a guffaw of laughter from him.

  He was horribly restless. He could not lie in bed forever, growing weaker and weaker every hour. He moved the leg and flexed his foot and ankle as much as he could beneath the bedcovers. Often when he was alone, he sat on the side of the bed, exercising the leg in any way he could devise that did not involve him in actually putting weight on it or that did not cause him to black out from the pain. What he needed, he realized, was crutches. But how could he ask for them when he had no means of paying for them?

  He felt rather like a prisoner. Apart from the fact that he had only one working leg, he possessed nothing at all, not even the nightshirts he wore. How could he acquire other clothes? But how could he leave the house, or even this room, unless he did? He was itching to be out, searching for some clue to his identity, even though Phyllis had told him that most of the British had gone back home by now.

  He wondered why she and the others were still here, since it seemed logical to assume that they had come to do business at a time when Brussels was bustling with army personnel and British visitors. And then it struck him that perhaps it was his presence here that was delaying them. He winced, as if with pain.

  Of course, they still were doing some business. Almost every night he heard the noise of revelries downstairs and then the more intimate sounds of private pleasures from closer at hand. It was all very frustrating.

  It was Rachel York whom he saw most often. She sat with him several times a day, even though constant vigilance at his bedside was no longer necessary. Usually she brought some sewing with her and kept her head bent over her work while they talked or sat in companionable silence until he dozed. Sometimes she read to him from the book he had seen on her dressing table—a copy of Fielding’s Joseph Andrews. It was interesting to realize that she could read—a whore with an education.

  He tried his best not to use that word when thinking of her. It was strange really—he liked the other four ladies none the less for their profession. It made him uncomfortable to know that she was one of them. Perhaps it was because no gentleman liked to admit that he was besotted with a whore.

  He looked forward to Rachel’s visits. He liked to look at her and listen to her voice. He liked her silences. He liked the way she quickened his blood and made him feel more full of life and energy. Not that she had flirted with him again as overtly as she had done that afternoon when she had sat on his bed and touched the lump on his head. Perhaps he had misunderstood after all, he thought. Perhaps the sexual tension on that occasion was something he alone had felt, occasioned by her beauty and her proximity and her sympathy.

  Sergeant William Strickland had taken to coming to his room once or twice a day to see if there was anything he could do for him.

  “It’s like this, sir,” he said unbidden one day. “I am well enough to leave here. I wasn’t bad enough to stay here in the first place, though the ladies treated me as if I was about to draw my last breath, so to speak. But now that I am here, I can’t seem to get up the courage to leave. Where am I supposed to go? All I know is soldiering.”

  “I can sympathize with you,” Alleyne assured him.

  “I have thought of going with the ladies when they return to England,” Strickland said, “as a sort of bodyguard, sir, which they ought to have on account of they are ladies without a gent even though there are some what would not call them ladies. But I’m not sure they really need me or want me.”

  He brought shaving water and his razor with him once a day and always offered to do the shaving himself, though Alleyne always declined and did it himself. The sergeant spoke up one morning while watching him.

  “I don’t suppose you are in need of a valet, are you, sir?” he asked with a pathetic sigh. “There are more than enough women to tend your needs but no man. A gentleman ought to have a man of his own.”

  “Sergeant Strickland,” Alleyne said with a rueful chuckle, “you at least own a shaving kit and probably one or two other belongings in addition to your uniform and your boots. You may even have a few coins to rattle around in your pockets. At the moment I own the skin I was born in but nothing else—absolutely nothing.”

&nb
sp; The sergeant sighed again. “Well, if you change your mind, sir,” he said, “I daresay I’ll be here a few days longer. We could come to some arrangement.”

  The blind leading the blind, Alleyne thought after Strickland had returned to his own attic room. Or the half blind leading the lame might be a more accurate image.

  He had begun to fear—it was a deep, bowel-churning, knee-weakening, soul-dizzying terror actually—that his memory was not going to return at all.

  Did he exist if he had no past?

  Did he have any human validity if he was nobody?

  Of what value or significance was anything he might have done during his life if it could be so totally wiped out with one fall from the back of a horse?

  Whom had he left behind after losing his memory as effectively as if he had died?

  Who mourned for him?

  Foolishly, foolishly he wished for Rachel York—as if, like a mother, she could kiss his hurt and make it all better.

  Though he certainly did not think of her as a mother.

  Somehow, he decided, he was going to have to get his hands on some crutches and some clothes. He was going to have to get out of here.

  CHAPTER VI

  THE LADIES WERE RESTLESS AND IMPATIENT TO go home. They were desperate to pick up the trail of the Reverend Nigel Crawley. Their determination to confront him, to punish him, and to get back their money had not diminished by one iota. He was simply not going to be allowed to get away with such a crime, they declared—or with making fools of them when they had thought it impossible for any man to deceive them. Flossie and Bridget had written to as many of their literate acquaintances as they could think of, but they had specified that any replies should be sent to London, not having expected to be delayed in Brussels for so long. They were eager to discover if there had been any.

  They held a meeting in the kitchen one afternoon while Sergeant Strickland was with Mr. Smith.

  There were some minor matters to discuss first. All of the women except Rachel had numerous acquaintances among the male population of Brussels. And Flossie and Geraldine were both adept at sizing up a man—literally sizing him up—without having to go at him with a measuring tape. They discussed what clothes Mr. Smith would need to enable him to move more freely about the house and eventually to leave it. They all undertook to wheedle the requisite garments out of various sources. And Phyllis knew someone who could donate, or at least loan, a pair of crutches.

  But there was a far larger problem to be solved, of course, before they could feel free to leave at last.

  “He still can’t remember a blessed thing that happened before he woke up here in Rache’s bed, can he?” Geraldine said. “And so we have nowhere to send him, and he has nowhere to go.”

  “Anyway,” Phyllis said, “he can’t even walk yet.”

  “And he will be as weak as a baby after more than a week in bed,” Bridget added.

  “He is a lovely, lovely man,” Flossie said with a sigh. “But there are times when I could wish him to perdition.”

  “If I could just go back and do things differently,” Rachel said, “I would leave him at the Namur Gates. He would have been looked after by someone. He would have been recognized as an officer as soon as he regained consciousness, and someone would have undertaken to discover who he was.”

  Except that she could not have borne to abandon him. And now she could not bear to hear him spoken of as a burden.

  “Lord love us but he is handsome,” Phyllis said with a sigh. “I am a fair way to being in love with him.”

  “We all are, Phyll, though it’s not just his looks, is it?” Geraldine said. “He has that roguish gleam in his eye. No, don’t be sorry you brought him here, Rache. I don’t begrudge him the last ten days—or Will Strickland either.”

  “We are going to have to do something about them soon, though, Gerry,” Flossie said. “We cannot stay here forever. I am so homesick for England I could scream.”

  “Any suggestions about what we ought to do with Mr. Smith?” Bridget asked.

  “We could all go out,” Phyllis suggested, “and knock on every door up and down every street to see if anyone has mislaid a handsome gentleman with roguish eyes and an aristocratic nose.”

  They all laughed.

  “Some of us don’t speak French, though, Phyll,” Flossie said.

  “We could offer him a job with us in London,” Geraldine suggested, “and he could work while we go off in pursuit of Crawley.”

  “The ladies would be queued up down the street and around the corner,” Bridget said. “Our gentlemen clients would not be able to get near the door when we got back to London.”

  “We could charge him a percentage of his income for rent,” Flossie said. “We would soon be rich enough to buy two boarding houses.”

  It was a good thing they had a keen sense of humor, Rachel thought as they all laughed again. Their prospects were really rather bleak. The chances that they would ever find Nigel Crawley were slim, and even if they did, it was unlikely that they would recover any of their money. Yet she knew that indignation and pride would send them on the chase anyway. They would be doubly poor by the time they admitted defeat and returned to work. It was a very good thing that they could at least laugh at themselves.

  If only she could think of some way to help them. But wealthy as she would be in three years’ time, at present she was as poor as the proverbial church mouse.

  “I think what we sometimes forget,” she said, “is that Mr. Smith has lost his memory, not his intelligence. He is recovering from his wounds, and I do not believe he will be content to remain in bed or dependent upon us for much longer. Perhaps it is not up to us to decide what to do with him. Perhaps he has some ideas of his own.”

  “The poor dear,” Phyllis said. “Perhaps he will wander up one side of each street and down the other, knocking on doors.”

  “He will be snatched up by the first woman to open a door,” Geraldine said with a sigh. “I suppose we should ask him, though.”

  “I will,” Rachel offered. “I will sit with him for a while this evening while you are all entertaining. If he has no ideas, then we will all put our heads together again. If we can just solve the problem of Mr. Smith, then we can turn our attention to acquiring enough money to go after Mr. Crawley.”

  She hated thinking of him as a problem. She also hated the thought of the day—surely soon now—when he would not need them any longer and would leave.

  “My favorite idea is still the one about climbing the ivy on a dark night to get your jewels, Rache,” Geraldine said, provoking laughter.

  Rachel got to her feet and carried their empty cups and saucers and plates to the bowl to wash.

  PHYLLIS TOLD ALLEYNE WHEN SHE BROUGHT HIM his evening meal that he was going to have crutches by the following morning. He could have kissed her and told her so.

  She came toward the bed with saucily swaying hips and leaned over him, lips puckered, so that he could do just that. He laughed at her as he drew her head down with one hand against the back of it and pecked her lightly on the lips.

  “And where are they coming from?” he asked her as she straightened up and fanned her face vigorously with one hand while batting her eyelids at him.

  “Never you mind,” she told him. “I know someone.”

  It was almost exactly what Geraldine said later when she came to collect the tray and informed him that he would have some clothes soon—perhaps even by tomorrow.

  “We know people,” she said, striking her usual hands-on-hips, bosom-thrust-forward pose and winking at him.

  Later in the evening he could hear the outside door opening and closing downstairs and the rumble of male voices mingled with feminine laughter. There were card games at the house every evening, Strickland had told him, with the ladies holding the bank and acting as hostesses. But there was a strict curfew at one o’clock, when the ladies turned to the other part of their profession.

  Since there was no
point in dwelling constantly upon his plight, Alleyne chose to be amused yet again over the fact that he had taken refuge in a brothel and was in the nature of being a kept man. It was perfectly clear to him from whom his crutches and clothes were going to come. The ladies were certainly not going out to buy them. In a sense that was a relief, but even so it was an uncomfortable realization if he let his mind dwell upon it. He chose to laugh instead. One day in the future, after his memory had returned and he had resumed his normal life, he was going to look back on this episode in his life and be enormously tickled by it.

  At least by this time tomorrow he ought to be able to move around the room. If some clothes had arrived also, he might even be able to move beyond the room. Perhaps within a few days he would be able to go out at last in search of his identity. It was going to be a daunting task when he was in a foreign city and apparently most of the British visitors had left, either to follow the armies to Paris or to return to England. But at least he would finally be able to do something.

  Perhaps then he would have more success at keeping the terror at bay.

  He was bored and picked up Joseph Andrews, which Rachel York had left on the table beside the bed. But he found after a few minutes that he was staring at the same page, his brow furrowed in thought. He had woken again from an afternoon nap with that panicked concern for the letter. What letter?

  Deuce take it, what letter?

  He had the feeling that if only he could remember the answer to that question everything else would come flooding back. But nothing would come at the moment except the familiar throbbing of a headache. He closed the book, set it back on the table, and stared at the canopy over his head.

  He was still staring upward when the door to his room opened.

  It was Rachel York—and his breath caught in his throat.

  She was wearing a simply designed evening dress of pale blue satin. But on her, of course, nothing elaborate was necessary. Its low neck and high waistline showed her fine bosom to best advantage. Soft, silken folds clung to her alluring curves and shapely legs. She had done something prettier than usual with her hair. There were narrow, looped braids and curls with a few wavy tendrils teasing her neck and temples. He was not sure whether the blush of color in her cheeks was natural or the result of carefully applied cosmetics. Either way she looked more alluring than ever.