Lords of Honor-The Collection

by Christi Caldwell

Chapter 8

  Derek stared down the now empty corridor and, dragging a hand through his hair, he unleashed a string of black curses. What in blazes had he done? For the young rogue he’d once been, he’d never been a manner of man such as his father and brother, who’d taken their pleasures with maids on their staffs.

  In Lily’s arms, however, he’d felt more alive than he had all these years since his return. She’d made him forget honor and anger and pain, so all he had wanted was to lose himself inside her.

  Running a shaky hand through his hair, he thrust aside the tumult of emotion whirring inside and looked to the door his man-of-affairs had disappeared behind.

  He tried and failed to regain a semblance of control over his thoughts. Desire continued to course through him, with the remembered feel and touch of Lily. And this hungering had little to do with the lack of warm bodies he’d had to bed these past years and everything to do with the lush contours of her generously curved figure. He scrubbed a hand over his face and willed his thoughts to rights.

  Women did not desire him. Not any longer. The teasing, charming rogue with his cocksure grin had died on the fields of Toulouse, and in his place remained a scarred, burned, seething beast. Yes, Lily, no doubt, had used her wiles as a ploy to retain her post, as he’d charged. And yet… He slid his gaze down the corridor which she’d fled… Her whispery moans and passion-glazed eyes spoke an altogether different truth. How could that be? How, when he could not even stomach the sight of his own visage should she tremble in his arms?

  Dragging his attention away, Derek retrieved his cane and strode toward his office for his meeting with Davies. Lily Benedict was either mad, foolish, or both. As he made his way along the length of the hall to his office door, a room that had proven his sanctuary over the years, he grimaced. The muscles of his leg strained from his exertions but he pushed ahead, craving the privacy behind that wooden panel the way a drunk thirsted for French spirits. Except, now that sanctuary had been shattered…by a beauty with a mouth to tempt a saint into sinning.

  People did not put demands to him and they certainly did not gainsay his wishes. Yet this insolent fool had done both. Derek stopped beside the door and reached for the handle. I should sack her. He paused with his fingers outstretched and a contemplative frown on his lips. The fact that, in her short time in his household, she’d entered these forbidden halls indicated she was not a woman to do as bid—even if she was a servant on his staff. But to turn her out would be a manner of beastliness that even he was incapable of. Only a true fiend would kiss her and then sack her. That callous act would mark him the kind of dark villain George had been when in the living.

  He grinned wryly. Perhaps there was a sliver of good left in Derek’s rotted soul, after all.

  “That wasn’t very nice of you.”

  No, he hadn’t been kind to Lily. Except, he hadn’t been kind to anyone in so long he didn’t think he could recall those simple gestures; smiling, laughing and bowing, if he needed to save his other eye. He—Derek froze. He stared unblinkingly at the door. Did the conscience he’d thought long dead, in fact, live and still speak? His frown deepened. And yet, if those guilty remnants of his past belonged to him, why did they whisper about him in a soft, lyrical, singsong children’s tone.

  “Did you hear me?”

  He turned slowly around and scanned the corridor. Who in blazes—?

  Small fingers tugged at his coat. “I am right here.” Derek jerked his gaze lower and then widened his eye. A stern, angry, little girl frowned up at him. For a moment he was transported back to the nursery above stairs—to another girl with those thick brown ringlets.

  “I am a dragon! A fiery monster….”

  “I never knew a dragon could speak…”

  “Oh, yes…”

  The air trembled with the memory of his sister’s laughter.

  “Can you not see me because of your eye?” The rabidly curious inquiry made by the girl pulled him to the moment.

  “I can see you,” he barked. “I—” Swiftly he closed his mouth as he realized he was a handful of words away from answering to a child.

  When he said nothing else on it, the girl tugged his fabric once more. “You what?”

  “I want you gone.” That menacing whisper turned the girl’s cheeks white. She released his coat and stepped away. Grateful that this tiny little person would take herself off, Derek turned around.

  “And that wasn’t nice, either.”

  Perhaps Lily’s madness had proven contagious and infected his sister’s damned daughter. For he’d occupied the same home as the child for weeks and, in that time she’d engaged but a handful of words with him, in meetings he’d abruptly ended. Oh, he was aware of her lurking in the shadows, stealing peeks the way all people inevitably had of the grotesque Duke of Blackthorne, gawking like he was an oddity. He’d studiously avoided her. It was a perfect arrangement for a man who craved nothing more than a solitary existence and a child who feared monsters.

  Or it had been the perfect arrangement. Until now. He flexed his jaw.

  The child tapped his arm. “Well? Aren’t you going to say something?”

  His sister’s child had been a good deal easier when she had fewer words. Were all children this boldly stupid? His mind spun as he tried to recall the youth he’d been. Fearless. Unrepentant. Yes, stupid indeed.

  Annoyance flashed in the girl’s blue eyes with silver flecks. Derek started. He knew those eyes. Or at least had known them at one time. They had been nearly the same shade of blue to meet him in a mirror every morning. The Winters eyes. He, George, and Edeline had possessed eyes the same shade of blue that it had been remarked upon by all who knew them. Now his siblings’ eyes had been forever closed. The other only had one left to show for his efforts fighting Boney’s forces. He tightened his jaw.

  A brown curl fell over the child’s brow. “Don’t you know it is rude to stare?” She blew at the strand. The stubborn curl promptly fell back into place.

  If he remembered how to laugh, this would have been one of those moments when he would have tossed his head back and roared with the hilarity of this child handing out lessons on proper behavior. A girl such as her didn’t require a nursemaid. She could be one.

  His ward scrubbed her hand over her nose. “You don’t say very much, do you?”

  Her question, teeming with curiosity, jerked him back to the present. “I did say something,” he hissed. “I want you gone and I have a meeting with—”

  “Mean Mr. Davies?”

  At the very moniker he and his siblings had given Davies years earlier, another unexpected smile pulled at his lips.

  “You are smiling again.” She ran the back of her hand over her nose. Again. “And you don’t seem to be a monster when you smile.”

  “I am very much a monster,” he whispered. By this child and her damned nursemaid’s blatant rejection of his commands, he was a wholly ineffective monster. What was the benefit of being a hideous beast if you couldn’t even manage to run a child off?

  She angled her head to better study his burned cheek. As a flash of fear lit her eyes, his mouth went dry with the familiar shame and dread of being studied like a circus oddity. No, people did not love him. He was reviled, pitied, and feared, but never one to be loved. After all, if his own mother hadn’t been able to love him transformed as he’d been, what other person could? He thrust aside those weakening emotions. It was far better for the girl to be fearful. Terror would keep her away and, more importantly, keep him sane and solitary.

  The girl took a step, toward him. Toward him? “You weren’t always a monster, I suspect,” she murmured. “My mama spoke of you often and said she loved you very much.” Oh, God. Agony burned him with the same vicious ferocity of that misfire years ago. Derek rubbed a hand over his chest. He’d thought himself incapable of feeling, anymore. Apparently, there was still something left of his heart…even if it was just raw with the loss of his sister. His ward pointed a finger at him. “Y
ou never came to visit when you returned.”

  Monster that he was, he’d still not point out to this child the reason he’d not come was because his wounds had found him languishing in a hospital, on the cusp of death. And then, when he’d managed to survive and awakened, he’d found the monster he’d become. “I was otherwise busy,” he bit out and made to step around her. Who would believe that he’d so desire a visit with Davies? Anything to end this torturous questioning.

  The child stepped in his path, blocking his forward escape. “My mama wanted to see you.” There was an accusatory note in her words that wrenched at a heart he’d believed incapable of feeling. Ah, God. With her goodness and innocence, Edeline had been the only light in the whole Winters family. He and George had merely been worthless rakes and rogues who’d lived for themselves. She had possessed a pure soul. He flexed his jaw. In the end, they’d proven cursed; every last one of them. The little girl tapped him on the hand. “Did you hear me?”

  “I did.” This was to be his hell, then. Not the marks upon his face or his crippled leg, but rather a lifetime saddled with a child who’d not allow him to wallow in the misery of his own existence. Derek cursed roundly.

  “Oh, you should not say hell. That is not at all polite.” She wrinkled her little brow. “Or bloody. But sometimes using the word bloody is acceptable. If you have scraped your knees and are bleeding, then you may use it. Or if you lose a tooth.” She opened her mouth wide and jammed a finger somewhere in the vicinity of her front teeth. “I lost that one and it bled. So I could use the word…and…”

  Derek’s fingers twitched with the need to clamp his hands over his ears to blot out the child’s incessant prattling. This meeting officially concluded with his obstinate ward, he stalked the remaining distance to his office, pressed the handle of the door, and stepped inside. “Goddamn it.”

  “And that word is never—”

  Derek slammed the door so hard it shook on its frame.

  “—appropriate.” The muffled response carried through the panel.

  He shot a hand out and turned the lock, just as the eight-year-old tormentor rattled the handle. “Now, go,” he boomed.

  Davies stood at the edge of his desk, his face a ghastly shade of white. Ignoring the other man, Derek strode across the room in his uneven, jerky manner, and made his way over to the sideboard. He rested his cane against the edge and grabbed the nearest bottle and glass. Abandoning his walking stick for the liquid fortitude in hands, he limped back to his desk and sat. “We met this week, Davies,” he snapped. “I do not like unexpected meetings.”

  “Y-yes, Your Grace.”

  He liked it a good deal less when he was in the midst of kissing Mrs. Lily Benedict until she was moaning for more of his touch.

  The door handle jiggled again. “You need to apologize to the lady.” Oh, blast. She’d still not gone away. Derek dug his fingertips into his temple, ignoring the frowning Davies. He’d certainly not take lessons on proper and improper language from a blasted child. “My mama always said gentlemen should be kind to ladies.” The gentleman he had been, died on the battlefield. Ignoring the chastisement being delivered on the other side of his door by a too-old-for-her-years child, he poured himself a healthy snifter of brandy.

  “Did you say something?” The child, who would not quit, pressed the door handle once more. “I cannot hear you.”

  Derek took a long swallow and welcomed the fiery path the brandy blazed down his throat. Yes, despite the logic in sending away Mrs. Lily Benedict, it made far more sense to allow her to stay on—insolence and all. Let that one deal with the child. And then he could be free to wallow in the misery of his and his former friends’ making.

  His man-of-affairs alternated his disapproving stare between the doorway and Derek. Tiring of his silence, Derek waved him to his seat. “Bloody hell, Davies, get on with it already, will you?”

  The old servant jumped. “Of course, Your Grace,” he said rushing to claim his seat. He settled his ledgers and folios on the edge of Derek’s desk and drew forth one black book. “I am here to discuss the status of Lady Flora’s governess.” That nasally, monotone deliverance could have proven Wellington’s most effective weapon against the bloody French. All Davies would have needed to do was speak and Boney’s forces would have slumbered to death from the sheer, excruciating pain of his drawn out sentences.

  For how many of this man’s visits, and the doctor’s, been the only deviation from Derek’s otherwise solitary existence? There were no visitors come to call. No balls or soirees. No breathtaking beauties. Until her.

  “…As such, there is the matter of hiring a new governess for Her Ladyship.”

  The dauntless Lily Benedict flashed to mind as she’d been with her thick, black lashes fluttering and her lips kissed crimson. Derek tapped his pen back and forth in a rhythmic movement meant to grate.

  Davies paused mid-sentence. He dropped his gaze to Derek’s glove-encased fingers. The hint of a frown marred his thin lips. “I-I understand the latest h-has—”

  “Fled?” He winged a brow up.

  Coughing into his hand, the servant continued. “Found a post elsewhere.” Is that what Davies would call running off after catching a glimpse of her employer? Then the man was corked in the brain. Horror, revulsion, and terror had blended in the young woman’s eyes as she’d taken hasty flight. “I have already put out inquiries for a replacement for Miss Calpepper…”

  Unlike Lily who’d not only stormed into his household and stolen an interview with him, but also stood bold and unrepentant before him twice. And kissed me. She’d put her mouth against his and not shuddered and whimpered in fear, but rather moaned with desire. Ultimately he’d succeeded in running her out of his private corridors. Yet, on both occasions, it hadn’t been his hideous flesh to send the lady into flight. In fact, by the whitening at the corners of her mouth and her rapidly drawn breaths, the threat to sack her had roused greater terror in the lady.

  “…The woman to replace her will of course be proper and…”

  Davies’s words ran in and out of focus. Derek stopped tapping the pen and raised it close to his eye. He studied the black tip, turning it left and right. The midnight shade put him in mind of the brave, but wholly stupid, woman. For the shock and fear he could all but smell emanating from her slender frame, she’d spoken with him and to him as though the better portion of his face hadn’t been licked by flame.

  “…You needn’t worry after the suitability of the young woman. I will see to…”

  He narrowed his gaze upon that black tip. Such a woman would not run off the way the previous nursemaids and governesses had prior to her, nor the way they would continue to flee after she left. The solitary life he hungered for would be continually interrupted by a parade of young ladies who could not dwell within the beast’s den.

  You do not say very much, do you?

  And the bolder his sister’s child would become, invading his sanctuary, and on and on this process would go with his blasted man-of-affairs. Life would be a constant search for the next governess until either the girl became a woman and made her blasted Come Out or her other damned rake of a guardian reformed his ways and took mercy on Derek’s black soul.

  He tossed the pen down. “I have found the girl a governess.” A tempting woman who entices me with every exchange and who posed the greatest risk for it.

  Davies removed his wired spectacles from the bridge of his nose. “Your Grace?” Did the man believe the removal of those glasses should aid his hearing?

  Derek laid his forearms upon the surface of the desk and steepled his gloved fingers. “A governess. The lady has been hired. You are to deal with her. You are to enumerate her responsibilities.” I merely wanted an introduction to the child. An introduction that you as her guardian should, at the very least, provide. He cleared his throat. “See her properly introduced to the girl.”

  The white-haired servant withdrew a handkerchief. He dusted his perfectly unblemis
hed lenses with the crisp, white fabric. “And the lady’s name, Your Grace?”

  The husky contralto of the young woman’s speaking voice wrapped around his memory; seductive and soothing all at once. He’d long ago given up hope of ever knowing that passion and ease with a woman. “Mrs. Lily Benedict,” he said gruffly.

  The servant puzzled his brow. “Well.” Yes, well. After all, what could the man say to his reclusive, half-mad employer taking on the responsibility of selecting a proper governess? Then the older man flared his eyes and a flush mottled his cheeks.

  Ah, so the astute servant even now pieced together that the woman Derek had been embracing in the corridor a short while ago was, in fact, one and the same. He took a perverse pleasure in the stiffly proper man’s shock. Regardless, the same way he did not answer to impudent children or insolent ladies was the way in which he’d not answer to this man. “I have worked out the terms of the young woman’s wages.” He proceeded to enumerate the details he’d promised Lily. As he listened, the solicitor’s brown eyes went huge at the ridiculous sum he’d settled upon her.

  Flummoxed, the usually unflappable Davies sprawled in his seat. “But, Your Grace—?”

  “Unless you have specific reasons Mrs. Benedict is unsuitable, the matter is concluded.” Even then, it still wouldn’t matter. The lady was fearless and bold, and the perfect governess for his miserable household. And I desire her. Do not forget that crucial part. Annoyance thrumming through him, Derek shoved back his chair and the legs scraped along the wooden surface. “This meeting is concluded.” The fire flashing in the lady’s crystalline aquamarine eyes danced around his memory; the way her eyes blazed with passion under the force of his kiss. An unexpected hunger slammed into him, shocking with the staggering power of it. Once upon his youth, he would have laid claim to such a lady and she would have delighted in his touch. No more. That ease with ladies had burned up with the skin upon his face. Self-hatred consumed him.

  Women such as her did not belong in his solitary, dark world. Disgust, loathing, and rage ate away at Derek leaving him, instead, with a familiar, welcome numbed fury. Davies made to go, but he stayed him. “I do not want any dealings with Mrs. Benedict. You are to handle anything and everything pertaining to the lady. She is to meet weekly with you and you are to ascertain if she’s seeing to her responsibilities.” Then he could be safely protected from hungering for things that could never be for one such as him.