The girl froze. “Ma’am?” She cocked her head.
Such a mistake could have been any accidental, coincidental slip-up, and yet… Lily’s heart kicked up a funny beat. Claudia looked beyond her shoulder to the footman and a look passed between them. Then the servant lunged.
Oh, God…
Lily took a breath to scream, when he slapped a hand over her mouth, muffling that sound. The valise tumbled from her fingers and she kicked and flailed, catching Claudia in the stomach for her efforts. The girl cried out and she reveled in that warning cry. That moment too fleeting as the footman at her back cursed.
“Get out of here, you bloody fool.”
Claudia’s gaze reflected an apology and regret all at once.
Lily implored her with her eyes. Why? Why would she do this? The answer to that would never come. Thomas dragged her flailing figure through the hall. Her heart thundered hard and fast as she struggled to draw in panicked breaths, bucking and twisting against the hold of her captor.
“You shouldn’t have fought me, bitch,” the footman whispered harshly against her ear. “He didn’t want you hurt.”
Lily bit down hard on the flesh of the man’s palm. He quietly cursed and cuffed her in the temple. Silver flecks danced before her eyes and she struggled to blink back the ringing echoing in her ears. She let loose a scream from deep within her throat that sound muffled by the humming of her ears and the coarseness of his hand. Thomas cursed once more and punched her in the side of the head.
Her eyes slid closed and the world went black.
A loud humming filled Lily’s ears and she struggled to see through the thick curtain clouding her vision. With a pounding at her temples, she forced her eyes open. A splash of sunlight slapped her face and she groaned, closing her eyes against the pain of that blinding brightness. Bile climbed her throat at the agony clamoring around her brain.
In a bid to escape the agony of her body’s pain, she rolled onto her side but her body jerked with resistance. That slight tug sent pain shooting up her numbed arms. What in blazes? With effort, Lily forced her eyes open once more and, this time, the world came back into focus.
Horror crept in with an agonizing slowness and then when it reached the surface, it unfurled—Derek sending her off, Claudia and Thomas’s treachery. Lily gave a frantic tug and tingling pain shot down her arms at the tight knots binding her wrists. She wrestled, struggling back and forth.
Faint weeping penetrated her own panic and Lily froze mid-movement. Her breath came hard and fast as she scanned her frantic gaze over the familiar room. And then her belly churned with nausea all over again for reasons that had nothing to do with pain. She took in the cheerful cottage, the modest chintz curtains, the matching floral upholstered sofa, and then she pressed her eyes closed to keep from casting the contents of her stomach upon the floor of this hated home—one she’d wished to never see again. And now she was here, as some kind of living hell with that very familiar little figure trussed up like a Christmas goose on the sofa opposite her.
“Mrs. B-Benedict,” Flora whispered, her face white. “I am scared.”
Chapter 24
“You don’t welcome changes to your schedule.” The analytical observation from down the corridor brought a rush of heat up Derek’s neck.
“I also don’t welcome inane ramblings.” He infused a harsh edge to those words to deter further probing on Dr. Carlson’s part. What madness had compelled him to send ’round for the doctor this morning? Why, when it was just as the other man said and Derek preferred his well-ordered life without deviations or interruptions. Because I am a friendless bugger, in need of a friend…
“And yet, you’ve requested my presence here this day.” The other man was too bloody clever for his own good. Or rather for Derek’s own good.
Derek stomped down the hall, moving with a single-minded purpose. He concentrated on each bloody, agonizing step and stretch of his long-ago torn muscles. For how long had he believed there was no other greater pain than these weekly sessions with his doctor, sessions that were as hopeless as they were helpless?
“You do not need to move at that brisk pace, Your Grace,” Carlson called into the distance between them.
Derek made a crude gesture and continued marching on with the doctor’s laughter trailing behind him. Yes, there had been no greater pain than the misery of his own existence. There was nothing more agonizing than his circumstances. He reached the end of the hall and came to a stop before that portrait of a stranger. Gasping from his exertions, he brushed the back of his sleeve over his damp brow and stared up at the young man there.
That man was dead. He had died long ago and he was never, ever coming back. He braced for the familiar ache of regret. That didn’t come.
With the loss of his friends and the death of his sister, Derek had discovered the true meaning of loss. It was not the once-perfect flesh upon his face. It was those who’d craved his friendship and caring even when he’d shut them out with his every vile utterance, action, and, worse, inaction. The truth slammed into him like a fist to the gut.
And he damned Lily Benedict for having made him feel, when it was vastly easier to feel nothing.
“I gather by your usual surliness there have been difficulties with a lady.” Dr. Carlson’s unerringly accurate charge brought him around so quickly, he tripped and stumbled against the wall.
Derek cursed and quickly righted himself. The angry words he’d have once uttered died on his lips. For, he’d been so very long without a friend, a prisoner in his own home, his mind with nothing but these grating walls and his tortured thoughts. “She was a bloody liar, Carlson,” he hissed.
The sure-footed doctor strode down the hall. “Oh? In what ways?”
The shame of her deception and his own desperate need to believe she could have ever felt anything for him humbled him into temporary silence.
Dr. Carlson stopped before him. Theirs was a relationship that moved beyond even the closest friendship Derek had known in his youth. This was a man who’d brought him back to the living when he’d been pleading to be left with the dead. He was a man who’d taken the broken man confined to a chair, closed in his rooms, and forced him to put his legs into some semblance of use.
“The young woman showed up on my doorstep and demanded the post of governess.” And I fell hopelessly and helplessly in love with her. The muscles of his face contorted in a spasm of pain and he turned away to conceal that telling show. “I fell for the bloody governess,” he said, tiredly.
The doctor drummed his fingertips together and contemplated him in that manner of a man of science studying a puzzling challenge. “And you find it to be a problem you fell for Lady Flora’s governess.”
He scoffed. “Come, look at me, Carlson. Do I appear a man who’d pass judgment on a person for their station?”
The other man arched an eyebrow in return. “Why, because you are scarred?”
Derek cursed. “Yes, because I’m scarred. These things matter,” he said, slashing the air with his hand. The abrupt movement sent his weight pushing over his thigh and pain gripped him, momentarily sucking his ability to think. He drew in several deep, calming breaths. “Because I’m a man who can’t walk,” he said, at last. “Because I’m a man who would rather be thrust into the middle of a battlefield than step outside the walls of my townhouse. Because I am incapable of the warmth my sister rightfully deserved and the care my niece still does deserve.”
The other man gave him a long look. “And you believe that matters to your Mrs. Benedict?”
“She’s not my Mrs. Benedict,” he gritted out. She’d never been his. Or had she? Surely soulful eyes and passionate lips could have not lied with such finesse. Derek leaned against the wall, still unable to meet the other man’s eyes. “Would you have the truth?” He didn’t wait for a response. “The lady was here for nothing more than to steal from me. She found the prized diamond she sought and all along she was only here…” His mind shied away
from revealing the most intimate piece of what she’d shared—his brother and the man she’d taken as her lover. Those belonged to nobody but her—and now him.
“She was only here?” Dr. Carlson prodded.
“On a matter of revenge,” he settled for. “Against my family. And I was so desperate to know love and the feel of a woman that I allowed myself to believe the lies she fed me were truths.”
Silence descended on his revelation. Carlson was calmly stoic and logical as he always was, in all matters. “Well, how do you know they weren’t truths?”
Derek blinked.
“Did the lady make off with the diamond?”
“She discovered it.” He allowed the agony of that discovery to wash over him again with the same vicious pain.
Dr. Carlson adjusted his wire lenses. “She discovered it, committed the theft, and then left?”
…I love you…I could not go through with it…
Derek furrowed his brow. She had discovered the diamond and had it on her person, and yet, she’d remained. Why would she do that? Why if that had been the only reason she’d been here?
…I love you…I could not go through with it…
He made a sound of impatience and at his doctor’s prodding stare, then he limped off. “You don’t understand,” he mumbled.
“Oh?” The amused drawl. “You’ve hated yourself for years, Your Grace. You’ve tried to run people off and have proven largely successful.”
“Thank you.” His sister’s visage flashed to mind. Then Maxwell. And St. Cyr. All of them, he’d effectively cut off from his life.
“It wasn’t a compliment,” the doctor returned.
“I was being sarcastic,” he muttered. Long ago he’d lost all traces of his humor.
A wry grin formed on the other man’s lips. “I know.”
“Oh.”
Dr. Carlson gestured to him. “Horrible things happened to you, Your Grace. I will not deny that. Suffering no person should ever have to know, and yet you knew that pain, and still do. You’d spend the whole of your life shut away believing yourself undeserving of any warmth, believing no one can see good in you when it is you who cannot see the good in you.”
Those words speared Derek with shock. It ran through him with a potent accuracy that left him speechless. After the horror of looking upon himself and seeing the world’s disdain, he’d spent years shaping himself into that unfeeling monster. How long had he spent believing himself unworthy? Until Lily came along. Unafraid to go toe-to-toe with him, she’d dragged him by his proverbial heels from the shadows. She’d not fled.
He recalled her as she’d been yesterday with agony etched in the delicate planes of her face and her whispered words—no, those were not the actions or words of a deceiver. Why would she have entered his office with that diamond?
The air left him on a slow exhale. She wouldn’t. There had been no reason for her to return to his office with that damning piece in her possession; no place for her to be in the precise halls he’d forbade her from entering with the diamond in her hands. “My God,” he whispered. She was returning it. There was no other accounting. But he’d not allowed her to speak. She’d begged to be heard out and instead, he’d spat and hissed and snarled like the beast he’d been accused of being because it was the only protection he’d known—and because it was easier than letting her in. Only it hadn’t been easier. It had left him hollow and empty, aching for her.
Footsteps sounded at the end of the hall and he looked up, grateful for the distraction. His heart lifted on the hope that the same woman he’d ordered to her chambers had defied him yet again. Disappointment sank that hope as Harris called out, “Your Grace.” The high-pitched tenor, steeped in panic, as it always was.
Derek narrowed his eye, as the man rushed forward with…he squinted…with…Lily’s valise? He stared blankly at it. She was leaving. What reason did I give her to stay? “What is it, Harris,” he interrupted when the man drew to a panting stop before him.
“This was discovered in the corridors of the servants’ hall,” the other man blurted out.
He shook his head. What was the man on about?
“Mrs. Benedict is gone,” the man whispered.
A loud humming filled his ears like a thousand swarming bees and Derek dug his fingers into them to turn sounds into words. “Gone?” Did that sharp, desperate question belong to him? For her departure could only signal… He looked to the valise. Her bag. She’d left her bag. The niggling trace of dread worked its way around his belly. He looked to Dr. Carlson, the man of logic and reason, and found the lines of his face etched in concern.
“And Lady Flora is missing, as well.”
Harris’ frantic words jerked his attention back. He stumbled forward and caught the man by the lapels of his jacket. “What do you mean, Lady Flora as well?” he demanded sharply, giving the man a shake.
The butler swallowed hard and reached between them to fish a note from his pocket. “This just arrived, Your Grace.”
Derek swiftly released the man and yanked the sheet from his fingers. He opened the ivory vellum and quickly scanned the contents of the note. His body went cold. He jerked his head up. “When did this arrive?” he rasped.
“B-but a few moments ago.”
Derek dropped his stare to the sheet once more; the chilling foreboding worked through his being like a venomous serpent slowly spreading his poison to his entire being.
…you have something I require. If you would see the restoration of two things of great importance to you, make for Loughton. You will find a cottage at the edge of River Rodig, halfway between the marsh and the forest. If you value the safety of that which is in my care, you are to arrive alone…
Oh, God. The earth dipped and swayed, and he closed his eye, sucking in great, gasping breaths. He’d believed his life empty before, but he’d been so, so wrong. If there was no Lily and Flora, there was nothing for him. His heart would cease to function.
“Your Grace?” Dr. Carlson prodded.
He folded the page and stuffed it into the front of his jacket. His skin burned with the intensity of the men’s stares. “Carlson, we are finished here for the day. Harris,” he said quietly. “Will you have a mount readied?”
The man hesitated. He exchanged a look with the doctor and then returned his attention to Derek. “Your mount, sir?” he whispered.
Sweat beaded on his brow; the perspiration having nothing to do with his earlier exertions and everything to do with the terror churning through him. He’d not climbed astride a horse since Toulouse. Were the muscles of his legs even capable of those old movements?
“You are strong enough,” Carlson murmured, correctly interpreting the path his thoughts had traveled.
He managed a nod. “I also require something from my office.” The servant with full use of his legs could accomplish both tasks far quicker than Derek could ever hope to. God, how he hated those old battle wounds more than ever. As Derek instructed him where to find the cursed diamond, Harris furrowed his brow. “Go, Harris,” he urged.
The man raced off. His footsteps echoed from the walls of the silent corridors.
With a fast-building dread, Derek limped across the room and retrieved his jacket and cane. He shrugged into the garment and then, with his doctor at his side, he made his way through his house to the foyer. His breath came hard and fast, though he no longer knew if it was the fear pounding at his chest or the exertions of the pace he’d set. How in blazes was he, an invalid without use of his leg, a man who’d exited his home but a handful of times in the past seven years, capable of going out and saving anyone? The days of his battlefield heroics had died a quick, fiery death and yet… He narrowed his eye into a hard slit, focused on the end of the corridor. Yet the same warrior’s bloodlust that had raged in the thick of battle filled his mouth so all he saw, tasted, or heard was the death of the man who’d dared touch Lily and Flora.
As Derek’s cane clacked noisily upon the hardwood floor
, silence otherwise reigned throughout his household. A household devoid of cheer and sound and life, not even two weeks prior. And yet, it now felt more a home than the one he’d known even as a boy, unscarred and unmarked by life.
He and Carlson reached the foyer when the other man suddenly stopped. He held a hand up. “Your Grace, you do know I am the soul of discretion. If there is anything you require?”
He managed a jerky nod. “Thank you,” he said, his tone gruff. For the miserable bugger he’d been to Carlson through the years, the man had shown him a loyalty and friendship he’d never been deserving of.
Carlson sketched a bow.
Derek paused at the threshold of the corridor and eyed the marble foyer. More specifically, the door. The door outside. The door that led out into peering eyes, and rabid stares, and disgusted looks. The door that would thrust him back into a world where all remembered the man he’d once been and the beast he now was. Through the fabric of his gloves, his palms moistened and fear sucked the moisture from his mouth. He did not leave these doors. He’d not done so since he’d destroyed another man’s life. Or attempted to. Ultimately, love prevailed.
Love was also the reason Derek even now stood prepared to exit those doors and reenter the living. Drawing forth a steadying breath, he limped forward. His butler stood patiently in wait, with Derek’s cloak and hat in his hands. He took the hat from the servant and then allowed him to assist him into his cloak.
“You have—?”
“Here, Your Grace.” Harris reached into the front of his jacket and withdrew the weighty diamond.
Derek stared at the jewel fought over by so many families. An empty, cold, lifeless stone. As he accepted it and stuffed it inside his jacket, Derek’s throat seized. Lily and Flora’s life hung in the balance for this meaningless bauble. By God, he’d see that bastard in hell before he let him harm either of the people he loved. He looked briefly to his butler; a man who’d been more patient than Derek had ever deserved. “Thank you, Harris,” he said, his voice hoarsened by emotion.
Lords of Honor-The Collection Page 78
