Slightly Tempted

by Mary Balogh

  The hand over her mouth began to shake. It felt cold and clammy.

  “Help!” she called weakly in the direction of the road. She cleared her throat and called a little more firmly. “Help!”

  Apart from a few incurious glances, no one took any notice of her. All were doubtless too preoccupied with their own suffering.

  And then she dropped to one knee beside the dead man, intent upon she knew not what. Was she going to pray over him? Keep vigil over him? But did not even a dead stranger deserve some kind notice at his passing? He had been alive yesterday, with a history and hopes and dreams and concerns of his own. She reached out a trembling hand and set it lightly against the side of his face as if in benediction.

  Poor man. Ah, poor man.

  He was cold. But not entirely so. There was surely a thread of warmth beneath his skin. Rachel snatched back her hand and then lowered it gingerly again to his neck and the pulse point there.

  There was a faint beating beneath her fingers.

  He was still alive.

  “Help!” she cried again, leaping to her feet and trying desperately to attract the notice of someone on the road. No one paid her any attention.

  “He is alive!” she shrieked with all the power her lungs could muster. She was desperate for help. Perhaps his life could still be saved. But time must surely be running out for him. She yelled even more loudly, if that were possible. “And he is my husband. Please help me, somebody.”

  A gentleman on horseback—not a military man—turned his attention her way and she thought for a moment that he was going to ride to her assistance. But a great giant of a man—a sergeant—with a bloody bandage around his head and over one eye turned off the road instead and came lumbering toward her, calling out to her as he came.

  “Coming, missus,” he said. “How bad hurt is he?”

  “I do not know. Very badly, I fear.” She was sobbing aloud, Rachel realized, just as if the unconscious man really were someone dear to her. “Please help him. Oh, please help him.”

  RACHEL HAD FOOLISHLY EXPECTED THAT ONCE THEY reached Brussels all would be well, that there would be a whole host of physicians and surgeons waiting to tend the wounds of just the group to which she had attached herself. She walked beside the wagon on which Sergeant William Strickland had somehow found space for the naked, unconscious man. Someone had produced a tattered piece of sacking with which to cover him partially, and Rachel had contributed her shawl for the same purpose. The sergeant trudged along at her side, introducing himself and explaining that he had lost an eye in the battle but that he would have returned to his regiment after being treated in a field hospital except that he had found that he was being discharged from the army, which apparently had no use for one-eyed sergeants. He had been paid up to date, his dismissal had been written into his pay book, and that was that.

  “A lifetime of soldiering swilled down the gutter like so much sewage, so to speak,” he said sadly. “But no matter. I’ll come about. You have your man to worry about, missus, and don’t need to listen to my woes. He will pull through, God willing.”

  When they did reach Brussels, of course, there was such a huge number of wounded and dying about the Namur Gates that the unconscious man, who could not speak for himself, might never have seen a surgeon if the sergeant had not exerted the authority to which he was no longer entitled and barked out a few orders and cleared a path to one of the makeshift hospital tents. Rachel did not watch while a musket ball was dug out of the man’s thigh—thank heaven he was unconscious, she thought, feeling faint at the very thought of what was happening to him. When she saw him again, both his leg and his head were heavily bandaged and he was wrapped in a coarse blanket. Sergeant Strickland had found a bier and two private soldiers, who loaded the man onto it.

  Then the sergeant turned to her.

  “The sawbones thinks your man has a chance if the fever don’t get him and if the knock on his head didn’t crack his skull,” he told her bluntly. “Where to, missus?”

  It was a question that had Rachel gaping back at him. Where to, indeed? Who was the wounded man, and where did he belong? There was no knowing until he regained consciousness. In the meantime, she had claimed him for herself. She had called him her husband in a desperate—and successful—attempt to attract someone’s attention back there in the forest.

  But where could she take him? The only home she had in Brussels was the brothel. And she was only a guest there—a totally dependent guest at that, since she had almost no money of her own with which to help pay the rent. Worse than that, she was very largely responsible for the fact that Bridget and the other three had lost almost all of their money too. How could she now take the wounded man there and ask the ladies to tend and feed him until they could find out where he belonged and arrange to have him taken there?

  But what else could she do?

  “You are in shock, missus,” the sergeant said, taking her solicitously by the elbow. “Take a deep breath now and let it out slowly. At least he is alive. Thousands aren’t.”

  “We live on the Rue d’Aremberg,” she said, shaking her head as if to clear it. “Follow me, if you please.”

  She strode off in the direction of the brothel.

  SLIGHTLY DANGEROUS

  * * *

  On Sale June 2004

  BARON RENABLE’S CARRIAGE CAME RATHER EARLY in the morning to fetch Christine to Schofield Park. Cecily, looking harried, gratefully accepted her offer to help with some final preperations. And so, after a brief visit to her appointed chamber—a small box room at the back of the house wedged between two chimneys, both of which blocked the view from the window and gave her only a narrow glimpse of the kitchen garden below— to take off her bonnet, fluff up her curls, and unpack her meager belongings, Christine dashed up to the nursery to greet the children and then spent the rest of the morning and part of the afternoon being rushed off her feet with various errands. She might have run for the rest of the day if Cecily had not suddenly spotted her in the middle of the afternoon, dashing upstairs with an armful of towels for one of the more opulent guest chambers, and shrieked in protest at her appearance.

  “You simply must get dressed, Christine,” she said faintly, one hand over her heart, “and do something with your hair. I said you might help. I did not intend that you be treated like a maid. Are those really towels over your arm? Go to your room this instant, you wretch, and start behaving like a guest.”

  Less than half an hour later Christine appeared downstaits clad decently if not dazzlingly in her second-best sprigged muslin with her curls freshly brushed to a shine. She positively despised the fact that she was nervous—and that she had allowed herself to be trapped into this. She could be in the middle of giving her weekly geography lesson at the school now and actually enjoying herself.

  “Oh, there you are,” Cecily said when Christine joined her in the hall. She grabbed one of her hands and squeezed it rather painfully. “This is going to be such fun, Christine. If only I have not forgotten anything. And if only I do not vomit when I see guests approaching. Why do I always want to vomit on such occasions? It is really quite ungenteel.”

  “As usual,” Christine assured her, “everything will go so dazzlingly well that you will be declared the summer’s finest hostess.”

  “Oh, do you think so?” Cecily set one hand over her heart as if to still its erratic beating. “I like you hair short, Christine. I almost had a fit of the vapors when you told me you were going to have it cut, but you look young and pretty again, as if someone had turned back the calendar just for you—not that you were ever not pretty. I am mortally jealous. What was that you said, Bertie?”

  But Lord Renable, a short distance away, had merely cleared his throat with a long rumbling sound.

  “Carriage approaching, Cece,” he said. “Here we go.” He regarded her gloomily, as if they were expecting the bailiffs to invade Schofield Park and haul off all their earthly possessions. “You go upstairs and hide,
Christine. You can have another hour of freedom yet, I daresay.”

  Cecily tapped his arm none too gently and drew a deep and audible breath. She appeared to grow three inches and was instantly transformed into a gracious, aristocratic hostess who had never in her life felt a single qualm of nerves or the tendency to vomit in a crisis.

  Though a relapse did threaten when she looked down suddenly and realized that she had a half-full glass of lemonade in her right hand.

  “Take this, someone!” she commanded, looking around for the closest footman. “Oh, gracious me, I might have spilled it over someone’s boots or muslins.”

  “I’ll take it,” Christine said, laughing and suiting action to words. “And spilling it over someone sounds far more like something I would do than you, Cecily. I’ll take myself and the lemonade out of harm’s way.”

  She escaped up the stairs on her way toward the primrose sitting room, where the other lady guests were to join her. For some reason known only to herself, Cecily always kept the ladies and gentlemen apart at her parties until she was free to welcome them all to the drawing room for the tea that was the official opening of festivities.

  But she paused on the landing, which curved back above the hallway so that one could look down over the banister. The carriage Bertie had heard must have been closer than he thought. The first guests were already stepping inside, and Christine could not resist looking to see if they included anyone she knew.

  They were two gentlemen. One of them—carelessly dressed in a brown coat that was wrinkled and too large for him, dark blue pantaloons that bagged slightly at the knee, scuffed boots that had seen better days, a cravat that appeared to have been thrown about his neck with haste and without any reference to either a mirror or a valet, shirt points that drooped without benefit of starch, and fair hair that stuck out in all directions as if he had that moment lifted his head from the pillow—was Hector Magnus, Viscount Mowbury.

  “Ah, it’s you, is it, Cece?” he said, smiling vaguely at his sister as if he had expected someone else to greet him at her house. “How d’you do, Bertie?”

  Christine smiled affectionately and would have called down if it had not been for the gentleman with him. He could not have been more the antithesis of Hector if he had tried. He was tall and well formed and dressed with consummate elegance in a coat of blue superfine over a waistcoat of embroidered gray, with darker gray pantoloons and white-topped, shining Hessian boots. His neckcloth was tied neatly and expertly but without ostentation. His starched shirt points hugged his jaw just so. Both garments were sparkling white. He held a tall hat in one hand. His hair was dark and thick, expertly cut and neatly worn.

  His shoulders and chest looked broad and powerful beneath the exquisite tailoring, his hips slender in contrast, and his thighs very obviously in no need of a tailor’s padding.

  But it was not so much his impressive appearance that held Christine silent and rooted to the spot, spying when she ought to have moved on. It was more his utter assurance of manner and bearing, and the proud, surely arrogant, tilt of his head. He was clearly a man who ruled his world with ease and exacted instant obedience from his inferiors, who would, of course, include almost every other living mortal—a fanciful thought, perhaps, but she realized that this must be the infamous Duke of Bewcastle.

  He looked everything she had ever been led to expect of him.

  He was an aristocrat from the topmost hair on his head to the soles of his boots.

  She could see something of his face as Cecily and Bertie greeted him and he bowed and then straightened. It was handsome in a cold, austere way, with stern jaw, thin lips, high cheekbones, and a prominent, slightly hooked, finely chiseled nose.

  She could not see his eyes, though. He moved almost directly beneath her as Cecily turned her attention back to Hector. Christine leaned slightly over the banister rail at the very moment when he tipped back his head and looked up and spotted her.

  She might have drawn back in instant embarrassment at being caught spying if she had not been so startled by the very eyes she had been trying to see. They seemed to bore right through her head to the back of her skull. She could not be sure of the color of those eyes—pale blue? pale gray?—but she was not too far away from them to feel their effect.

  No wonder he had such a reputation!

  For one fleeting moment she was given the distinct impression that the Duke of Bewcastle might well be a very dangerous man. Her heart thudded painfully in her chest as if she had just been caught in the act of peeping into a room through a forbidden knothole in the door at some scandal proceeding within.

  And then something extraordinary happened.

  He winked at her.

  Or so it seemed for yet another fleeting moment.

  But then, even as her eyes widened in shock, Christine could see that he was wiping at the eye that had winked, and she realized that when she had bent forward over the rail so had the glass in her hand. She had dripped lemonade down into the eye of the Duke of Bewcastle.

  “Oh!” she exclaimed. “I am so terribly sorry.”

  And then she turned and scurried away as fast as her legs would carry her. How excruciatingly embarrassing! How horridly clumsy of her! She had promised not to trip over his feet on the very first day, but it had not occurred to her also to promise not to pour lemonade in his eye.

  She desperately hoped this was no harbinger of things to come.

  She must compose herself before any of the ladies joined her, she thought after she had arrived safely in the primrose salon. And she must stay well out of the orbit of Duke of Bewcastle for the next thirteen and a half days. It really ought not to be difficult. He probably would not even recognize her when he saw her again. And she was not the sort of person he would notice in the normal course of things.

  The Duke of Bewcastle could not, despite the fact that she had inadvertently assaulted him with lemonade, be even the slightest bit dangerous to someone as lowly as she.

  And why should she be so discomposed by him anyway? He was not the sort of man she could ever wish to impress.

  SLIGHTLY TEMPTED

  A Dell Book / January 2004

  Published by

  Bantam Dell

  A Division of Random House, Inc.

  New York, New York

  All rights reserved

  Copyright © 2004 by Mary Balogh

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  eISBN: 978-0-440-33491-0

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