“—three—”
Faust started to lower his face to Stoner’s. But the blue eyes moved, fastened onto him, focused. He looked confused. Then he looked affronted.
“Wait,” Faust said. “He’s alive.”
Another hand, a slender and agile one, slipped beneath Faust’s arm, fastened onto Stoner’s throat. “I’ve got a pulse,” Dr. Harris said. He pushed closer, elbowed Faust aside.
He wasn’t dead. Nothing else mattered. Faust crawled away, huddled beside Bruckmann’s secretarial station, collapsed with his back against the wall. Through the cordon of Cavanaugh’s and Dr. Harris’ bodies, he couldn’t see Stoner. But a querulous, professorial voice raised and was soothed away. It was enough.
“Where’s the stretcher?” Cavanaugh yelled.
Peckham and Sloane brought it, set it beside Stoner, backed away. The cordon of bodies moved, shifted, heaved. Then they lifted the stretcher, this time carrying obvious weight. Dr. Harris glanced at Faust, a clinical and diagnostic glance. Then they carried the stretcher from the sitting room.
Faust wanted to go with them. But his gaze stopped when it crossed a pair of legs, the most beautiful legs in the world, rising into a tweed skirt that could not camouflage the most beautiful woman in the world. Jennifer watched the stretcher pass. But she didn’t follow. She watched until the men maneuvered it through the doorway, then turned and looked at him.
The last of the oxygen sucked from the room. Her face was grave, somber, even sad. She knew what he’d done to her beloved grandfather. She had to know. She had to hate him again, she’d never want to see him again, and nothing else mattered.
Jennifer crouched beside him. Her hand touched his, tucked something into his unresponsive fingers. He managed to close them on cloth, linen, soft. He couldn’t look away from her face. But he could feel her gift. A handkerchief. She’d given him her handkerchief, and for the first time Faust realized her face was dry and his streamed with tears.
Then Jennifer rose, turned, and ran after the stretcher.
Faust found air. His chest expanded, it seemed for the first time in hours, and his head cleared. The room swirled. He dabbed his eyes, wiped his face, blew his nose.
He’d gone too far. He’d lost his perspective. They all had.
Bruckmann stood near the doorway, staring about like a landed and frightened fish. But Tanyon waited beside the desk, watching Faust. The manila folder, its papers and guilty photos, were scattered on the floor.
Something had to change.
Faust slid his arm back into the sling and pushed to his knees. He scrabbled across the floor, scooped the papers and photos back into the file, set it on the desktop, grabbed the desk’s edge, and pulled himself to his feet.
Tanyon watched him, waiting without a word. Faust cradled the folder in his left hand and carried it openly past Bruckmann as he left the sitting room, grabbing Clarke’s cigarettes and matches in passing.
In the ballroom he paused. Jennifer of course had gone, a forgotten paper still rolled into the platen of her typewriter. The Wainwrights huddled together at one desk, their hands clasped. They twisted and stared at him. Wainwright stepped in front of his wife, shielding her, his eyes smoldering.
Faust turned left and walked to the eastern stairwell. Those boots clumped behind him.
They took the stairs slowly, one gentle step at a time. It was the best he could manage. By the time they reached the guardroom, Faust’s head had cleared and he knew he’d been a fool. No matter how charming or kindly he could be, Stoner was the enemy and he should have let the old warrior die. But he’d rather be a fool than go back and withdraw his rescue, or return to Jennifer the now-grungy handkerchief in his front patch pocket. Something had to change. But not that.
In the guardroom, Faust paused beside the work table and glared at Tanyon; the first change started here. But the sergeant didn’t respond, merely waited without speaking. It seemed he agreed. Faust walked into the cell fully clothed, the folder still cradled in his hand. Tanyon closed the gate behind him.
Pym turned from the transmitter-receiver. “Sergeant, Sloane said—”
“Mr. Stoner had a heart attack and collapsed.” Tanyon locked the gate and shoved the keys into his pocket. “And I don’t know what’s going to happen so don’t ask. Now ring down to Mrs. Alcock and ask her to make Major Faust here a cup of tea. He performed first aid on Mr. Stoner and kept him alive until the medics arrived.” He rapped his knuckles on the work table in passing as he walked from the guardroom.
Pym’s jaw dropped. His grey eyes cut sideways toward the cell.
Faust dragged the table into the slant of sunlight spilling through the guardroom window, the legs scraping across the wooden floor with a noise that climbed his spine. He sat behind the table, opened the folder atop it, flipped the horrific photos over, and began to read as Pym lifted the receiver.
Chapter Seventy-Six
late afternoon
Margeaux Hall
When the clock over the radio table had ticked past five, Tanyon returned. “Dr. Harris wants to see you.”
Faust glanced up. The guardroom had stayed deserted and quiet. He’d read through Hackney’s notes twice, studied the photos and reports, and turned back to the first page again. Only at Tanyon’s entrance did he realize how late it was and how badly his arm throbbed. “Yeah, I bet. Thanks.” He closed the folder and rose.
“No problem.” Tanyon unlocked the gate.
He grimaced. “You don’t make a good nice person, so don’t take it too far.”
Tanyon paused with the gate halfway open. “We could go back to playing by the old rules, you know.”
“In your fondest fantasies.” He ducked out before Tanyon could change his mind, but paused. Pym watched them, brows lowered over his steady grey-eyed stare, as if pondering the changes underway. “Corporal Pym, I’m not trying to give you orders or anything. But no one needs to be looking at this folder.” Stoner had seen his granddaughter. Carmichael didn’t need to see his fiancée.
Pym glanced at Tanyon, then nodded. “No one will bother it. Including me.”
“Thank you.” He led the way to the infirmary, those boots clumping behind him. He’d become so used to captivity, the sound was almost reassuring.
Dr. Harris stood at the sink, washing his hands. The back windows were open, a hot breeze whispering through to the corridor, and the infirmary’s inner door stood ajar by an inch. Dr. Harris fastened a clinical eye on Faust as they entered. “Well, you look a tad better. But not much.” His voice was pitched low. He flipped off the faucet with his elbow and grabbed a towel. “How do you feel?”
“Like mincemeat.” No sense trying to fool a man who knew better.
“I don’t doubt it.” Dr. Harris poured a glass of water, took a bottle of pills from a cabinet, shook one into his hand, then gave both the pill and water to Faust. “We’ll start here.”
“Thank you.” It wasn’t an aspirin; in the moment the pill stayed on his tongue before he slugged it down, it tasted far worse. “Cripes, that’s foul.”
“With painkillers, effectiveness is directly related to flavor.” Dr. Harris took the glass and set it aside. “Let’s have a look at you.”
Together they removed his crusted and stained tunic, shirt, and undervest. Then Faust hitched onto the examining table, the breeze drifting across his bare skin, and Dr. Harris began teasing off the blackened bandage. The painkiller had advanced to the point he barely noticed the gauze tugging from the wound, a welcome relief from his previous painful care.
Dr. Harris raised his voice and called over his shoulder. “Miss Stoner?”
The inner door opened. Jennifer slipped through, pulled the door closed behind her, crossed to the sink, and washed her hands, like a professional nurse preparing to assist. This changed everything. A tingle unrelated to the breeze shivered across him, and Faust couldn’t stop his questioning glance at Dr. Harris.
“I need for Cavanaugh to watch Mr. Stoner,�
� Dr. Harris said in a discreet murmur. “As a nurse, he’s educated and observant, and an unnoticed change in the patient could be fatal at this point. However, I need someone here, as well.”
Of course. So he got to sit there, half naked, bloody, and bowed, while the woman he longed to impress took a good look at his ravaged self. The heat in his face had nothing to do with the blistering August sunshine, and he focused his attention on the polished floor as Dr. Harris snipped at the old stitches. She’d turn around any moment now.
It was as bad as he feared, her gasp audible across the room. Before he could stop himself, he glanced up. Her widened hazel eyes stared at his chest. The worst of the swelling had gone, but massive bruising, black and purple, covered the right side of his body, criss-crossed with little red stitched-up scabs and smears of crusted blood. Great. Just what he wanted her to see. His life could get no worse if he’d set out to destroy himself deliberately. As Nash said, Swords may not fight with fate.
He didn’t glance back up. “I try not to look at it.”
Her deep breath seemed loud in the quiet room. “Major Faust, I hope you’re all right.”
She spoke in a murmur, too. If both she and the doctor were whispering, then Stoner had to be resting in the adjoining room. The heat in his face intensified. At least he hadn’t spoken much.
“Thank you. I’m fine.” What else could he say?
“Actually,” Dr. Harris said, “that’s what I’d like to discuss.” Gentle pressure tugged the old stitches from the back of his arm. “You’re not all right, you know.”
Even better. “Has something else gone wrong that I don’t know about?”
Another tug. “Each time you rip these stitches open, you rip the edges of the wound.” A final tug, and Dr. Harris reached past Faust’s shoulder, handing an instrument that looked like large blunt tweezers to Jennifer. She set it on the towel atop the instrument table, followed his pointing finger, and handed him a set of small, fierce-looking scissors. “Thank you. And somehow, you always manage to force dirt through the bandage into the wound. Miss Stoner, would you draw me a bit of water?”
She murmured something indistinguishable and glided across the floor to the sink.
Fragging doctor. “It’s not like I’m doing it deliberately.”
“Right.” The scissors snipped, snipped again, and tugged at his skin. “That’s not important, you know. What’s important is that sooner or later, the edges of the wound will become too ragged for me to stitch them properly, and it will become infected.” Another snip, then Dr. Harris reached past his shoulder, taking the basin of water Jennifer handed him. “When that happens, there won’t be much I can do for you.”
“You mean you’d have to put me in the hospital?” It sounded like an escape attempt right there.
“I mean I’ll likely have to cut off your arm.”
His stomach contracted as if punched. He glared at Dr. Harris over his shoulder. “You’re trying to scare me, right?”
There wasn’t a trace of humor beneath Dr. Harris’ concentration lines and he returned Faust’s stare with a chilling sobriety. “I’m perfectly serious. And I hate amputations almost as much as autopsies. So if you push it to such a point, we’ll both be miserable.” He shoved Faust’s shoulder back about and resumed work.
If he could go back in time, he’d murder Erhard before the plane ever took off and cheerfully accept the consequences. Faust rubbed his eyes, acutely aware of the doctor behind him cleaning the injury and the wonderful woman at his side as she pretended to be busy arranging the instruments. He’d considered her personality forceful, abrupt, ferocious. Nice to know she could be discreet, as well.
His stomach wasn’t calming. The thought of permanent mutilation panicked him more than an English firing squad. He could deal with anything else, but not this. Stoner had shown him this fear during their first, seemingly ages-ago interrogation. At the time he’d thought it a distant curiosity and not something he’d have to face within the week. Now he stood face-to-face with it. And he couldn’t let it matter, either.
Hackney’s notes made clear what was at stake. Or rather, who.
As the needle slid, barely noticed, into the back of his arm, he snuck a glance at Jennifer. She’d straightened the instruments in orderly rows atop the towel, folded her hands on the table’s lip — and stared again at his chest, this time from the corner of her eye. A rosy flush tinged her round cheeks and golden sparks glinted among the brown in the eye he could see. Her breasts rose and fell in quick breaths. Just wonderful. She’d formed a horrified fascination for those bruises and couldn’t look away. For the rest of her life, she’d remember him like this.
Dr. Harris tightened the stitches with another tug but no pain. Hopefully the painkiller would last this well through the night. But he couldn’t let any of these considerations stop him, either. No matter what she thought of him, no matter what happened, he had to catch the killer tonight.
For her.
Chapter Seventy-Seven
early evening
Woodrow
That wasn’t a boy.
Jennifer leaned against the banister in the dim and silent farmhouse, clutching the laundry basket. She could think of nothing except that man and hadn’t since leaving the infirmary. His broad, hard chest, solid muscles that rippled when he moved, tight waist and oh she had to get a grip and not on the ironed shirts. Not on him, either. Right now it might hurt. No matter what else she imagined, she hadn’t imagined those awful bruises.
She forced her feet to climb the stairs. She would put the shirts away in their wardrobes. In the bedrooms. The bedrooms. No, she would not think of that man in a bedroom. But her mind would not stay blank. The geometric planes of his chest refused to be conjured away, as if he truly was a magician and had cast a spell on her. Heat surged into her face and lovely tingling electrical jolts shivered across her skin. She’d experienced them before but this time was different and much, much worse. She wouldn’t allow herself to call it better.
She’d start with Stoner’s room. Surely it would bring her to her senses; surely she’d think of him, lying grey and wan in the infirmary while Dr. Harris rang the few undamaged hospitals in the area trying to find a vacant bed. But the first breath she took across that threshold, redolent with his clean, subtle, masculine scent, barely touched with a salty sweat tang, blasted another electrical shock through her breasts and abdomen and made her shiver. She’d longed to meet a man who was Stoner’s match, and this one even smelled the same. The bitter irony of finding that match on the wrong side could not slow her galloping pulse.
Dr. Harris had warned them for months of Stoner’s danger. If it had happened at any other time, Stoner would be dead because Bruckmann, Tanyon, the Wainwrights, and their soldiers all admitted they hadn’t known the proper first aid. Neither did she. But it had happened while that man was in the room. And he’d saved Stoner’s life. She’d seen it, heard him begging Stoner not to die. She’d treasure the memory, even if she never saw him again.
With more than usual care, she arranged Stoner’s shirts, grey and pale blue and uniform khaki, in his wardrobe. He’d tried to break that man although he hadn’t expected to succeed. And thankfully he hadn’t. Instead, as she’d warned him, he’d broken himself.
She hurried from Stoner’s room to her own and stacked her folded shirts on the shelf, refusing to glance at her bed. There was a law against what she wanted. The government had passed it recently, forbidding Englishwomen giving aid and comfort to enemy soldiers, and whatever else that man was he remained an enemy officer. She could not explore his body, trace the outlines of those rippling muscles, skim the hard tiny circles of his nipples — oh, she had to get this under control. He’d sat on the examining table, his right arm against his side, his left braced out beside him, beside her, as if he wanted to wrap it around her and pull her close, and it had taken all her self-control not to step into that inviting circle.
Surely he’d known her thoug
hts. But he hadn’t looked at her, no more than a swift unhappy glance, and then he’d stared at the floor and ignored her utterly. Perhaps he didn’t hate her. But he certainly didn’t think of her in this same manner, not after Stoner had tried so hard to break him. Not after she’d helped.
And not after she’d slugged him and split his lip.
That magnificent man had stopped and looked at her through the blackout curtains. And then he’d moved on.
She flushed again, grabbed the laundry basket, and burst into Harriet’s room. Already its cheerful yellow coziness had an empty feel to it, a bare layer of dust across the dresser and a hollow sound when she opened the wardrobe. Everything was just so awful. If only Harriet was here, to commiserate, gossip, cheer her with her giddiness and laughter—
—there was something on the wardrobe shelf. Jennifer set the ironed shirts aside, reached into the darkness beneath the swaying line of dresses, and rummaged until her fingers closed on stiff cloth. She pulled out a man’s handkerchief, plain and cheap, crumpled into a ball and stiffened with dark, rusty stains. Within a second, she knew what they were and those exciting electrical jolts shuddered into horror.
There on the rack, right before her, hung Harriet’s missing dress, the same shade as the eye of a daisy.
Chapter Seventy-Eight
early evening
Margeaux Hall
Loud voices, quickly hushed, spoke in the corridor outside the guardroom. Faust straightened over Hackney’s notes. It had been Bruckmann’s voice, but it hadn’t been Tanyon who’d hushed him and not many other people in Stoner’s command carried such authority. It had to be her. Faust tucked the awful photos to the bottom of the stack, pulled those of the living girls to the top, and closed the folder, rising to his feet.
He expected her to erupt into the guardroom in her usual tempestuous manner. But she paused in the doorway and peered in, as if uncertain of her welcome. Her auburn hair curved about her ear, brushing her jaw line just as he wished to, and her determined chin lowered. “Major Faust.”
Deal with the Devil Page 43
