Chapter 6
Chapter Six
Magnus hadn’t ever undressed a fine lady before, but it didn’t take a great intellect to deduce the particulars. He’d already removed her mud-stained redingote earlier. Simple enough, really. All that remained was to divest her of her gown and—he assumed—her corset.
A vastly different business from removing an overcoat.
It was bloody awkward, truth be told.
As he leaned over her on the bed, he privately debated whether it might not be better to wait for the doctor to arrive or for Charlotte to regain her memory, whichever came first. But evening was already approaching.
And Turner was still away on his possibly fruitless errand, returning heaven knew when.
There was nothing Magnus could do but get the unpleasant task over with.
“Are the fastenings at the front or the back?” he asked her.
Charlotte regarded him warily from her tower of pillows, her anxious face illuminated in a halo of lamplight.
She was still worryingly pale, and her hair was in complete disarray.
It fanned out all around her in dark auburn tendrils, putting him in mind of a mermaid who had been mistakenly washed ashore.
She moistened her lips. “At the back, I think.”
Magnus moved to slide his hands around her waist. He paused only briefly to receive her permission. “All right?”
She seemed to steel herself. “All right.”
He gathered her up from the bed, lifting her into a sitting position. She stifled a moan of pain. “Easy,” Magnus said. “Won’t take a moment.”
“My head—”
“I know. Lean on me.”
She slowly relaxed against his chest. Her cheek came to rest in the crook of his shoulder and her arms crept tentatively around his midsection. Touch by devastating touch, overwhelming him with her trembling warmth, her rose-bud sweet smell.
His muscles jumped beneath her fingers. It was all he could do not to flinch.
No one had touched him in a very long while. Not in this way, with complete and utter trust. As though he were someone safe. Not a rogue or a monster, but a refuge in a storm. A man she might run to rather than from.
He fumbled at the row of tiny buttons at the back of her long-sleeved bodice. He’d always considered himself a dexterous fellow. Now, he seemed to be all thumbs. “Blasted fastenings,” he said crossly. “Who the devil needs so many?”
“I don’t know,” she said weakly.
“And you put this on yourself this morning?” He opened another five buttons in clumsy succession. “Or don’t you remember that either?”
Charlotte didn’t answer.
Unfastening the final button, Magnus parted the back of her bodice. There was a startling flash of raspberry pink satin.
His pulse jumped.
It was her corset, by God. Hiding there beneath her elegant lady’s clothing, as bold as the costume of a French courtesan.
He stared at it for a moment in the lamplight, nonplussed.
Was this the style now among English young ladies? To be perfectly proper on the outside and daringly risqué underneath?
Or perhaps it was merely her own style, and all of a piece with her practice of keeping one suitor dangling on a string while she conspired to secretly meet another. A lady of questionable morals, then, in both character and dress.
Or no morals at all.
Magnus treated her with no less respect because of it. Who was he to pass judgment on her character? Indeed, it was far wiser not to think of her at all.
An impossible task given their present positions.
His only hope was to focus on the mechanics of the business as single-mindedly as possible until he was finished.
Stiffening his jaw, he reached for the metal hooks that closed her skirts.
Another series of straps and ribbons lay beneath them—the fastenings of some fiendish wire underpinning which his masculine brain could scarcely fathom.
“Not how I’d imagined spending my day,” he said under his breath. “Dealing with all this frippery.”
Her skirts dispensed with, he took hold of her corset strings to untie them.
“It fastens in the front,” Charlotte murmured against his shoulder.
His fingers stilled. “It laces here.”
“There are hooks in the front. It’s…easier.”
“It’s diabolical is what it is.” Magnus shifted her weight from his shoulder. One hand at her waist, he used the other to pull her bodice off of her one sleeve at a time. Her arms fell limply to her sides when he’d finished.
Her blazing pink corset came next. It fell away from her inch by inch, exposing a slim, shapely figure shielded by nothing more than a fine linen shift.
Heart beating ridiculously hard, Magnus tossed the corset onto a nearby chair, along with her bodice. He silently thanked God that there was no need to hold her any longer. The rest he could do with her lying down. “If I may?” he asked.
“Please,” she said.
He gently helped her to lean back onto the bed. She exhaled an unsteady breath as her head came to rest on the stack of pillows. A wince of pain contracted her brow.
Magnus withdrew his hand from her waist. His fingers flexed briefly into a fist. It was either that or hit a wall.
Where was the wretched doctor when they needed him? Taking care of some squire in Upper Beadwell? To hell with the squire! And to hell with Upper Beadwell too!
“Husband?” Charlotte queried.
“Stop calling me that,” Magnus snapped.
She stared at him with wide, wounded eyes, provoking an immediate surge of guilt.
“It’s Lord Eversleigh,” he said. “Or Captain Sterling. Or…Or Magnus.”
Or idiot, he might have added, for snarling at her so readily.
Gritting his teeth against an apology, he methodically removed her skirts and her wire underpinnings, casting them onto the heap with her bodice and corset.
She looked smaller without her armor. More vulnerable. As though anyone and anything might hurt her.
Magnus felt an unsettling surge of protectiveness for her.
Rising from the bed, he swiftly covered her with the quilt before retreating to the washstand to wet another cloth. Good God, he was perspiring. One would think he’d just summited a Far Eastern peak or fought a treacherous naval battle.
It rather felt as though he had.
An uncomfortable silence stretched between them. He hoped she might have drifted off again. But when he chanced a covert glance in her direction, he found her not asleep, but still looking at him.
“I didn’t mean to frighten you,” he said gruffly.
“You didn’t,” she replied.
Magnus wrung out the washcloth over the basin. “You’ll be thinking me some wild beast who takes his ill-temper out on his guests.” His brows sank as he returned to the bed. “And I am,” he added.
Charlotte’s gaze held his. “I’m not scared of wild beasts.”
He looked back at her steadily, his chest gone peculiarly tight. For an instant, he dared imagine—
Mr. Aloysisus chose that moment to utter a low growl from beneath the wardrobe.
The tightness in Magnus’s chest was replaced by a bitter and immediate understanding. What an idiot he was. Too flustered from having unclothed her to recognize the obvious. She’d meant her dog, of course. Isn’t that why she’d been up on the wall in the first place? To find the little menace?
Uttering a wry huff at his own stupidity, Magnus applied the wet washcloth to Charlotte’s wound, doing his level best to ignore her soft gasps and whimpers as he cleaned it.
He wasn’t her husband. He wasn’t anything to her.
Just a man solely concerned with his own well-being.
That he was caring for it at all was a consequence of that selfishness, not on account of any finer feeling.
“You’ll find that not all beasts in this part of the world are created equal, my lady,” he said. “Best to proceed with caution.”