Chapter Five
Disgraced.
Emma had disgraced herself. There was simply no one else to blame. True, she had not asked Lord Wolverton to come to her defense today. But neither had he insisted she rush to his rescue, either. Or into his arms.
Those strong protective arms that had anchored her to his magnificently built body.
She’d been married for years and had never known a need so keen, so deep reaching that it overcame her judgment.
Had she felt sorry for him? Or for herself?
With a few simple words he had dismantled her emotions.
To think that her brother or his wife might have walked in, and she would have had to explain that—that she had come close to sleeping with a stranger, peer of the realm or not.
She lifted her hand to her heart. She wasn’t sure whether she ought to pay penance or do something unspeakably wicked like…
stand at the top of the stairs and bellow a few swear words. She whispered them instead.
“Damn. Damnation.”
What had come over her? She wasn’t the one who’d been hit on the head.
However, she was the one who had let herself be half seduced by a man of his appalling reputation when no other man had managed to steal as much as a kiss on the cheek from her in years.
Not even that Sir William, whose shabby behavior made her feel unwholesome and—Adrian’s love play had left her feeling vulnerable but not violated.
Upon escaping him, she should have experienced any number of appropriate reactions.
But not this sparkling invigoration, this sense of Sleeping Beauty awakened after a hundred years of dormant desire, of being swept up into the stars, of walking…
“The hallstand, Emma,” a familiar masculine voice warned behind her. “Watch where you’re walking. We don’t need another invalid on our hands.”
A guilty blush pinkened her face at her brother’s gentle reprimand. “Well, who moved it, then?” she demanded, laughing shakily.
The intelligent blue eyes of her second eldest brother, Lord Heath Boscastle, studied her for a moment.
Of all her family members he was the most protective and perceptive.
And there was certainly something for him to perceive if he looked deeply enough.
“No one. The hallstand has always stood there. Are you sleepwalking, Emma?”
“Of course not. It’s my habit to check on the girls before bed every night.”
“I know,” he said in amusement. “However, they sleep in the other wing on the floor above. As they have ever since they arrived here.” His gaze drifted past her to Adrian’s door. “I thought you might be on your way to check on Wolf,” he said in a casual tone she knew better than to trust.
Wolf. She cringed inwardly at the too-apt sobriquet.
Spying in the military had refined Heath’s instincts.
She would absolutely die if he guessed what had just happened.
She could not understand it herself. Pray God Adrian was a man who kept his promises, or, well, she cringed to imagine the repercussions.
As calmly as she could, she answered, “I did check on him, naturally. One feels a sense of responsibility when a man has been incapacitated on one’s behalf.”
His lips thinned into a hint of a smile. “Incapacitated? I think he could have been struck by an entire table and still survive. But I am curious, Emma. Just how responsible for his well-being do you hold yourself?”
This was the test. The trial by Boscastle torture. Heath’s blue eyes boring into one’s inner thoughts like a tomb-raider exhuming a book that held the secrets to the universe. He knew nothing. How could he know?
Furthermore, she was a grown woman, not a debutante, although until this moment she’d never had cause to lie to her family.
“I hold myself responsible in the extreme,” she replied, her voice unwavering, her regard challenging him to make more of it at his own peril.
Brother and sister, they stood as equals on the Boscastle sibling battlefield.
“In the extreme. Interesting choice of words, Emma.”
“Would you expect any less of me?” she inquired in an even tone that gently sent the ball back into his court.
He hesitated. “I cannot recall a similar situation in the past by which to judge you.”
“Surely you know me well enough to realize that my duty to obligation will always be met.”
He stared down at her with such tender intensity that she was tempted to throw herself into his arms and plead for understanding. For guidance. And if he’d probed any deeper, she might indeed have been brought to that humiliating pass.
But Adrian had given his word that no one would ever know. Their secret. Their shared sin.
Heath’s voice penetrated her reverie. “The line between obligation and inclination often becomes blurred, and if one is not looking up—”
“—then one walks into the hallstand.” She touched his arm. “Thank you for your concern,” she said with deliberate lightness. “Are you on your way to visit him?”
“Is he awake?”
“He was a few moments ago. I cannot vouch for his temper, however. He appears to have a complete intolerance for his infirmity.” Although infirm in no manner described the full-blooded devil who had not only discovered a chink in her armor but had aroused womanly instincts she had long believed to be becalmed.
In a single day, she had discovered that the one man she believed to be her decent admirer was anything but, and the man of an indecent past who had defended her honor—Well, it remained to be proven exactly what he was and why she now felt constrained to defend her interest in him.
It rained during the first night of his recuperation.
Adrian had forgotten how different the English rain was from the storms that swept across the Far East. English rain burrowed deep into the marrow.
Despite it or perhaps because of it, he drifted into a fitful sleep.
Into this miserable clime he had been born.
He would have found mordant amusement in his plight except that the laudanum had taken effect. He felt its soporific power seep into his system, and beneath it, penetrating even deeper, the warmth of Emma Boscastle. The touch of a gentlewoman’s hand. A soft yet reprimanding voice.
The door opened slowly.
Adrian glanced up, a smile playing at the corners of his mouth.
Please, let her have come back. She would probably need an excuse.
Claim she’d forgotten to shut the drapes or move the stool from the middle of the floor so he wouldn’t fall in the night.
He didn’t give a damn what reason she used.
He’d be a good boy for once and not tease.
He would beg her forgiveness and promise to behave if she would talk to him.
He knew what Emma must think of him. He was a poor friend who took advantage, a scoundrel, a seducer.
The truth, however, was that he’d had only two other lovers in his life.
One had been a half-caste courtesan who’d taught him everything he was dying to know about sex.
His last long-term affair had been with a French gentlewoman who’d taught him everything he wished he had never learned about love.
“Are you going to come in or not?” he asked quietly. “If you do, I will apologize for what I did.”
The bed curtains rolled back on their rings. He reclined in a relaxed pose against the pillows; he had to restrain himself to wait patiently for her to approach him.
A bloody good thing it turned out to be, too. It wasn’t Emma’s delicate, disembodied features that materialized from out of the shadows.
It was the lean, cynical face of her older brother, Lieutenant Colonel Lord Heath Boscastle, who stared down at Adrian for several meaningful seconds before inquiring with a guarded smile, “Apologize for what, exactly?”
A less seasoned gentleman would have cracked under the strain of that sphinxlike stare. Adrian remembered rumors of French spies who spoke secretly of their respect for the quiet-spoken, enigmatic Englishman who had not ever broken under torture.
Ofttimes Adrian wondered what Heath’s bravery had cost him personally. No one would ever know. Heath was the type of man who would shrug off either praise or acknowledgment of what he considered to have been his duty. One presumed he would carry his secrets to the grave. He was a fine officer.
In fact, Adrian had more than once regretted he’d not enlisted in the regular British military and fought alongside the Boscastle brothers and their ilk.
He’d never formed the camaraderie amongst his peers that other nobly born military officers had.
But then he had been seeking to escape his aristocratic identity.
In fact, he’d left England at sixteen, his life made intolerable by his father’s taunts.
He had met Heath Boscastle not long after at a Prussian military academy.
Heath had gone on to a quiet but personal glory.
Adrian had given himself to adventure and darker acclaim.
Yet he could still remember his last conversation with the man who now claimed to be his father, Guy Fulham, the Duke of Scarfield. Well, it had been more of an eavesdropping until Scarfield had caught Adrian by the scruff of the neck and humiliated him in the midst of a house party.
“Look at you, listening at keyholes like a dirty little thief. But then I shouldn’t be surprised, should I?
Your mother was naught but a whore, and your natural sire was a soldier.
Not even an officer, if you please. An ordinary, ignorant soldier who didn’t even have the wherewithal to survive a year in battle. ”
His life had started to make sense then.
His father had grown aloof since the death of Adrian’s mother four years earlier.
It hadn’t taken him long to figure out a few unsavory facts about his place in the world.
The old duke wasn’t his blood, as it turned out.
Soon enough the abuses and malignant neglect of the man he’d believed to be his father assumed a more dramatic meaning.
Adrian’s young mother, Constance, had apparently taken a lover, a common soldier who happened to be passing through the village, and that’s why the duke had come to despise the sight of Adrian.
The old bugger thought his heir was a by-blow.
The revelation should have broken Adrian’s spirit.
Another boy would have been shamed by repeatedly being reminded he was the accidental product of an adulterous affair.
Instead, it cheered him immeasurably. Gave him a new purpose in life.
He decided to become a blood-and-guts soldier like his real father.
He would show the duke what he thought of his stuffy old world.
He’d become a great military adventurer, a wealthy nabob, and flaunt his successes under the aristocracy’s nose.
Only it hadn’t worked out that way at all. Revenge, Adrian had discovered, rarely did. Yet by the time he’d set upon his path, he couldn’t turn back. He was as much a victim of his vengeance as he was the perpetrator.
He hadn’t counted on the rest of the world not exactly agreeing to his half-cocked plans. Or himself. Fighting had knocked most of the anger out of him. In fact, he’d gorged himself on so much violence that he had become numb.
He’d had military adventures, all right.
Only his reputation had been built as a mercenary, not a hero.
He had trained native soldiers to beef up British forces and subdued insurgents in the battle against French encroachment on foreign holdings.
The rulers who appreciated being spared an assassin’s knife had rewarded him in gold, rupees, and diamonds.
He had been granted trading rights by East India Company and held mercantile interests in Bombay, Madras, China, Persia, and India.
He’d made his name by agreeing to fight anywhere for a price.
And then a year or so ago the duke had the gall to ask Adrian home, claiming to be stricken with some mortal affliction.
He wrote that he hoped to make amends. Home?
For the love of hell, Adrian had only come back to England because he’d be a fool to refuse an inheritance that was his by right.
No other reason, although he was ready to settle down.
And if he wanted to claim a woman forbidden to him by friendship?
“Adrian.”
He glanced up moodily at the mild reproach in his host’s voice.
“Yes?”
“I asked you what it is you are apologizing for.”
“Apologizing? Ah.” He frowned. The head injury must have jolted his brains, after all. He rarely brooded on the past. “Well, I’m sorry for all the bother. It’s bloody embarrassing to have a chair broken on your noggin and then end up being cosseted like a vestal virgin.”
Heath sighed. “You were defending my sister. There’s no need to apologize for that.”
Adrian regarded the other man with a scowl. “Except that I bollixed it up. The true offender sneaked away, and I fainted at your sister’s feet like a girl. In fact, now that I think about it, I’m of a mind to finish what I started. Where does Sir William reside?”
Heath shook his head. “Drake and Devon were already planning to have breakfast with him when Emma pleaded for mercy. She’s not as scandal-prone as the rest of us. Let this go for her sake.”
“I don’t need anyone else to stand in for me,” he said heatedly. “I could have challenged him myself. Or not.”
Heath laughed. “Actually, friend, I’m afraid you’re not quite capable of even standing by yourself, let alone fighting a duel.”
“Damn it all to hell,” Adrian said mildly. “Are you going to insist I stay?”
“I think you need another spoonful of that sedative.”
“I think I should take the whole bedeviled bottle.”