Under Your Spell Read online

  “’Tis surely a worthy try,” he said, and steadying his stance, secured his gelding beside the mare.

  She was watching him when he straightened, and he wished, for a moment, that he were a better actor, able to pretend all was well. That he was young and hale and able.

  “Come,” she said, tone somber.

  They walked to her darkened house together. It was no easy task to control his limp, but he almost managed. Still, he doubted she was fooled.

  No servants met them at the door. The place was silent and dim but for a fire that flickered from a distant room, casting the vestibule in mottled shadows.

  She led him through the echoing foyer to a salon that boasted the fire, and pointed to a brocade chair that stood beside a little table. A small, fat book of poems sat primly upon the oiled oak. “Sit,” she ordered, and he did, trying not to wince and failing rather miserably.

  She raised a brow and he forced a grin, not adverse to making her believe he still tried to solicit her pity. Indeed, seeing her remove her bonnet and let her chestnut curls trail down her back made him more than willing to play the rogue. Her feet were bare and narrow beneath the hem of her strange black skirt, and the sight of them conjured up unwanted imaginings of more bare skin.

  “Perhaps I should spend the night,” he said.

  She stared at him a breathless moment, then laughed quietly and left the room, but she returned in a minute, carrying a basin and a cloth draped over one slim arm. The firelight gilded her magical features, setting her face aglow and her hair ablaze. It cascaded down her back like molten copper, alive in waves of variegated golds and reds.

  Soaking the rag, she wrung it out and stepped up close. Touching it to his ear, she washed it gently, then rinsed the cloth again before carefully probing the wound beside his temple. “The cut is not terribly deep, but it might well become inflamed. You should see a physician.”

  She was close enough for him to smell her scent. It was strangely calming. Earthy. Friendly. Soothing his aches, easing his memories. But he would be a fool to assume she was a friend. What the hell had she been doing outside Grey’s house?

  “I’ve had some contact with doctors,” he said, his voice casual. Perhaps he was a better thespian than he knew. “As it turns out, I do not care for them so very much.”

  “You shouldn’t let this go untreated.”

  “I am told I have a marvelous ability to heal.”

  “How nice for you.” She was scowling at his head. “This may require stitches.”

  He ignored her statement. “What was his name?” he asked.

  “His?”

  “The lucky lad on Gallows Road?”

  “Oh.” She smiled a little, a woman of mystery. “A lady of quality doesn’t tell.”

  “I think you may be confused, lass.”

  “Oh?” She washed again.

  “A lady of quality doesn’t sleep with millers’ sons in a section of town where the majority of the population are cutthroats and thieves.”

  “Oh yes,” she said, looking thoughtful. “That was it.”

  Her eyes shone like cut emeralds in the wavering firelight. Her lips twitched entrancingly, but he would not be distracted. “So, who was the fortunate fellow?”

  “No one with which to concern yourself,” she said, but then her gaze fell and her eyes widened as she saw past where his fingers tried to hide his severed breeches. “You were stabbed!”

  Damnation! He didn’t bother to glance down. “Beautiful and astute,” he said.

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “I was trying to be manly.”

  “Then you were doing a terrible job of it.”

  He managed a smile. “I’ve endured worse wounds.”

  His trousers had been ripped open. Blood soaked the fabric. Perhaps he should have gone straight home, but the chance to be here with her, before the fire, with her fingers soft against his skin, was all but irresistible.

  She looked a bit shaken, he noticed, but somehow her worry didn’t quite jive with the scene he had witnessed outside Grey’s. Aye, perhaps she had been afraid, but she had also been frightfully brave. Of course, one did not preclude the other. He had learned that from Monkey, a pale-faced cabin boy with shaky hands and eyes so wide they swallowed one’s soul. A boy too young to leave his mother’s side, much less to die on a leaky vessel half a lifetime from home. A boy who should have been climbing trees and teasing apple-cheeked girls, instead of delivering gunpowder to a faulty cannon that would take his life. Damn Fowler for the battle-lusty bastard he was. And damn himself for allowing the bright-eyed Monkey to be drawn into such lunacy.

  “You’ll have to take them off,” she said.

  Drake focused on her, drawing himself from the darkling memories. “I beg your pardon.”

  “Your breeches,” she said. “You shall have to remove them.”

  No. He wouldn’t. He raised one brow. “So soon after the miller’s son? I am flattered, lass.”

  “Take them off,” she repeated evenly, and left the room.

  He leaned his head back against the chair and wondered what the hell he’d stumbled on to. Who was she? Was there truly a miller’s son? And why did he find her so ungodly appealing, he wondered, but in a minute she had reappeared with a tray of bottles and bags. She paused in the doorway, eyeing his still-clothed legs. “For a military man, you don’t take orders very well.”

  “Perhaps that is why I never made captain.” Or perhaps it was because he had threatened to decapitate Fowler with a boarding axe. Had the crew not intervened, the world would be a better place, but Monkey would still be dead.

  “You don’t want it to become infected.”

  “It already has,” he said, and put the ragged memories behind him.

  She watched him with inquisitive, spring-bright eyes. “What if I promise to sleep with you if you cooperate?”

  Despite himself, he felt his interest stir. “Would you?”

  Their gazes held. Heat flared between them.

  “No,” she said.

  He couldn’t help the smile that tugged at his lips. She was an enigma. But he didn’t want an enigma. He had made a vow to himself to find peace and comfort. Somewhere quiet and calm where he would learn to forget. But that was before he’d learned less than three weeks earlier of Sarah’s death. “You’re making me quite confused,” he confessed.

  “Good.” She gave him a glance from the corner of her eye as she fiddled with the cork on a round, cut-glass bottle. “Take off your breeches.”

  “No.”

  She faced him, arms akimbo. “I’ll give you the name of the gentleman I was visiting.”

  “I thought he was a miller’s son.”

  “Perhaps I should have said gentle man.” She said the words with slow appreciation, fostering thoughts of another’s hands against her skin, but he shoved the images aside. Surely he had more important things to consider. His sister was dead, after all. Shouldn’t he find out why? Shouldn’t he do something worthwhile after his wasted years at sea?

  Reaching down, he unbuttoned his breeches. She turned away as he slid them down his legs. The left one was hale, muscular enough. But the right was a twisted branch of agony, an ugly, blighted limb, puckered with scar tissue and torture.

  “Good Lord!” she breathed.

  He clenched his jaw, then forced himself to relax, to look up, to lean back, as if he were not embarrassed, as if his very life had not been torn from him on that hideous day eight months ago.

  “How did you live through that?” she murmured.

  He realized he was gripping the chair’s arms and eased up a bit, breathing evenly. “I am extremely strong.”

  He’d meant it as a jest to lighten the mood, but she barely seemed to notice he had spoken. “The bone was shattered,” she whispered.

  His throat felt dry. “Yes.”

  Her eyes looked too large for her winter-white face. “And protruding.”

  The memories made
his stomach lurch. “Yes.”

  “But they didn’t amputate.”

  They had threatened, had held him down, had touched the knife to his skin. Memories of pain, of terror and nausea and rage exploded in his head. “I may have issued some fairly inventive threats.” His tone was marvelously light. “Nevertheless, I believe they would still have amputated had they thought it worth their trouble.”

  She was scowling. The expression was strangely beautiful.

  “I don’t believe they expected me to live through the night,” he said.

  “I’m sorry.” Her voice was solemn, quiet, earnest, but he would not let her softness touch the open wound of his mind.

  “That they didn’t amputate?” he quipped, but she didn’t respond. In fact, for one fleeting moment, her eyes seemed to shine with tears. But she turned quickly away.

  “I’ll just…I’ll clean the wound. The fresh wound,” she said.

  He watched her, mesmerized, wanting quite desperately to reach out, to touch her tears, to be whole. But perhaps it was too late for that. “I can care for it myself,” he said.

  “Perhaps,” she agreed, and seemed to rally, to become more herself, the spirited, cheeky maid who might very well have stood off the brigands in Miss Anglican’s garden. “But I shall do it all the same.”

  Had he imagined the tears in her eyes? Could he bear to see her cry? He daren’t chance it. Better far to make light of it. “Because you lust for me?”

  She looked at him again, and he saw the effort she made to return to normal. “Of course.”

  He smiled. “Now you are pitying me.”

  “True,” she said.

  “I don’t like to be pitied…” He paused. “Unless it will get me into your bed.”

  The flicker of a smile lifted her heavenly lips.

  “Will it?” he asked.

  The smile bloomed a little more. “No.”

  He barely noticed when she touched the rag to his knee.

  “So all you offer is the name of the miller’s son, then.”

  She seemed absorbed in her task. “He isn’t actually anyone’s son.”

  Against all odds, her touch felt wondrously soothing against his skin. Not like the hands of that bastard barber who had longed to cut him limb from limb. “Isn’t that rather unusual?” he asked.

  She gave him a scowl, but it only made her more appealing.

  “He must be someone’s son,” he explained.

  “I meant…it is not as if I am robbing the cradle,” she said.

  “Ahh, an old man, is he?”

  “Does it have to be one or the other?”

  “No.” He watched her steadily, examining every rare feature, every fleeting expression. “It could be me.”

  “I’ll keep that in mind.” Her eyes flickered to him and away. “This should be stitched also.”

  “It will be fine.”

  She pursed her lips. “It would seem a shame if you died of this.” She washed the edges of the wound and glanced toward the puckered scar, tensing a little. “After surviving that.”

  There was pity on her face. Perhaps, if he were a proud man, her sympathy would bother him as he had suggested that it did, but in truth, he was touched by her emotion, honored by her worry.

  “How are you at stitchery?” he asked.

  “My pillows are quite spectacular. The talk of Bloomsbury.”

  Aye, she was sensitive, but she was also strong. “Think of me as a cushion,” he said.

  “Dr. Howard is quite good,” she said.

  He settled his head against the chair’s back. “I guarantee I shall never know.”

  “I would not have taken you for a coward.”

  Best then that she didn’t know the truth; that he had been terrified in every battle, had been sickened at the sight of blood, the screams of the dying. War was no glorious adventure of men. It was horror and sin and waste. Yet perhaps the greatest sin of all was not his own stifling terror, but the fact that he had gained from it. Not only coin and title, but reputation. He could hear the whispers of mothers to their sons as he walked down London’s genteel boulevards; There goes the valiant lieutenant, Jimmy. He fought at the battle of Grand Port. We but pray you will be half so brave. The words echoed in his ears until he longed to scream at him, to tell them of the dysentery, the debauchery, the dissipation. But he would not, for he was a coward. “I wasn’t aware that you were considering taking me at all.”

  She gave him a disapproving glance that made him want rather desperately to kiss her. “Your mind seems to be having some difficulty changing gears, Sir Drake.”

  Her nose had the tiniest tilt to it. “Not all of us are so lucky as to have just left a lover’s bed.” Indeed, some of them had given up hope of ever having a lover again. But he felt hope spring to life now. Hope and other things.

  “And quite the lover he was,” she said.

  Her skin was fair and unblemished, looking velvet soft against the fire of her hair. “Are you trying to make me jealous?”

  “I’m trying to convince you to give up your nonsensical attempts to seduce me.”

  “If that was your wish, lass, you shouldn’t have brought me here and insisted that I drop my breeches.”

  “I’ll keep that in mind in the future,” she said, and turned away, but he caught her arm, breath held at the feel of skin against skin.

  “We have a future?” he asked.

  Their gazes met. She had ceased to breathe. Her hair glowed like living flames in the flickering light, and her eyes, bright as fresh-cut jewels, consumed him.

  There seemed nothing he could do but pull her down for a kiss.

  Chapter 11

  His lips were warm and firm, his hand strong and steady as he slipped his fingers into her hair, pulling her down, tugging her closer. And God help her, she responded, reveling in his touch, drowning in his earthy allure. Beneath her palm, his thigh was taut with muscle, and beyond that…

  Ella came to her senses with a start and pulled rapidly away.

  “Sir Drake,” she said. Her voice was marvelously steady, while her heart was beating far faster than it had on Gallows Road. “You are wounded.”

  A corner of his dark devil’s mouth twitched. The fingertips of one hand rested on the book of poems that graced the table beside him. “The greatest bliss is in a kiss—a kiss of love refin’d. When springs the soul without control and blends the bliss with mind.”

  She studied him. “Did you do nothing but memorize poetry while aboard ship?”

  “I managed a few other things,” he said. “But nothing so important as that.”

  She watched him, wondering. “You are a strange man, sir.”

  “Strange and wounded,” he said. “But I think, perhaps, your love would be the best medicine I could hope for.”

  His lips were inches from hers, and though she knew far better, she let him kiss her again, if only for a moment.

  “A bit early to speak of love, isn’t it?” she breathed.

  “I was using the term as the revered poets of yore used to—”

  “You meant sex.”

  He paused a second, ran a hand down her arm. “If you insist.”

  “If I hadn’t seen the scar myself I would not have believed you’d been wounded so near…where you were,” she finished lamely.

  His lips quirked the slightest degree. “I am quite an amazing man.”

  Perhaps he was. Or perhaps he was a liar, a rogue, a seducer of women. Jasper Reeves had reason to believe Grey was still alive, and she was beginning to think Grey had possessed some sort of power over Sarah. Just as this man had an inexplicable power over her good sense. “Tell me, Sir Drake,” she murmured, “why were you on Gallows Street at such an unorthodox hour?”

  “I believe I told you about my business to the east.”

  “You could have taken a safer route.”

  His lips were curved in the vague semblance of a smile, but his eyes smoldered steadily. “But then I couldn�
��t have saved you.”

  Reaching out, she touched his lips, though she could not have said why. They were smooth and warm, his chin slightly stubbled when she ran her thumb down it. His throat was corded with muscle and sinew, pulsing with life and power. “How did you know I was there?”

  “Call it a premonition.”

  His words tingled through her. “Are you gifted?”

  He closed his eyes against her touch, and beneath her fingers it almost felt as if he trembled. “You feel like a gift in my arms,” he said, and tugged her gently onto his lap.

  She smoothed her hand down his chest, then flicked open his shirt button, because she could, because he certainly wouldn’t object. His throat constricted. Beneath her buttocks, his thighs bunched with anticipation. She opened another button. His skin was darkened from years in the sun, his chest as hard and smooth as stone, his entire being mesmerizing.

  “Are you gifted?” she asked.

  He watched her a moment, dark eyes shining. “No, lass,” he said. “Just randy.”

  She stifled a smile and wondered vaguely if he was lying, for she felt something in him, something magical. “You’ll never survive the ton with that kind of honesty,” she said.

  “My apologies.” He watched her, breath slightly labored, expression intense.

  “How badly does your leg hurt?”

  “Not at all.”

  She eased open another button. “You’re a terrible liar.”

  “My apologies again.” He watched her with the intensity of a hunting wolf. “I don’t mean to rush you, lass, but you’ve not yet told me the lucky fellow’s name.”

  Beneath her hand, the taut muscles of his chest tightened and shifted as if by magic. A warm tingle shivered through her. She moved her hand the slightest degree. The muscles shifted again. Her lips seemed suddenly rather dry. Things would have been considerably easier if there truly were a miller’s son.

  “Lass,” he said, and she came to with a start. “I fear I may be getting blood on your frock.”

  “Oh! I’m sorry. I…” She stood abruptly, but she was still positioned between his legs. “I made you bleed,” she said, and turned away.