Charming the Devil (18 page)

“The utilitarian design makes it easy to move about,” she intoned.

“You’ve no need to worry,” he said, and loosened his grip on her ribs.

“But what if I want to?” The words came out in a jumbled rush.

He froze, so close her skirt brushed his legs. So close she could feel the warmth of his breath on her face.

“What if you wish to worry?” he asked. Cautious. Good heavens, he was more cautious than she.

“To befriend you,” she breathed.

He inhaled carefully. “It has occurred to me that we may be speaking of two different situations entirely.” His words were very low.

If her legs felt a little steadier, she might very well have scrambled into the stable and hidden in the loft. “What are
you
talking about?”

“To me you are perfection come to life, and I…” A muscle jumped in his hard jaw. “Your nearness makes it difficult to…”

“To what?” She leaned a little closer, barely able to hear the masculine intensity of his voice.

“Before I met you…” His eyes searched hers. “I was content enough.”

“And now?”

He seemed to relax just a smidgen, as though he had decided on his course and would accept whatever it offered. “Now there seems to be little reason to breathe if you are not in my arms.”

Shivers coursed over her, followed by an urge to burst into song. Odd. “Oh.”

“I was not being completely honest when we spoke earlier.”

“Oh?”

“I
am
lonely,” he admitted. “But I am also aroused.”

She stared at him, lips slightly parted, heart pounding in her chest. By comparison, her last two
ohs
seemed rapier sharp.

“I wish to bed you, wee Faerie.”

She tried to speak, but nothing came to mind. Literally nothing but the thought of being in his arms.

“Might you feel—”

“Yes,” she said. Too quick. Too eager. Too…
everything contrary to who she usually was. She had to slow down. Relax. Try for refinement. Or rationality. She took a deep, silent breath and steadied her voice. “My apologies. I didn’t mean to interrupt.”

He watched her carefully, as if trying to decipher her whimsical ways. But he was hardly the only one. There might well be a queue. “Lord Wrenwall is hosting a garden party in two days’ time,” he said. “I will understand if you change your mind before then.”

“I shall be there,” she said, and, granting him a regal nod, lifted her heavy skirts in one gloved hand before turning toward the house.

F
aye kept her steps slow, her head high as she made her way up the hill toward Lavender House. Her hands were steady, her expression serene.

“’Tis late.”

Faye jumped, heart thumping like a wild hare’s inside her constricted chest. Apparently, her careful pretenses had reached their shallow limits.

“Did he harm you?” Shaleena asked, and stepped from the shadows, fully clothed, but still intimidating.

“Who?” Faye rasped, and refrained from placing a hand to her chest to keep it from leaping into the open air.

“The Scotsman.”

“No. Why? Were you listening in on our conversation?”

“Was it terribly interesting?”

“Well I…No.”

“Then why would I waste my time?”

Faye stared at her a moment, then turned away, but Shaleena spoke before she could escape.

“So you have agreed to meet him.”

“I thought you didn’t listen in?”

“If that is true, you are even more naïve than I realized,” she said.

Anger welled like a fountain inside Faye, but she had little time for foolish emotion. She was confused and lost and jittery. “I just…am I mad?” she whispered.

Shaleena canted her head, studying her in the darkness. “For wishing to bed him?”

Faye felt the air leave her lungs in a rush. Though really, she should not have expected less from Shaleena. “I never said as much.”

“Perhaps I got the wrong impression,” said the other, and watched her in silence. “Perhaps the Celt did, as well.”

“I didn’t mean to…” Faye began, then closed her eyes and wished she were someone else. Or some
thing
else; hermit crabs had always intrigued her. “What am I going to do?”

“Are you asking for my advice?” Shaleena raised one haughty brow.

God help her. “I believe I am.”

Even in the darkness, Faye could see the other’s lips curl up with humor. But the moon-shadowed dimness made the expression look strangely soft. Not jaded or hostile, but almost self-deprecating, almost kind and longing and gentle.

Shaleena sighed and glanced toward the place where the lightning had crackled just a few nights before. “Ella would warn you to be on the alert, to determine what it is he truly wants from you before you make a decision. Madeline would tell you to think about how your life will change if you choose this path.”

But she didn’t want to think. “And you?”

“I would say that some mistakes cannot be undone,” Shaleena said, and suddenly, for the first time in Faye’s life, she felt a bottomless depth of sadness in the other woman, a well of pain covered by nothing more than a thin veneer of harsh superiority. “If you pass up this opportunity, will it be a mistake, do you think?”

“I don’t know.”

“What
do
you know?”

Besides fear? Very little. But Shaleena was watching her with careful intent, and she had no respect for cowards.

“I know he’s…” Kind? Courageous? Wounded? “Large,” she said.

Shaleena’s lips twitched up. “Then I would suggest you read a bit of Cleland’s little novel and get a good night’s sleep.”

“Read—Oh.” Remembering the lingering folderol associated with the publication of the scandalous
Fanny Hill,
Faye felt the blush reach the tips of her toes. “I’ve made a terrible mistake,” she said, and turned away, but Shaleena caught her arm.

“Faye,” she said, startling her. Up to that point,
she hadn’t been entirely certain Shaleena even knew her name. “Don’t do anything rash.”

“It is rash, isn’t it?”

“I meant…” Something crossed her face. It almost looked like regret. Perhaps guilt even. She glanced toward the street again. “Do you care for him?”

She nodded, able to do no more.

“Does he care for you?”

“I don’t know.”

“Don’t you?”

Hopes and doubts tumbled wildly in her mind. “He saved a maid today.”

Shaleena canted her head, waiting.

“He…I think he’s a good person. But…” She shook her head, still crazed. “In the past I’ve thought…”

“What?”

“That others were good.”

“And you were wrong.” It wasn’t a question, which was just as well because as memories assailed Faye, she found it impossible to force out an answer.

“Tell me, Faerie Faye…” she began, but her voice was distant, her expression far away. “Is it worse to live as if life is good and to be proven wrong or to believe it is evil and be proven right?”

Faye stared at her. “What was Joseph to you before he came here?”

“He was nothing,” she said, but the lie popped off a bright spark of pain in Faye’s temple.

“You knew him,” she countered, and Shaleena drew herself to full height.

“I’ve known many men, little witch. It does not make them important.”

Faye refrained from stepping back.

“He was someone you cared for.”

For a moment, a hint of honesty wafted through the garden, but an instant later Shaleena laughed. “He is someone who pleasured me for a time,” she said. “Several times, in fact. But you cannot expect too much from men. Not more than thrice in one night, no matter how powerful your charms,” she said, and tossed back her auburn hair. “Unless you have had the foresight to obtain more than one lively partner for the evening.”

Embarrassment almost caused Faye to back down, but she had done so most of her life with little to show for her cowardice. “You cared for him,” she repeated.

Something deep and earnest shone in Shaleena’s eyes, but in a moment she straightened, hardened, cooled. “Indeed I did. I cared for him with each hard thrust. With each soft death. You want advice, little witch? It is this. Enjoy your Scotsman to the hilt,” she said, and turned haughtily away.

R
ogan strode between the rows of booths and stalls that lined Long Acre. A carnival had been assembled, and every conceivable delicacy seemed to be available. The intoxicating aroma of pork pies and chocolate soufflés melded uneasily with the coal soot that perpetually saturated the city. But Rogan’s normally impressive appetite was not up to his usual standards, for he was a man with a purpose. He was having a rather difficult time, however, remembering just what that purpose was. Something about a death, he thought, but the memory of a faerielike creature kept distracting him.

Had she truly agreed to meet him in Wrenwall’s garden? And if so, what did that mean? Did she intend to share his bed? Or had his blatant desires driven him mad?

To his left, a small, golden-haired lass lifted her wares high beside a battered dogcart. “Buy me sausages,” she said. Her voice was singsong, her smudged cheeks pinkened from the chafing eve
ning wind. She had solemn sea-green eyes and a cherry bow mouth.

Rogan hunched his shoulders and hurried on, passing an idle pair of jugglers.

“You’ve power in you.”

Glancing to his left he spied a bright-eyed crone behind a wooden counter covered in small, dark bottles and sprigs of dried herbs tied in hemp.

“What say you?” he asked.

She nodded once, as if answering a voice in her head instead of responding to him “Even from here I can feel it in you.”

She was old and bent and knobby, standing behind her bevy of strangely shaped bottles. But he stepped toward her, realizing suddenly that this was where he had planned to come at the outset. This was where he would find his answers.

“You are the proprietress of this shop?” he asked.

“The
proprietress
?” she said, and titled her head a little, studying him with an almost girlish glint to her eye. “I suspect one might call me such. Certainly they have called me worse. But I did not suspect such naïveté from one such as yourself.”

“Like myself?” he asked. What went on here?

“You have strength, but not just in your brawn,” she said, skimming his torso.

“I am no great scholar,” he said, confused, and she laughed as if she understood much that he did not.

“There are many sorts of strength. This one was given to you by another,” she said, then shook her head as if drawing herself into the present. “But you did not come to hear of her. What is your question for me?”

He scowled, but focused on the problem at hand. “I but wondered if there is a potion of sorts…an herb, perhaps, some concoction that could cause a man’s death and make it appear as if he did naught but die in his sleep.”

She looked at him askance, sparse brows raised over faded eyes. “You look more like the sort to kill outright than to trust to secret herbs.”

“I’ve no intention of killing,” he said.

She watched him in heavy silence for a moment. “And yet you have.”

He felt his stomach pitch again, for she was correct, and though he mourned the deaths he had caused during battle, there were other tragedies even more shameful. “I have,” he admitted, for honesty was as much a part of him as the color of his eyes or the width of his shoulders.

She nodded. “But now you wish to know how another has died.”

It was his turn to nod. “Can it be done undetected?”

She bent over her stall, waving him closer. He leaned in. “Any sorceress worthy of her grimoire could brew such a potion.”

He drew back abruptly. “Do you say you’re a witch?”

She laughed. “You, of all persons, should not be surprised to know such exist.”

In fact, until that moment, he would have been. For though the Church had oft blamed the troubles of the world on the mystic, he had seen true evil and knew it to be caused by naught but greed. Yet she looked to be the very personification of a witch.

“And what about those who do not dabble in sorcery. Could they, too, obtain such a potion?”

She shrugged. “In truth, lad, the king’s own surgeon would be hard-pressed to tell if a swain had died of a simple blend of hensbane and poppy or from pleasuring his young mistress.”

“Hensbane and poppy?” he said, but she had turned to the right, brows crinkled, not listening for a moment.

“Would there not be signs that he had consumed poison if—”

“Prickly poppy soothes—” she began, then jerked her attention away again. “Go,” she said.

“Where might one find—” he began, but she was already stepping back. With a quickness that belied her age, she slammed down the shutters that closed her inside her simple stall.

He scowled at the wooden enclosure, then turned to stare back in the direction he had come, wondering at this strange turn of events.

The young girl’s singsong pitch sounded hollow and lonely. “Buy me lovely sausages. Lovely sausages to buy.”

Two grand ladies passed to his left. Their petal-bright gowns brushed the street and each other’s. Perhaps their frilly parasols held the city’s heavy soot at bay, for their gloves looked as white as summer clouds. Behind them, a dark, liveried boy of less than ten years carried a bundle of new purchases. The underlings of London might be half-starved and much beaten, but they were often well dressed.

It was forever a city of disturbing variables. An aging woman in a pink frock coaxed a complaining ass down the rutted street, hawking the fine qualities of the animal’s milk. A plump maid removed a baked apple from a charcoal stove stowed in a rickety barrow. Wrapping it in brown paper, she promptly sold it to a gentleman sporting a pristine cravat and creamy, strapped pantaloons. Nearer by, an old man sat on a three-legged stool in the mouth of a listing canvas tent.

Rogan stepped inside to peruse the titles. There were a number of books of poetry and a good many devoted to religion and science, but stashed among the weighty volumes he found a slim, leather-bound volume of animal illustrations. Leafing through the book, he was struck by the lyrical beauty of the paintings, for the artist had seen his subjects not as beasts of burden but as entities with souls and feelings that shone from their eyes. He shifted through the pages, admiring.

“Lovely sausages. Sausages to buy.”

The girl’s litany melded forlornly with the
sound of hoofbeats from the street behind him as the city took on a rhythm of its own. A dog snarled. A woman laughed. But the paintings were entrancing—a wolf bitch smiling at her young. A mare nuzzling her wobbly-legged foal.

“Buy me sausages—”

A dog growled again. Someone gasped. And suddenly the world seemed eerily still just as it had a hundred times on distant fields, stunned to silence by impending violence. Rogan turned in slow, silent motion, and it was as if the image before him was framed by the mouth of the tent. The tattered sausage girl stood perfectly still. Her sea-green eyes were as wide as forever against the now-pale curve of her cheeks. Her scrawny arm was lifted, wares dangling, seeming to be the only motion in a world gone still. Not three feet away stood a gaunt hound, glazed eyes fixed on the child’s face. The hair along the cur’s spine stood up in a primeval arc, and its fangs showed yellow beneath snarling lips.

“Dear God,” breathed the proprietor, but in that instant, the cur coiled to leap, and there was no more time.

Reaching to his right, Rogan snatched a heavy volume from the nearest shelf and heaved it toward the slavering hound. The book slammed into the beast’s ribs like a missile. The animal went down with a snarl, tumbling to the ground. But in a moment it had found its feet. Eyes glaring, it swept its attention back to the petrified girl,
and in that moment Rogan lunged from the tent.

Grabbing the child about the waist, he swung her into the air. The dog sprang just as Rogan slammed his fist sideways. The animal snapped at Rogan’s forearm, felt the crunch of knuckles, and hit the ground hard. For a moment it lay still, stunned and disoriented. Still holding the fair-haired lass aloft, Rogan shifted his feet wide and braced himself for the next assault, but the hound only found its balance, stood uncertainly, then trotted shakily away.

The world returned to normal by unsteady degrees. Sounds gradually seeped into Rogan’s recognition. Colors bloomed in the flowers of a vendor’s bouquets. But nothing seemed to make sense. Only memories remained. Cold and ashy in his reeling mind.

“Posie.”

Someone spoke, but he was lost in the past where haunting eyes watched with silent horror.

“Release her.”

Tears streaked a tiny round face capped with silken curls.

“Sir!”

Rogan blinked and stepped shakily into the present.

A woman stood before him, lips pursed, chin uplifted haughtily to gaze into his face.

“Is this your maid?” he asked.

She nodded primly.

Rage coursed through him. “Could you not find
a larger servant to abuse?” he asked, and swept an angry hand over the city at large. “This place is filled with the downcast. Why not throw some larger morsel to the hounds rather than—”

But suddenly the woman’s face crumpled. She dropped to her knees and covered her face with one shaky hand. “Tell me she is unhurt.”

He tightened his grip as memories consumed him. “If she is, it is because of nothing you’ve done to make certain—” he began, but she was weeping now, gasping nearly silent breaths.

“Posie, my love…” she croaked, and with the sound of the woman’s voice, the girl struggled from his grip and leaped into the other’s embrace. Tears streamed like rivulets down the woman’s face as she enveloped the thin lass in her arms. Eyes squeezed shut, she rocked sideways in rhythm to their tandem tears.

Rogan could do nothing but watch. Nothing but stare. So he had been wrong again. The girl was not neglected. Was not left alone to fend for herself and turn over a few meager shillings to a harsh master. The girl was loved. Cherished as every child should be. As so few children were.

“My husband…” The woman had cupped the back of the girl’s head with chapped, reddened fingers, seeming to soak solace from the feel of the child’s silken hair against her skin. The girl had turned her little face against her mother’s neck. “He suffers from consumption. I left Posie with the sausages whilst I brought him a tonic.”

Rogan felt foolish suddenly, as if the world watched, knowing how little he understood of love, how little he comprehended of caring. “The child is too small to be left with such a task,” he rumbled.

“I know, sir. I know.” The mother’s throat contracted, and her mouth twitched as she rose shakily to her feet, bearing the clinging child on her hip. “But I’ve no wish to beg for help,” she said. “My husband says my pride will be the death of me.” Closing her eyes, she allowed herself a moment to turn her face into her daughter’s fair curls. “Better that than to lose…” Tightening her arm around her baby’s back, she drew a shuddering breath and turned toward him again, a smidgen of her former attitude returning to her proud features. “I can never repay you for what you’ve done, sir, but my sausages are fresh and hearty if you’d care to take—”

“See to the child,” he said, and turned away, but his legs still felt weak, his heartbeat uncertain as he strode away, memories swirling like a whirling dervish in his mind. From behind him the stench and noise made his gut clench, and finally, hidden behind a wooden stall, he stopped to grit his teeth against his roiling stomach, to cover his eyes with a shaky palm.

“Mr. McBain?”

The voice was sweet and summer soft. He turned slowly, letting his hand drop from his face.

“Mr. McBain.” Faye stood before him. Her cos
tume was perfect, an azure confection that flowed about her lissome body like sun-swept waves. But it was her eyes that captured him. For they were bright and wide and worried, as if she cared for naught but him alone. “Are you well? I saw what happened. Were you hurt? I was—”

“Why are you here?” Against the feathery beauty of her voice, his own sounded like the rough scrape of a whetting stone.

“I was…Rogan!” She paused, face as pale as sea foam as she stared at him. “You’ve been injured.”

Scowling downward, he glanced at his chest, but all seemed to be well.

“Your arm,” she said and sure enough when he looked to the left, he saw that his sleeve was rent near the elbow. A ragged laceration skittered a couple inches across his forearm, and blood dripped easily from the wound.

Somehow it barely registered, however, for in his mind’s eye he again saw the shattered expression of a child. A child whose world he had ruined.

He glanced up, seeing the beautiful faerielike face blend with another. “Were you cherished?” he asked.

“What?” Her voice was breathy, and though he’d asked before, he needed reassurance yet again, longed to believe that she had been loved, that she had been held as the sausage girl had been held. Cuddled like a precious gift.

“As a child,” he said. “As a wee lass.” A muscle
twitched almost painfully in his jaw, a remnant of the terror he had felt only moments before. “Tell me ye were adored?”

“Rogan, please…” she said, and reached for his hand. Her skin felt like a cool balm against his. Her eyes found his in a moment, evergreen flecks against an amber backdrop. “You’re shaking.”

“Tell me your da doted on you.”

“Where’s your mount?”

“Gave you piggyback rides. Sang to you in the wee hours of the morning.”

“You’re scaring me,” she said.

“Tell me,” he said, and tightened his grip on her hand.

“I was…I was cherished,” she said.

But she was lying. He could feel it like a bayonet to his soul and winced at the pain. “What of your mum?”

“Rogan, where is your Colt? You did ride here, did you not?”

He wanted to shake her, to demand the truth, but who was he to think he deserved that much? Nodding brokenly, he glanced down the street. In a matter of moments he was astride, but truth to tell he remembered little of the journey to his house though he eventually found himself inside.

Connelly appeared, making some sort of questioning noises. But the little faerie sent him on a mission, and in a few moments, the irritating Irishman handed over a bowl of water, gave Rogan a foolish wink, and declared he was about to leave
for an important meeting. The door closed behind him. The house went silent.