With This Ring (8 page)

The smell was quite possibly the worst he’d ever known, and he’d been in a tropical prison for a year, so he knew a right stench when it hit him in the face.
It was a testament to the power of that tender touch that he did not rise up and flee the awful aroma.
Instead, he ignored the rude assault to his raw nasal passages and focused his full attention on the fingertips sweeping sweetly across his pectoral muscles.

A small hand.
A lady’s?
No, he could feel the slight roughness of her fingers on his oversensitive skin.
A woman who worked for a living, then.
A nurse?

A nurse would be good.
This gave him the distant understanding that he was not actually in hell, that he was ill.
This led him to recall that he’d been out in the rain—bloody cold English rain, when his body had known nothing but island temperatures for nearly twenty years.
If he listened now, he could still hear that icy rain slashing hard against a nearby window.

A fever, yes.
He had a fever, and he was in England.

He just couldn’t remember why.

His nurse continued her ministrations, rubbing something deeply nasty onto his chest.
It seemed to warm him and ease the wheezing passage of air into his lungs.
Hastings felt soothing sleep pulling him down, freed at last from his nightmares of hell.
A fever, a cold English rain, and a nurse with an angel’s gentle voice and a disturbingly erotic touch.

As he drifted off to sleep, he deeply and profoundly hoped that the angel wouldn’t spot his towering erection.

Chapter Six

Elektra opened her eyes upon a sea of mud-stained linen.
She blinked.
No, it was only a relatively wide expanse of shirt compared with the size of her hand, which had slipped into the neck of it, her fingers pressed to warm bare skin.

My goodness.

It was morning.
She blinked up into a pink-and-gold dawn sky above the roofless room.
She lay in a warm, if slightly damp, nest made of fusty cushions and draperies.
Even now, a decade after the fire, she could still detect the smell of smoke on them.
The man who was not Lord Aaron—what was his name?
Oh, yes, Hastings.
Mr.
Hastings held her close, his arms about her, his hand gently tucked in the crook of her waist, his torso rolled toward her as if to curl protectively around her.

At some point in the chill and the dark, she seemed to have curled snugly into Mr.
Hastings’s large, warm body.
Now she pressed fully against him, with her head upon his shoulder and her knee drawn up to cover his … er, well.

Mr.
Hastings was a very affectionate sleeper.

Or perhaps he was simply trying to stay warm.

The poor man had given her the driest, most sheltered bit of the protected space.
She’d benefited greatly from that consideration.
She ought to have caught her death last night, and instead she felt fine.

With the greatest restraint, she lifted her fingertips one by one, relieved when the wide chest beneath them didn’t sir.
Then slowly, she slid her hand out of the placket of his shirt.
Then she carefully removed her thigh from its, ahem, grip about his, heavens-was-that-his—?

Forcing her gaze aside, she eased herself away from his sleeping form.
She couldn’t bear the thought of him opening his eyes to find her wrapped intimately in his arms … well, that would be highly embarrassing!
She allowed herself to think that the flash of heat in her face was based in that hypothetical moment of discovery and not in the way his hands tightened about her when she carefully tried to roll away.

Pity, for she’d been most comfortable.
She was very nearly warm as well, which had seemed like an impossibility the night before.

Oh, blast!

She had spent the night in the arms of a strange man.

That was the plan, was it not?

Well, one hesitated to label that impulsive abduction and attempted self-ruination with any description so dignified as
plan
.
More temporary insanity than good old-fashioned plotting.
Hardly worth a Worthington’s time, really.

Not to mention it had been a dismal failure.

A quick glance down assured her that she was most clearly untouched.
Even her filthy shirt and crumpled weskit were not askew in the slightest.
So, despite the intimacy and helplessness of her pose, this Mr.
Worthington had not taken the slightest advantage.

Well, of course he hadn’t.

A servant who accosted a lady wasn’t long for this world.
Most didn’t even make it to the magistrate, but merely ended up the victim of some tragic and entirely fatal accident while everyone involved had excellent alibis.

That was the way the world worked, and Elektra was in favor of it, in general.

However, if her brothers ever discovered that she’d spent the night so intimately with a manservant, even factoring in the necessity of survival, the fellow wouldn’t last a day.
Nor would her reputation survive if anyone outside the family ever knew.

Elektra wasn’t at all sentimental about her virtue.
The sooner she married and disposed of the endless boring restrictions of purity, the better.
Wives had ever so much more freedom than did maidens.
Married women could shop and travel alone.
They could dance at balls without first having to have their partners vetted by bossy matrons.
Heavens, Elektra longed simply to be free to stroll by herself in the park in the middle of the afternoon!

However, until the day she took some not-too-old, not-too-hideous, not-too-stupid man’s ring upon her hand, her reputation remained a vital weapon in her armory.
She could never land a duke or an earl if she didn’t have
VIRGIN
stamped upon her like an indisputable brand.

She sat up, her thoughts already churning the problem through the Worthington mental processes, the ones that allowed that anything was permissible if one followed a single simple rule.

Don’t get caught.

Now, there was only one person who knew what she’d done.
Lysander didn’t count.
He barely spoke to her, much less anyone outside Worthington House.

It all hinged upon this man.
Mr.
Hastings had nothing to gain by carrying tales of her actions, unless he liked to live dangerously.

Nothing of import had happened anyway.

Just two things. Just two kisses that nearly made you forget everything you have based your life upon for the last decade.

Elektra felt fully able to excuse her enjoyment of the first kiss.
After all, she had thought she was kissing her future husband!
How joyful to discover that he riveted her sensual attention so thoroughly!

That happiness had been unfortunately short-lived.
The discovery that her captive was only an ordinary manservant had been most disappointing.

So why did you kiss him again?

He kissed me!

And you kissed him back. A lot.

She had indeed.
In fact, she was a little stunned to realize that in both kisses, er, cases, it had been Mr.
Hastings who had the presence of mind to call a halt to matters.

I must be losing my looks.

Then again, maybe she wasn’t.
Elektra’s gaze slid sideways to where Mr.
Hastings lay sleeping still.
There remained a definite
shape
beneath his trousers.

Elektra turned her gaze virtuously away, but she allowed herself a smirk.
She still had everything required to turn a man’s head.
Which meant that Mr.
Hastings was an exceptionally well-behaved fellow.

How alarming!
The last thing Elektra needed was a man who felt compelled to Do the Suitable Thing.
No, she needed Mr.
Hastings to be the sort of bloke who looked assiduously after his own skin—that was the only way she could be sure that he would never breathe a word of what had happened last night.

Restless, she rose to her feet and began pacing the squelching carpet.
She had to make a plan.
She needed to brush the cobwebs from her mind and
think
.

*   *   *

The sun flashed in her eyes and she went still in a warming shaft of sunlight coming through a broken window.
For a moment, the past dozen years slipped away and she could see the room the way it was.

The high arched windows filled the room with light that gleamed from polished furnishings and made the exotic patterned carpet glow with jewel colors.
Two little fair-haired girls ran giggling through the room, chasing across the fine rug, dashing around the spacious chamber, until a laughing dark-haired boy sprang from behind the luxurious settee to startle them, screeching with gleeful terror, back down the hall.

Little Calliope and Elektra and Lysander, from a time when the world was full of magic and promise.
It was more than another time.
It was another world, another Worthington family … none of which still existed.

No one knew how the fire started.
Elektra had long suspected one of Orion’s experiments, or perhaps it had been the twins brewing up something foul in one of the fireplaces.
Whatever the cause, the result was a house that was naught but walls and broken slate, still filled with the possessions that had been too ruined to take away, too broken even for vagrants to steal.

It can be saved. Someday, Attie will run through these halls that she was robbed of. Someday these cracked walls will fill up again with a whole, perfect family, just as it used to be.

Elektra know how to get it back for Attie.
For them all.
If she made the match of the decade, they could have it all back.

As she stood there, her hand stole to the ribbon that hung from her neck.
Lifting it, she pulled out the key.

The beautifully scrolled iron key from the front door—the key that no longer worked on a door that no longer locked.
The door itself had long been carted away to fuel someone’s fire.

Still she kept the key.
She carried it always.
Someday that door would be repaired and when it was, she would have the key to open it.

*   *   *

Aaron felt sunlight on his face and for the first time in a thousand years, some tiny fragment of him was warm.

No, that wasn’t quite right.
There was a heated portion of his anatomy that had not given him this sort of problem in years.

Out of a male instinct as old as man, he reached for a bit of coverlet to pull over his lap even while still nearly asleep.

The cover was unpleasantly damp in his hand.
This shocked him enough to open his eyes.

Good God, what a beauty.

Miss Elektra Worthington, detestable madwoman and scofflaw extraordinaire, stood before the window in a shaft of golden light, her face uplifted and her hands clasped before her bosom.
Her eyes were closed.

She took his breath away.
Even filthy and rumpled, with her tangled braid come half undone—and dressed like a boy for pity’s sake!—there was no hiding the vulnerable yet powerful arch of her neck, or the achingly perfect parallel lines of her cheekbones and jaw that he could happily gaze upon for the rest of his life.

Unfortunately, the rest of his life was not available.
After the first shock of her perfection wore off, he considered that this girl was no better than he had once been, spoiled and thoughtless, ruining people’s lives as a game.
A game he had no intention of playing.

Aaron cast through possible opening lines and settled upon mockery.
Hastings was very good at mockery.

“Prayin’ for mercy?”
he drawled.
“Be ye askin’ the good Lord for forgiveness for kidnapping a poor workin’ man and puttin’ him in an icy damp hole all night long?”

“I’m asking God to strike you dead,” she responded tartly, without so much as opening her eyes.
“I’ve put in a request for a nice bolt of lightning, since it would leave less messy cleanup, but fire, flood, or famine will do in a pinch.”

She turned her head, opening her eyes to glare at him.
If he was not mistaken, she was as grateful to caustically mask the awkwardness of their night together as he was.

Her green-blue eyes were uncanny in the golden light of day, large and wide-set in her ivory face.
She was a bit too thin, he noticed.
It only encouraged the impression that she was some sort of fairy creature hiding in this strange unearthly ruin.

He looked around him, realizing at last the full and hideous extent of the devastation.
The room had apparently been some sort of drawing room once.
Odd bits of charred or broken furniture still stood, placed purposely about the space in some mad mockery of graciousness.

Though the corners still dripped from last night’s weather, the sun poured through the gaping holes that were once lovely arched windows, as if determined to illuminate every moss-tinged element of the shattered gentility of the past.

It was a horror that struck Aaron like a cold fist to his gut.
This had once been a pretty place, even somewhat grand place.

Like Arbodean.

Now look at the state of it!
Like his worst nightmare come to merciless light, the story it told of a gracious home, ruined by fate—and then, because it could not be restored, left to rot away under a coating of rubble and green mold.

This might be his own future, staring him down.
Arbodean was vast and elegant—and expensive.
He was the last of his line; there could be no denying him the title and the estate, no matter his disgrace.

The fortune, on the other hand, belonged to his grandfather, the current Earl of Arbodean, alone.
Without that inheritance, Aaron could never maintain the gracious estate of his ancestors.

Worthington Manor was an apt illustration of that worst of possible scenarios—and precisely what he would end up with if his grandfather ever learned of his night with Miss Elektra Worthington!

How had this happened?
How could he prevent such a thing from happening to Arbodean?

“This place is—Was there a battle?
Was it cannon-fire?”
Or an earthquake, with a touch of pestilence and a dash of volcanic eruption?

“No,” she replied absently.
She dropped something down the front of her man’s shirt and then dusted her hands.
“Just an ordinary fire.
Five brothers, you know.”