If His Kiss Is Wicked. Jo Goodman
I must attend to. You are free to remain or go as you will.”
Restell reached the door by a route that maintained the most distance between himself and Miss Hathaway. He did not look back once he crossed the threshold but closed the paneled door quietly behind him.
Emma unfolded herself slowly, finding that she had become remarkably stiff during the time she’d spent curled so tightly in the chair. She touched one hand to her cheek where embarrassment had made her face go hot. She would have liked to indulge in a bout of tears but that release was denied her. There had been no tears since she’d escaped her abductors, nor many that she recalled while they held her. She’d been afraid to cry then and even more afraid since. She dreamed of drowning in tears or sometimes imagined being scarred by them, her face etched permanently as if by acid. Tears meant exposing that part of herself that she kept inviolate, that private, secret self where she still pretended that what had happened had in fact happened to someone else.
Uncle Arthur looked at her differently these days. She glimpsed disappointment in his sideways glance, even faint disapproval, as though because of her failure to protect herself she had failed him. Her inability to fend off her attackers reminded him that she was no stalwart son but a woman after all, with every one of a woman’s vulnerabilities.
Marisol, in contrast, looked at her often. Her cousin was at once curious and repelled by what she saw and wholly unable to suppress that play of feeling in her features. In the first days of returning home, Emma had been helpless to keep Marisol from attending her. At first she believed it was guilt that brought Marisol so often to her side, but she now suspected that she had given her cousin credit for more tender sensibilities than she in truth possessed. The expression of relief on Marisol’s fine features was perhaps a more accurate reflection of what she was thinking: relief that she had not been the victim here.
Emma could not find it in herself to blame her. Had their positions been reversed she might very well feel the same, and there had not yet come a moment when she wished their positions had been reversed. Emma could not imagine wishing what she had endured to be the experience of another person.
Hadn’t she come here to avoid just that end?
Restell Gardner was not at all what she expected and the very least of it was his age. At first glance one could be forgiven for thinking they were in the presence of a god. His pale hair, so light that it might have been gilt with sunshine made Apollo come immediately to mind. Sitting or standing, he had a careless, casual way of holding himself that lent him an air of supreme indifference. That impression faded when one was held still by his eyes. If he willed it so, he could hold a glance for an interminable length and never blink. The intensity of feeling that was not expressed in his loose and lean frame was captured in eyes that could be as warm and clear a blue as a halcyon sky or as opaque and cold as frost on a pond in winter.
His patience, not his Viking warrior looks, made him a force to be reckoned with. Although she had been made to wait in his drawing room for what seemed an unbearably long time, she had not been able to use that opportunity to formulate any sense of what she meant to tell him. Snippets of thought simply tumbled through her mind so that no coherent whole was possible, yet he had been able to draw almost the sum of it all from her.
She never once felt pitied or pitiable, even when she raised her veil and showed him what had become of her face. He had regarded her openly, without revulsion, and made it impossible for her to duck her head or retreat behind the gauzy black curtain of lace. In that moment she became stronger because he expected her strength, as if he knew how to tap more deeply into the well of her resolve even as she would have sworn there never existed such a well.
So she had remained strong…up until the moment he began tapping the poker. If the banging of the letter opener against his desk had given rise to a timpani in her head, the sharp staccato of the poker against the marble apron was like a pair of cymbals crashing together on either side of her skull.
Her reaction—to curl hedgehog-like into the relative safety of the leather armchair—had been accomplished without any conscious thought. She’d just done it. There’d been no help for it and that terrified her. What if Mr. Gardner suspected she was a candidate for an asylum? Would he agree to help someone on so short a tether? He might very well suggest confining her to a madhouse, and how could she trust that her uncle would not approve of such a measure? There existed evidence that he could be convinced it was in her best interest, and if she failed to make herself useful, certainly he could be convinced that it was in his.
Emma stood abruptly. Her legs were steadier than she would have credited. Opening her reticule, she withdrew the cheque she had drawn on her quarterly allowance and savings and made out to Mr. Restell Gardner. She placed it on the blotter on his desk and laid the letter opener over it to serve as a paperweight, then she tugged on her veil and started toward the door.
Several sharp raps from the other side stopped Emma in her tracks. She opened her mouth to say something, to say anything, but discovered she had no voice to call out. The insistent knocking came again, harder this time, more urgent, as though someone thought she’d missed it the first time.
Emma couldn’t say how long she stood there, only that she never saw the door opening. The darkness encroaching on the periphery of her vision had engulfed her by then.
Chapter 2
“Did I not say she is a female of the inconvenient variety?” Restell studied Emmalyn’s awkwardly positioned body as he posed the question. He had had occasion to observe that some women were able to manage a graceful faint. Miss Hathaway was not one of them. Judging by the sound he heard just prior to opening the doors, her impact with the floor had all the resonance of a two-hundred-year-old oak being felled. The arrangement of her limbs suggested she had been overcome quickly, with no opportunity to break her fall. He glanced over at Hobbes who had wisely chosen not to answer what was essentially a rhetorical poser. The man looked decidedly uncomfortable. “Never say this is the first time you’ve been confronted with a lady’s swoon, Hobbes.”
The valet cleared his throat. “Mary Stubbs used to fall on her face when the gin was better than she was used to. Never felt compelled to do more than turn her on her side, so she could sleep it off without choking on her vomit.”
“And you with no reputation for gallantry. There’s a puzzler.” Restell hunkered down beside Emma and laid his hand near the back of her neck. “Miss Hathaway?” When she did not respond, he glanced over his shoulder at Nelson who was hovering in the doorway. “Fetch whatever is at the ready to bring her around. Consult Mrs. Peach if you must. She will know” He broke off because he felt a slight stirring under his palm. “Wait. She is with us, I think.” He carefully turned her over. The veil fell across her face, and he chose not to sweep it aside. “Hobbes, you will slip your hands under her legs. I will lift her shoulders. Then we shall place her on the chaise.”
This transport was accomplished with rather more delicacy than Restell had imagined when he gave the order, but Hobbes was all for preserving Miss Hathaway’s modesty and his own sensibilities. Clearly the sergeant made a social distinction between the gin-soaked Mary Stubbs and their deuced inconvenient guest.
“It occurs to me that you’re a snob,” Restell informed his valet as they eased Emmalyn onto the chaise. “Leaving poor Miss Stubbs to sleep off good gin in the gutter while demonstrating all manner of concern for a young lady you do not even know.”
“I don’t believe I mentioned a gutter, sir, and Mary, well, she would have accused me of trying to have my way with her if I’d done more.”
“And you don’t think this woman will do the same?”
This was a question Hobbes had not considered before. He could not step away from the chaise quickly enough.
“Make yourself easy, Hobbes. No accusation will be made here—even if there were cause for it. I think Miss Hathaway would sooner eat nails for breakfast than admit some terrible wrong had been done to her.” Restell glanced back at the door. Nelson remained at his post awaiting further instruction. “Some tea, Nelson. A bit of whiskey would not be