made no attempt to get away, no move at all, as he settled onto the edge of the mattress beside her. Still, her eyes never left his, and he hadn’t yet seen her blink.
“All I want to do is talk to you,” he explained, keeping his voice soft and using his best doctor-patient tone. “That’s it—lie back and take a deep breath. Another. It’s all over now.” He stroked her wet cheeks with the back of his fingers.
“Get it over with,” she whispered. “I don’t want to…dread it anymore.”
“What?” he asked, still soothing her with his hands, patting, caressing. “What shall I do?”
“Kill me,” she squeaked. Her chin lifted and her eyes narrowed in a brief show of bravado.
“Don’t be absurd!” He grunted in disbelief, shaking his head. “Surely you don’t think…? I have no intention…I’m certainly not going to kill you. What gave you that idea?”
She wore the look of young men after their first battle-uncertain that they had survived it and already dreading the next one. “You said you’d do anything! And even before that I knew it was you who… The boat, the knife and the chocolate…” Her voice dwindled on a defeated sigh.
“What the devil are you talking about?” She must be in shock. God, he hadn’t meant to frighten her this badly. She really believed he wanted her dead for some reason. Well, he remembered, he had implied…no, had actually threatened her.
This was really getting out of hand. No one, even someone like her, deserved to feel such fear.
“I don’t want you to die,” he said earnestly, hoping to ease her mind, convince her. Ought he to use her Christian name? Patients always responded better to the familiarity. “Do you understand me, Elizabeth? You are in no danger. I just don’t want you to marry my nephew. That’s the only reason I brought you hens—simply to get you away from Terry. That’s all, I swear.”
She didn’t believe him. He could see her disbelief and virtually smell her fear. The poor thing still expected a death blow at any moment.
“Look, you little dimwit, if I wanted you dead, you’d never have awakened. Don’t you see? I could have done you in a hundred times over, dumped you somewhere and dusted my hands of it. You needn’t be afraid, Elizabeth. I do not want you dead.”
For a long minute she studied his face intently, biting her lips and breathing hard. She shifted uncomfortably and straightened her back. When she finally spoke, her words were soft. “Would you…leave me alone then? Please?”
He understood immediately. She had been abed all night and most of the morning without relieving herself. She looked somewhat calmer now, sane enough to trust to herself for a while.
Hopefully.
Neil glanced at the room’s only window, which he knew from experience was impossible to coax open. Should she break it, there was a thirty-foot drop beneath. One who clung to life so tenaciously was hardly suicidal enough to jump.
“Certainly. We can talk downstairs. There are towels on the stand, water in the pitcher, and the necessary room’s in there.” Neil waved as he stood up. “Your bag’s in the wardrobe. Why don’t you dress and come down to the study when you feel up to it? The door will be open. If you need to rest awhile, it’s all right. I won’t disturb you.”
She still didn’t fully believe him. Neil dragged forth the practiced reassurance he doled out like laudanum to the wounded. “I promise you, you’re safe, Elizabeth. My word as a gentleman.” Ha! She’d surely credit that after his conduct up to this point.
“Will you let me go?” She sounded a bit stronger, he thought, but very doubtful.
“Of course I’ll let you go,” he answered patiently. In about a week, he purposely didn’t add.
Slowly he descended the stairs, lost in his thoughts. “Lord, what have I done?” he asked himself, rolling his eyes heavenward. “This is sheer madness.”
Here was a side of himself kept well buried since he was a child. It had emerged only once in the intervening years.
With Emma.
Recklessness and disregard for consequences had already ruined his life twice. How many lessons did one need?
First his mother had left him, unable to deal with the wild child his aged father had spoiled rotten. How well he recalled the last incident before his father died.
Neil had had the best of intentions. Listening for days to his mother bewail the fact that she needed a grand hunt scene painted for the dining room, he had sought to oblige. He knew exactly how, he’d thought, after weeks of watching a visiting artist capture his mother in oils. His own attempt on the wall above the buffet wasn’t bad for a five-year-old. She didn’t agree. After her screaming fit, Neil made hasty amends. Mother must be pleased.
“What takes paint away, Jed?” he had asked the footman.
“Bird shit,” the disgruntled man replied, busy scrubbing the nasty stuff off the lord’s glossy carriage.
Well, chickens were birds, Neil reasoned. He’d visited the henhouse and set to work on the unwanted picture that very afternoon. Now that he looked back, he wondered that Mother had stayed as long as she had.
Married at sixteen to a man three times her age, Norah Guest Bronwyn had probably whooped with delight when her husband expired six years later. Until she realized she was only a dowager countess, stranded in the country with her own little hellion and an eighteen-year-old stepson—the new earl—who loathed her.
Without a word of explanation, Norah had packed her things and Neil’s, deposited him at a second-rate boarding school and hared off to God knew where. He hadn’t seen her since. But later, as a man, he’d met dozens of women just like her.
As far as he knew they were all like her—flighty, shallow, feather-headed females set on taking all they could get at the least possible cost.
Even after he’d realized that, he still fell responsible for her desertion. If only he’d been well behaved. If he’d been quiet, agreeable and more circumspect, she might have taken him with her or stayed and at least tried to love him. She wasn’t all she should have been as a mother, but he knew the fault was mostly his own. He should have been different.
With that thought dominant, he’d reformed his whole personality by the time he was twelve. He grew determined to find affection somewhere, somehow, and hold on to it. His older brother had doted on him after he changed, delighted with Neil’s newfound maturity. Didn’t that prove the theory?
Thank God Jon had been too preoccupied with estate business to notice Neil’s relapse at the age of twenty.
He’d thought Emma different from his mother. Showed how green he was—green as a goddamned summer cabbage. The old impulsiveness had reared its ugly head, caused him to think he could behave irrationally, love without analyzing the thing to death and get away with it. Lo and behold, another gut punch.
Now here he was, dead center in another harebrained fiasco that reduced his former lapses to insignificance. Why hadn’t he considered the repercussions first?
This
