couldn’t even ascertain if you were alive or dead. And now you expect me to leave. To just…what? Hail a hackney to take me back to Green Street?” Her face crumpled slightly. “Confound you. I thought I’d lost you all over again.”
His breath burned in his chest. He hadn’t thought—hadn’t considered. It had been too long since anyone cared about him. Not the title or the succession, but him. “I’m sorry I caused you distress.”
“Don’t be sorry. Just…let me look after you. I won’t be satisfied until I see for myself that you’re going to be all right.”
He could do little else but stare at her, his jaw clenched hard against the emotion dammed up within him. She couldn’t possibly comprehend the danger she was in. Not only the fact that she was here, at a hotel in the dead of night, but that she was here. Alone with him when he was in such an unpredictable mood.
He wanted her, damn him. He needed the solace of her arms. To lose himself in the sweet-scented feminine softness of her body.
It was already impossible to be near her without longing for her like a lovestruck pup. Thus far, only the respectability of daylight—of mannerly visits in the Trumbles’ parlor and polite encounters on Bond Street—had kept that longing in check. And even then, he’d faltered. The day they’d kissed in Hyde Park, and then again when he’d waltzed with her on the Parkhursts’ terrace. With each touch of her lips and clasp of her hand, he’d lost a little more of his implacable resolve. The very resolve that was meant to see him through this.
If only she’d waited until the morning to call on him, he might have regained some semblance of control over himself. But now…
“Let me see.” She stretched out her hand to loosen the tie of his banyan.
This time he made no attempt to stop her. He didn’t back away, merely stood there, holding his breath as the silken garment slipped over his shoulder and down his bare arm, exposing the bullet wound to her view.
But it wasn’t the bullet wound that caught Maggie’s eye. It wasn’t his arm at all. It was his naked chest.
She froze in front of him, her gaze riveted to an old scar that slanted from the bottom of his neck down over his pectoral muscle. Long faded, but still quite visible, it was the sole reminder of who he was and where’d he come from. The lone memento of a past he’d tried very hard to forget.
Bloody blasted hell.
He hadn’t meant to reveal it to her. Not here, not now. Had he been thinking clearly—
But it was too late.
A strange expression came over her face. She went pale and flushed by turns. And then she touched him. The slightest brush of her fingertips against his exposed flesh. It sent an earthquake through his vitals. A shudder he could neither hide nor suppress.
She inhaled a ragged breath, as though she felt it too. That deep bond of connection, forged so long ago, unbroken by time and distance. “Great God, I knew it.” Her eyes found his, a glimmer of triumph shining in their liquid sapphire depths. “It really is you.”
Maggie had scarcely touched him before St. Clare was, once again, moving away from her.
He pulled his banyan back over his shoulder, and tying it with a jerk, strode into his bedroom. A table beside the bed held a bottle of brandy and a single glass. He poured out a generous measure and drank it down in one swallow.
She followed after him. Surely he wasn’t going to continue to deny it? Not now. The scar across his chest was definitive proof. She’d recognized it instantly, remembering the bloodied gash left by Fred’s whip as if it were yesterday.
“Look at what he did to me,” Nicholas had said on that fateful night so many years ago. “I ask you, is this the work of a gentleman?”
St. Clare slammed his glass down on the table. “I told you that you shouldn’t have come here.”
Maggie knew she shouldn’t have come. It was reckless and wild. A very real risk to her reputation. Worse than that, it was unfair to Bessie (who Maggie had told), and doubly unfair to Jane (who Maggie hadn’t).
But Maggie hadn’t cared about burdening her servant, or keeping secrets from her friend, not when St. Clare’s well-being hung in the balance.
Nicholas’s well-being.
They regarded each other across the short distance of his bedchamber like two