The Mystery Woman (Ladies of Lantern Str - By Amanda Quick Page 0,49

again. She decided she was not in the mood to find out.

“Never mind,” she said. “You may dose yourself with Mrs. Marsh’s formula or not, as you please. I am not going to waste any more time arguing with you. If you will step aside, I shall return to my room.”

“Before you go,” he said very softly, “there is one thing I would like you to know.”

“What is that?”

“Downstairs in the hall when we kissed a few minutes ago, I was not aware of any pain at all. In fact, I found our embrace to be remarkably therapeutic.”

“If that comment was meant to be humorous, it fails the test.”

“I am serious.”

He sounded serious, she thought. She got the impression that he was trying to work out the logic behind the observation and not making much progress.

“Yes, well, we were at risk of discovery,” she said stiffly. “Excitement of that sort can cause one to temporarily ignore an otherwise nagging pain. I’m sure you’re aware of that, given your former career.”

“I know all about the numbing effect that violent excitement has on the body,” he shot back impatiently. “But that couple in the hall hardly posed a serious risk. No, Miss Lockwood, I am convinced that it was your kiss that made me forget the discomfort in my leg.”

She cleared her throat. “As you said, you recently spent a very long year in the country. I must go now. We are in the middle of an investigation, if you will recall, and I have a blackmail payment to deliver.”

He opened the door wider and stood aside. She swept past him and hurried down the hall to her room. She knew that he watched her until she was safely inside.

Twenty

Joshua waited until the door of Beatrice’s bedroom closed and then he made his way back down the old staircase to the ground floor. He winced at every step. Going down a flight of stairs was always more painful than climbing them in the first place. Worse yet, he did not have Beatrice to distract him now.

At the bottom of the staircase he stopped and opened the door. There was no one about in the hall. The house was quieter now. Traffic would pick up again just before dawn. There was nothing more predictable than the nightly routine of a country-house party.

A short time later he let himself into a small chamber that looked as if it had once been a monk’s cell. The little room was empty save for two old steamer trunks that someone had stored there years ago and evidently forgotten. With the door partially cracked he had a clear view of the heavy doors that guarded the great hall at the far end of the gallery.

He sat down on one of the trunks and took the small medicine bottle out of his pocket. For a moment he examined it in the narrow band of light that seeped through the doorway.

He was not sure how he felt about the tonic or the fact that Beatrice had given it to him. Certainly part of him was irritated. He did not like it that Beatrice was aware of his pain. Another part of him was oddly touched by the gift.

But it meant that even though she had been acquainted with him for only a few days, she knew him well enough to be able to discern those times when the leg plagued him. That alone was sufficient evidence that he was not doing a proper job of concealing his emotions.

It was the heated embrace in the hallway, however, that ought to alarm him the most. He had not intended for the kiss to get out of hand. It was to have been a charade, nothing more. But the instant he had crushed her against him, inhaled her scent and felt the sweet, soft, gently rounded form of her body beneath the fabric of the gown, something inside him had threatened to break free.

He had spent much of his life learning to control the powerful tides that threatened to wreak havoc on his carefully ordered world. The rigorous physical and mental training he had practiced for years had taught him to channel the fire inside. He had learned the hard way that when he violated his own rules, bad things happened.

A year ago he had slipped the bonds of logic in the course of an investigation and he was still paying for it. He still woke up in a cold sweat, wondering how