Lost in Your Arms (10 page)

Her next words jerked his attention back to her. “I treasure the hope that in the years we’ve been separated, you reconciled with your family. You always said they weren’t important to you, but your defiance of them guided your every action.”

“I was at odds with my family?” He would have sworn he was the most dedicated of family men. Probably she was wrong about that, too.

“That’s why you wed me. I was not the bride the MacLeans would have chosen.” Her mouth curled in a bitter smile as she put the broom and dustpan away. “Your cousin, the laird of the MacLeans, was much opposed to our marriage.”

“I had a cousin.” His memory of the girl on the rock flashed into his mind once more, and he asked craftily, “Anyone else? Mother, father, sister?”

“A mother, but you dismissed her without interest. You spoke only of Kiernan. Kiernan was a stick. Kiernan thought he was so smart. You’d show Kiernan. You ate yourself alive with envy of Kiernan.”

“Kiernan.” He sat up slowly. The name rang a bell in his mind. “I remember him.”

She hurried to his side, and her voice sharpened with hope. “Do you?”

“No. I mean . . . I recall the name, or something.” He tried; he tried so hard, straining as he reached for the memory, but he couldn’t quite grasp it. Kiernan, like everyone and everything else, hovered out of reach in the mists of his mind.

Exhausted from the effort, he collapsed back on the pillows. “He’s not there.”

Her forehead puckered. “Do you want us to let him know you’re alive? I’m sure your family must be worried.”

“It doesn’t sound as if they would be.” Perhaps he was cruel to so dismiss the clan which had given him being, but he wouldn’t go and face strangers he didn’t remember, or try to justify an existence spent in dissipation . . . if indeed he had so lived that life. “So tell me about this doctor. The one who taught you your profession.”

“Dr. Gerritson was in his seventies, and he had lived in Little Bidewell his whole life, curing everything he could, human and animal. I stayed with him. I helped him treat his patients and learned everything he could teach me.”

Catching the end of her braid, MacLean brought her closer to his bedside. “What have you done since then?”

“I’ve cared for the elderly, mostly, and the very ill.”

He tangled his finger in the braid, marveling at its silky texture.

“For the last three years, I’ve lived with Lady Halifax as her nurse-companion.”

Enid had been living with a female. “Is she a dear old thing?”

“I would say not. She is disagreeable, querulous, demanding, and difficult. Also intelligent, discerning, fair, and the best of women. I admire her very much.”

“Did she send the letter you received?”

“Indeed.”

He relaxed about one thing, at least.

“But she’s very ill. She can’t write anymore, but she dictates to the new nurse.” Enid looked down at her interlocked hands. “I left her to come to you.”

Her expressionless voice expressed better than anything else her obdurate resentment. Tightening his grip on her braid, he said, “You would rather care for an elderly woman than for me. You would rather clean up after the ill and hold a dying person’s hand than live with me. No matter how disgraceful my morals, how could you have left me for such an existence?”

“You misunderstand. I didn’t leave you.” Stepping away from him, she yanked her hair free of him. “You abandoned me.”

Chapter 11

“Ma’am, do you know what worm is eating at his gut?” Mrs. Brown watched from the rocking chair as MacLean pulled himself up on the bar over his bed for the dozenth time that morning. “He’s working himself night and day building those muscles of his, like if he doesn’t something bad’s going to happen.”

“I suppose he wants to be able to get up and walk again.” Enid folded the towels in preparation for MacLean’s bath. For the last three weeks, he had bathed every day—after his exercises. “Ever since he fell, he’s been resolved that he’ll get on his feet.”

Mrs. Brown glanced sideways at Enid. “Ye’re going to have to let him sooner or later, ye know.”

“I know.” Enid weighed the linen in her hand. “I’m worried about that compound fracture. I’ve never cared for one before, but old Dr. Gerritson had, and he said the patient should just be shot, like a horse, to save trouble. I don’t want MacLean to die.”

“Not after the trouble we’ve had bringing him this far.” Mrs. Brown threaded her needle with silky white thread and set to work on a fragile bit of froth trimming a little girl’s petticoat. “But if he was going to die, he would have already passed on, and knowing that man and his determination, there wouldn’t have been a thing we could do about it.”

“You’re right. I agree.” But that didn’t ease Enid’s mind. At night when she lay wakeful, she found herself imagining the worst: MacLean collapsing in agony, MacLean’s leg swelling from a blood clot, MacLean’s mind slipping away again. All absurd conjecture; she knew it, yet fruitlessly she chased phantoms of ill fortune through her dreams.

Without paying the women a bit of heed, MacLean lifted the iron weights Mr. Throckmorton had provided for him. Next he would work his legs, lifting them, flexing them, ignoring the compound fracture as if it had never been. Relentlessly he rebuilt his body as if he had a meeting with fate—as perhaps he did.

“He’s looking better,” Mrs. Brown said. “Filling out nicely.”

An understatement. As the iron weights rose above his head again and again, the muscles in his shoulders and arms bunched and relaxed.

“Of course, as much as he’s eating, he should be filling out,” Mrs. Brown added.

Long, smooth, taut muscles had developed on his massive bones and changed him from a skeleton into a living, breathing, Greek god. And Enid had been on her own for too long if she compared Stephen MacLean with Apollo for any other reason except dissipation.

“He should wear a shirt,” Enid fretted.

Mrs. Brown looked him over. “Why? It’s not often a woman my age gets to pleasure her eyes with such a sight.”

Shocked by the older woman’s frank appraisal—women her age weren’t supposed to be looking at men—Enid exclaimed, “Mrs. Brown!”

“A woman would have to be blind or dead not to appreciate him.” Mrs. Brown chuckled. “I suppose that’s why ye’re wanting him to clothe himself, though. He’s scarcely speaking to ye, so I suppose ye’re not sharing his bed.”

“That is not any of your business,” Enid said loftily.

“No, then,” Mrs. Brown decided. “I thought not. Ye’d both be a lot easier to be around if ye were dancing the bedtime minuet.”

Enid didn’t need a confidante, nor did she need an advisor. She was perfectly capable of managing her life without help from anyone.

Of course, she would have liked to tell someone MacLean’s real problem, and see whether or not they thought he would ever forgive her. For it was she who had set off this frenzy of muscle-building. She had told him who he had been, and he hadn’t liked hearing about his gambling, his cheating, his wandering. He had been infuriated by her recitation of his crimes. And when she had said he’d abandoned her he had called her a fraud. An imposter. A hypocrite.

She’d felt sorry for the man. He’d been so obviously flummoxed by her announcement. So she had let him abuse her and hadn’t said a word, and what did she get in return? He could barely stand to gaze at her. They never held a real conversation any more.

See if she ever tolerated one of his tantrums again.

Worse, he worked to bring himself to the peak of fitness so he could go off and find out the truth, and confront her with it. She knew that soon he would demand to be on his feet, and despite her fears that his leg would buckle beneath him, she would let him. She was surprised he hadn’t already attempted to stand.

But she couldn’t confide in Mrs. Brown. Not that Mrs. Brown needed an invitation to comment on the tense situation in the sickroom. Apparently the older woman considered Enid a daughter, and she heaped wisdom on Enid’s head whether Enid welcomed it or not.

“Ye don’t know how to manage yer husband,” Mrs. Brown began.

“I don’t want to learn.”

“Then ye’re a fool. All women need to know how to manage their man. How else are ye going to get the big lummox to do what ye want him to?”

“I don’t want him to do anything.” Enid felt as if she shouted into the wind.

And Mrs. Brown sounded so quietly exasperated. “Ye’ve got to break that habit of telling falsehoods, Mrs. MacLean. It’s bad for the soul. Now I don’t know what ye told Mr. MacLean that set him into such a snit, but—”

“I told him he was a wastrel of Olympic proportions.”

“There. Ye see? Ye don’t have to tell him every little thing. If ye’d told him he was a prince among men, mayhap he’d act the part. Instead, ye allowed yer grudges to cause ye to blurt out every little difficulty—”

Enid put her hands to her aching head. “You said I wasn’t to tell falsehoods, so why would I claim he was a prince among men?”

“Telling a falsehood to your husband isn’t really a falsehood, it’s more in the line of a stretching of the truth. The Lord will forgive ye that if it’s in pursuit of yer husband’s happiness.”

“I don’t care whether he’s happy.”

“Of course ye do! He’s yer husband. Ye have no choice. Marriage is forever, and ye might as well settle down and make do, just like every other woman who wed.”

Enid had never heard Mrs. Brown speak so frankly. “Is that what you did? Make do?”

“Yes, dear. I married beneath me. As do all women.” Mrs. Brown had finished her sewing. Shaking out the petticoat, she nodded as if satisfied. “If ye don’t need me any more today, ma’am, I’ll be off to the nursery to care for Miss Penelope and Miss Kiki. With the wedding only four weeks away, they’re wild with excitement.”

“I imagine they are.” Enid had enjoyed hearing the details of the arrangements every time Celeste had visited, and Celeste had come at least twice a week, always carrying flowers, a haircomb, and occasionally a book. Enid would have been grateful for Celeste’s thoughtfulness, except that MacLean talked to Celeste. He teased her. And Enid was tired of being ignored, tired of being envious of a friend, tired of this anxious, vaguely guilty sensation whenever she saw MacLean concentrating fiercely on recapturing his strength.

She was, in a word, fed up, and she told Mrs.
Brown, “You go ahead and tend the children.
I’ll
take care of Mr. MacLean.”

“Ye sound a little frazzled.” But nothing rattled Mrs. Brown’s placidity. “Better not get too snappish with him. Ye’ll not win with that man.”

Enid would have argued that point, but while she thought she could vanquish MacLean and his silly resentments, she knew she would never win against the powerfully practical Mrs. Brown. Folding her hands and lowering her head in mock meekness, Enid said, “I’ll read him the London newspaper.”

“He likes that.” Mrs. Brown rolled up the petticoat and placed it in her sewing basket. “It makes the time go quickly when he exercises.”

“How do you know?” Enid asked.

“He told me.” Mrs. Brown prepared to descend the stairs. “You ought to talk to him sometime, dear. He’s actually quite a nice man.”

A nice man. MacLean was about as nice as a Roman conqueror sacking a village. And in the space of one morning, Enid had compared him to a Greek god and a Roman conqueror. Next it would be a medieval knight, and he had nothing of chivalry about him. Nothing at all.

She glanced at him and found him watching her as he twisted one side to the other, putting his elbow to his opposite knee, back and forth, over and over. He had that expression on his face, like he wanted to pry open her head and peer into the contents.

Well, wasn’t that interesting. MacLean had suddenly decided he could be interested in her. Wouldn’t he be surprised to discover her thoughts?

Taking the
Sunday News of the World
—Mr. Throckmorton sent it every week—she walked to his bedside. “Would you like me to read to you?”

He nodded as he always did, for he exercised his mind just as he did his body. He listened to the stories, demanded explanations, and occasionally contributed a comment that proved he remembered . . . something. Yet he insisted his memory hadn’t returned, and she had no reason to doubt him. After all, if he remembered, he would know who he was and who he had been, and he would be apologizing to her for doubting him.

Pleased to discover her sense of humor hadn’t abandoned her, she grinned.

Placing a chair by his bedside, she sat, snapped open the paper, and read an article about the SS
Great Britain
, the first large iron-hulled screw-propeller steamship, and its launch on July 19.

He grunted. “She won’t make it across the Atlantic.”

She read about the statue of Lord Nelson being hoisted on the column in London’s new Trafalgar Square.

“About time,” he decided and curled up, then back down, then up again, until Enid’s abdomen ached to watch him.

She was reading a story attacking Prince Albert for being a foreigner when, without ceremony, MacLean interrupted. “Who are your family?”

There it was. A prying question put in the bluntest of tones. Dropping the paper into her lap, she said, “That’s the first personal thing you’ve said to me in three weeks, and you want to know about my family?
There’s no, ‘I’m sorry I’ve been a knave,’ or ‘It’s been lonely without your gentle conversation.’ Just, ‘Who are your family?’ “

Unimpressed, he lifted an eyebrow and his heaviest weights. “So who are they?”

Of course, he’d gone right to the heart of the matter. He wanted to know why she’d been deemed an unsuitable bride by the ogre leader of his clan.

Well. She could easily tell him that. “I don’t have a family.”

“Everyone has a family.”

“Not bastards.”

That got his attention. He stopped lifting his weights; he swept her with a critical glance.

What difference did it make if he knew? When he recovered his memory, he would taunt her with her illegitimacy. He always had.

“No mother? No father?” His bare chest rose and fell, powerfully pulling in enough air to feed his body.

She watched, saw the muscles that rippled beneath the skin, the layer of auburn hair that curled across his pectorals, and imagined how he would appear when he had recovered all his strength. “Not to . . . to speak of.” She needed to concentrate on the conversation, not on the view. “My mother died in childbirth. My father paid my tuition to Mrs. Palmer’s School for Young Ladies, and I attended until I was fourteen years old.”

“So you
do
have a father. Who is he?”

“Was, MacLean. He was the honorable earl of Binghamton.”

“You have noble English blood running through
your veins.” His Scots accent strengthened. “Blood of the silly, vain, useless aristocratic conquerors.”

“I’m English through and through, and proud of it, too,” she said fiercely. “Nothing you can do will ever change that, but there is never anybody less noble than a female child raised among her betters.”

“Your schoolmates were better than you?”

“They thought they were.” In her mind’s eye, she saw the long corridors of Mrs. Palmer’s School, lined with dull, pimpled girls with bad teeth, and all of them contemptuous of Miss Enid Who Had No Last Name. “Legitimate daughters of earls and barons, legitimate daughters of clergymen and knights, legitimate daughters of wealthy upstart merchants. In society’s eyes, they are all better than me.”

“So if they attended this Mrs. Palmer’s School, it was a fine, prestigious organization?”

“I believe it had that reputation.”

“That explains much about you.” He stared at Enid as if he could peel away the layers of equanimity and see the trembling child hiding within. “You speak with a high-class British inflection. You know the classics, you do needlepoint, and I heard you speak French with Miss Celeste. Very impressive.”

She didn’t appreciate the catalogue of her virtues as recited by a rude, most barbaric wastrel whose only real skill was dice games best played on the stable floor. Haughtily—and she had learned haughty from the best—she said, “Don’t forget my light touch at the pianoforte and my skill at the waltz.”

He flashed her a sharp glance. “In addition, you sport a quick wit—I imagine you developed that to
fend off the other girls and their barbs. The earl of Binghamton made it possible for you to move in higher circles. You’re surely grateful.”

“Grateful.” The word dripped with sarcasm; in Enid’s early years, she’d been told often that she should be grateful that her father had supported her. Gratitude was not what she felt; instead, she experienced a vast impatience that a man unable to keep his trousers buttoned was deemed generous and even honorable. He certainly hadn’t made provision for her support after his death, and he had taken care that she never lay eyes on him.