Teresa Medeiros (39 page)

A droll voice came from behind the divan. “I lost a mare that way once. Sad case. Had to shoot her.”

Morgan’s tactless remark caused all heads, including Sabrina’s, to swivel toward him. He didn’t look sad at all. His green eyes were positively twinkling with good cheer. Sabrina’s admirers glared at him.

A timid hand touched hers. Thankful for the distraction, Sabrina turned back to find a young girl peering at her with genuine sympathy, her face framed by mousy ringlets. “Your legs, Miss Cameron? Do they pain you?”

Sabrina sighed with relief. Her health was always a safe topic. “At times. Right before a rain they tend to ache dreadfully.”

The girls’ voice sank to a fearful whisper. “Are they … 
deformed?
”

Sabrina frowned, afraid to admit that she hadn’t looked at them in months. She always kept her eyes carefully averted when the maids were bathing her, and at any other time they were smothered by a lap rug or
dressing gown. She didn’t even bother with stockings anymore, since her feet never touched the floor.

She parted her fingers to illustrate. “Perhaps only a tiny bit.”

Without hesitation Morgan strode around the divan and snatched back the lap rug. Sabrina’s gown had ridden up to her thighs. Cool air rushed over her bare legs. She gasped, mortified to be so exposed. The girl who had dared to ask collapsed in a pretty swoon only to be caught by the man behind her. The others recoiled in horror, then crept nearer to gape. Sabrina was frozen in place by her own humiliation.

Morgan studied the length of Sabrina’s legs, his thoughtful gaze sweeping from her thighs to the tips of her toes. The crowd held their breath as if awaiting an opinion from the king’s physician himself.

“They don’t look deformed to me,” he pronounced, dropping the lap rug. “A bit pale and scrawny perhaps, but serviceable.”

Protected by the crowd’s mute shock, he bent to bring Sabrina’s hand to his lips. His eyes glinted with pure challenge as his warm lips brushed her knuckles “Miss Cameron. Till we meet again.”

Sabrina felt her chest tightening, her breath coming in furious little pants. “Why—you—you wretched—”

Morgan was accepting his cloak from a bemused footman when Sabrina’s sputters swelled to howls of outrage.

The footman’s eyes twinkled. “I do hope you’ll call again, my lord.”

Tossing an edge of the cloak over his shoulder as he would have his plaid, Morgan gave the man a conspiratorial wink. “You can bloody well count on it.”

As Morgan came striding down the front steps of the town house, Ranald whipped open the door of the waiting carriage with his strong arm.

He took one look at Morgan’s thunderous expression and shook his head in sympathy. “Went poorly, did it? What did the wretches do? Toss ye out on yer ear?”

“On the contrary.” Morgan threw himself against the leather seat and loosened his cravat with a savage jerk. “I’d say it went just as it was intended to go.”

Slamming the carriage door, Ranald hopped up to ride on the steps like a proper footman, then spoiled the effect by poking his head in the carriage window. Unlike Morgan, Ranald took great delight in their new finery. He’d spent most of his time at their lodgings in front of the mirror, preening in his satin livery and dusting fresh powder on his wig.

“Where the hell are we goin’?” he asked, then grinned sheepishly. “I mean what address shall I give the driver, me lord?”

Morgan’s jaw tightened. The single word shot from between his clenched teeth like an epithet. “Bloomsbury.”

They reached Bloomsbury after only three wrong turns and Ranald’s brief skirmish with a drunken sailor. By the time Morgan descended from the carriage, a light rain had began to fall, glazing the cobbled street and painting airy halos around the street lanterns.

Leaving Ranald to admire his reflection in a shop window. Morgan ducked inside the handsome town house, marched up the narrow steps to the second floor, and lifted his hand to knock. He heard the tinkle of crystal, the murmur of voices in gentle accord.

Fresh anger seized him. He slammed his fist against the door. It flew open beneath the force of the blow, crashing into the opposite wall.

The Camerons looked up from the cozy supper they’d laid before the hearth, both looking as guilty as if Morgan had caught Dougal with Elizabeth’s skirts around her waist.

Morgan shook his head, disgusted by their domesticity, the steadfast affection that had sustained them through years of joys and hardships that he and Sabrina would never share. He wanted to overturn the table, wreck the simple room, drain the bottle of brandy sitting on the pristine tablecloth.

Dougal rose, tense and wary. “You saw her, I take it?”

“You lied to me.”

Dougal’s eyes shifted briefly to his wife’s face. Morgan was sick of their sly glances. He grabbed the brandy bottle, but instead of draining it, hurled it to the hearth. Elizabeth flinched at its shatter.

She toyed with her napkin, arranged her silverware into a precise pattern. “We had no choice. If we had told you that our dear, sweet-tempered daughter had turned into a shrewish creature even we didn’t recognize …” She trailed off, running out of silver.

“So you believed if I had known that, I wouldn’t have helped her?” Morgan asked.

Elizabeth’s silence condemned them all. Resting a hand on his wife’s shoulder, Dougal drew himself up. “The only question now is will you still help her? Now that you’ve seen what she’s become.”

Morgan impaled Dougal with his unforgiving gaze, his voice husky with betrayal. “Even when I hated you, I always believed you were a good man, Dougal Cameron. But now I know you’re no better than my own da. Jerking our strings, making us all dance like bloody puppets to your tune.” His hands clenched on a chair back. He met Elizabeth’s beseeching gaze. She was the only woman he could refuse nothing. “Aye, I’ll do your dirty work for you. I’ll push her hard until she remembers how to fight for herself. But we all know what the cost will be. When I’m done with her, she’ll hate me and not you.”

With those words Morgan left them to their cozy supper, to the soothing beat of rain against their windowpanes. Ranald had taken shelter inside the carriage. Drawing the collar of his cloak up against the chill, Morgan climbed in to join him. One look at Morgan’s face and Ranald knew to keep his silence.

As the carriage clattered through a shallow puddle, splashing an arc of water into the air, neither of them saw the solitary figure on the corner left dripping in its wake.

“I won’t go back in there with her! His Grace can toss me out in the gutter if he likes. It just ain’t worth it.” The maid wiped her reddened eyes with her apron.

“Now, Bea, don’t say such things. You know your mum depends on you to put meat on the table for your little brothers and sisters.”

“But she’s a monster!” the maid wailed, hurling herself into the comforting expanse of Cook’s arms.

Cook patted her heaving back, exchanging a helpless look with the other servants who had sought shelter in the smoky haven of her kitchen. They had huddled in a nervous knot all morning, arguing and taking wagers on who would be the next hapless soul to be cast into the young lioness’s den. Even the handsome bonuses offered by the duke were losing their allure.

Cook cringed at the demanding tinkle of the servant’s bell. She glared at the ceiling, wishing with uncharacteristic malice that the duke’s invalid niece had the gold cord of the bellpull knotted around her delicate
little neck. Master Stefan had rigged the unfortunate device when Sabrina had arrived, not knowing that its tinkling melody would haunt them even when they fled the house.

The girl had been in rare form since the ball the previous night. She’d kept the household awake until dawn, ringing every five minutes for chest poultices, leg rubs, and cool cloths for her throbbing temples. Their good-natured employer had since locked himself in the library while Enid and Master Stefan retreated to the relative peace of the garden.

Cook shivered with dread as the bell rang again, its relentless jangle deafening them all to the firm knock on the front door.

The object of the servants’ trepidation lay alone on the settee in the morning room, seething with ill temper.

Sabrina gave the bell rope another vicious tug only to have it come off in her hands. She stared dumbly at it, her panic growing. There was no rush of footsteps in the corridor, no whisper of satin livery. No one was coming, she thought. Perhaps no one was ever coming. Perhaps she was to be left alone with only her doubts and fears for company.

And her legs.

She averted her gaze. The gilt cupids emblazoned on the mantel simpered at her. Although the heat in the room was stifling, she had forced the servants to lay a fire in the marble hearth. The morning sunlight beat through the casement windows like a taunting fist. Sweat trickled between Sabrina’s breasts. She plucked fretfully at the bodice of her dressing gown, then forced herself to lock her hands in her lap.

The stiff gesture might have fooled others, but it did not fool her. Her control was slipping. She had clung to it for months, manipulating herself and everyone around her as if she could somehow atone for that one near-fatal moment when she had lost control and gone plunging over a cliff. Without its armor to protect
her, she feared she would break into a thousand fragile shards and scatter in the warm spring wind.

“Damn you, Morgan MacDonnell,” she whispered.

Morgan was the one who had dared to stride back into her life and jerk her off balance just as he had always done. He was always there to shove her, but never around to catch her when she fell.

She looked at the blanket shielding her legs, then peeked at the door. As long as there were people rushing in and out to do her bidding, she had been safe from the temptation Morgan had dangled before her. Safe from the mocking challenge in his sunlit eyes.

The silence bore down on her, intensifying with each tick of the bronze table clock on the mantel. She could bear it no longer. Drawing in a breath for courage, she cast the blanket aside and parted the skirt of her dressing gown.

Sabrina studied her bared legs as if they belonged to someone else. She tilted her head first to one side, then the other, afraid to admit that Morgan was right. They looked paler and thinner than she remembered, but rather ordinary. She wiggled her toes, childishly fascinated by the simple motion.

“Here you are, darling. I brought the poultice for your poor chest.”

Sabrina snatched the blanket back over her legs as Aunt Honora breezed in. A sullen servant trailed her at ten paces.

Sabrina hid her guilty relief at their interruption behind an imperious sniff. “I do hope it’s wintergreen. Mint gives me hives.”

Her aunt clucked soothingly. “The apothecary was fresh out of wintergreen, dear. We shall simply have to make do.”

The tear-stained maid held her steaming burden a safe distance away as Sabrina snapped, “Have you seen my shawl? It’s freezing in here.”

Aunt Honora swiped her shiny brow. “But sweetcakes, it’s really quite warm.”

“Not if you have bad circulation and are left lying in a draft all day.”

Aunt Honora was rescued from the lash of Sabrina’s tongue by the appearance of Enid and Stefan.

Enid beamed as Stefan thrust a bouquet of lavender blooms under Sabrina’s nose. “Look, coz, see what sis picked for you. We thought some nice flowers might bring you cheer.”

Pollen shot up Sabrina’s nose. Waving the flowers away, she started to sneeze. “Take them away. You know I can’t abide hyacinths.”

Enid and her mother exchanged a dismayed glance. Stefan muttered something beneath his breath and jammed the blooms into a vase on the mantel. But even the maid’s dour expression turned to alarm as Sabrina’s sneezes deepened to gasps.

“Oh, dear Lord,” she choked out between wheezes. “My throat is closing. I can feel it. Help me. Please help me!”

Aunt Honora’s frightened cries brought the servants running. Stefan clapped Sabrina vigorously on the back while his mother sent a footman scampering to fetch the doctor. Before the man could reach the door, he collided with his master, knocking the duke’s wig askew.

“Here now,” Uncle Willie boomed. “What the devil is all this ruckus?”

No one noticed the butler and his towering companion standing before the gilt doors at the opposite end of the morning room. The butler intoned, “The Earl of Montgarry.”

No one paid him any mind. The duke was bellowing, Enid and the duchess were sobbing, and the servants were rushing about in various states of panic.

Giving their guest an apologetic look, the butler cleared his throat politely and tried again. “The Earl of Montgarry!”

Sabrina wheezed harder, clutching her throat and turning a charming shade of lavender to match the hyacinths.
The others gaped at her, frozen now in open horror.

After patting the rueful butler on the shoulders, the smiling earl marched down the length of the room, jerked the flowers from the mantel, and dashed the vase of cold water in Sabrina’s face.

A stunned silence fell over the morning room. Sabrina’s gasps died to shocked little hiccups.

At her disgruntled expression, the onlookers’ appalled faces began to change—a twitch here, a frantic blink there, a chewed-upon lip. Stefan balled his fists in his pockets and turned toward the window, his shoulders hunched. The butler, whose sole responsibility was maintaining dignity in the Belmont household, began to cough behind his hand. He hastily excused himself as if afraid the noble madman would dash the goldfish bowl in his face if he didn’t gain control of his erratic breathing.

Sabrina blinked up at Morgan, water dripping from her dark lashes, pooling in her lap, plastering the satin of her dressing gown to her heaving breasts.

Morgan dismissed her without compunction, bringing Aunt Honora’s plump hand to his lips. “Do forgive my impertinence, your grace. I have an elderly dog given to such fits.”

“Fits?” Sabrina echoed, her voice as clear and biting as a bell.

He slanted her an unreadable glance over her aunt’s hand. “Of wheezing. Fits of wheezing, of course.”