Thief of Hearts (27 page)

Anna's voice, subdued, sweet, came to him again through the two walls that separated them. He stared at the closed door to the dressing room half hers, half his and imagined what she might be doing in her room. Was she taking off her jewelry and setting it on her mirrored dressing table? Uncoiling her pretty hair and brushing it out? Sighing with relief as she unhooked her silly, useless corset. Stepping out of all those crinolines and petticoats. Unrolling her stockings. Pulling her chemise over her head and standing naked in the middle of the room, shaking her hair back.

Brodie was through the door, across the width of the dressing room, and pushing Anna's door open without knocking, all within the space of two and a half seconds.

Two startled female faces turned from their task examining a stain on a puce satin petticoat and gaped at him. One was Anna, depressingly fully clothed in nightgown, frilly robe, and slippers. The other was her maid; he knew her name was Judith, but Anna hadn't mentioned that she had the scowl of a tiger shark and a face like a boiled owl. She was hovering around her mistress now with a kind of Spanish vigilance that egged him on.

"Ladies," he said, with a fatuous bow. Anna raised her eyebrows and the maid dropped a perfunctory curtsy. He came farther into the room. They were standing beside the bed. "What's this?" He reached between them and fingered the petticoat they'd been studying. He could tell by the way they went stiff as marlinspikes that he'd committed some horrible breach of masculine etiquette. He held the satin to his nose and said, "Mmmm." The maid gave a little outraged gasp. He slid his arm around Anna's waist and rested his hand familiarly on the side of her hip. "You can go now, Judith," he said quietly, keeping his gaze on Anna's white neck where it disappeared into the collar of her nightgown.

"No!" Anna dropped her eyes to veil the anxiety and added with pretended calm, "No, stay, Judith; we hadn't finished what we were doing."

"Oh, sorry," he lied cheerfully, going behind her; "I'll just wait, then." He snaked both arms around her, clasped his hands together beneath her breasts, and rested his chin on top of her head.

There was a moment of silence. He remembered something. "Colored shoes are not considered consistent with good taste, you know," he mentioned. "However, delicate pink and faint blue each have their advocates."

Anna pulled down on his wrists as hard as she could while trying to keep her face tranquil for Judith's benefit. "What were you saying, Judith?" Each time she stopped her frantic pressure, he moved his hands a fraction of an inch higher. "The cream silk? Yes, II tore it. In Rome, I think, on an omnibus. We'll have to… " He pressed closer; she could feel every inch of him along her back and buttocks and thighs. "We'll have to take a piece of cloth from the… from the back, the inside, and make a… " He'd gotten a thumb inside her dressing gown and was stroking the bottom of her left breast. Her knees started to tremble. Judith had gone red in the face and wouldn't look at her. "A
patch
," she got out, then broke off again when he put his lips, and then his tongue, in the hollow place between her neck and her shoulder. She closed her eyes, just for a second. The working part of her brain finally grasped that Judith would be no protection, that there was almost nothing he would stop at while the maid remained with them, and that she would actually be safer without her.

So when Brodie murmured against her ear, sending little tremors to all of her extremities, "Now are you finished, love?" she dragged her eyes open, drew a difficult breath, and said, "Yes, I'm...you...we'll talk in the morning, Judith. Good night."

"Night, Judith," echoed Brodie, his irrepressible grin a match for the look of dislike the maid threw him before she whirled and dumped out of the room, without a curtsy. "I don't think she likes me, Annie. Did I do something wrong?"

"Let go of me. Let go!" He didn't, and now he was running his tongue along her jaw and rubbing little widening circles on her stomach, humming with satisfaction. She put her fist in her hand and rammed her elbow into his side, causing him to say "Oof!" and let her go.

Brodie collapsed on the end of the bed, clutching his ribs dramatically, chuckling under his breath. She straightened her clothes and backed away, glaring. She opened her mouth to tell him what she would do if he ever tried anything like that again, then closed it. He called her threats dares, and she didn't have the nerve to tempt him to call her bluff. She watched in impotent silence as he patted the satin comforter on either side of his thighs and gave the feather mattress a few test bounces.

"I like your bed better than mine," he decided. "It's softer. But, Annie, I have to tell you, this is the ugliest house I've ever seen. How can you live in a room like this? You can't walk three feet in a straight line without running smash into some damn gewgaw or other."

"I might take that seriously," she bristled, "if it came from anyone else but a man who's used to sleeping in a hammock and eating out of a brass cooking pot. You wouldn't know a fine, respectable residence if it bit you, John Brodie, so don't you dare criticize my house!" In a corner of her mind a low voice buzzed, saying he was right and she knew it, had often thought it; its insistent echo only made her madder. "Now would you please go? I'm tired and I'd like to retire."

"'Retire'? I'll make a deal with you. I'll leave as soon as you say you want to go to bed. Come on, say it. You can do it."

She ground her teeth. She wasn't afraid to say it, she was afraid of what he would say after she said it. Something vile, she hadn't any doubt.

"What's that?" he asked suddenly, pointing behind her.

She looked, and turned back. "That's my violin."

"You play the violin?"

His look of hidden hilarity irritated her exceedingly. "I'm learning. Is there something funny about that?"

"Absolutely not." But his tickled grin belied the answer. "I can't wait to hear you practice. How do you think it went tonight?" he asked without a pause, throwing her off. "I've been thinking it might not have been such a bad idea, your aunt's party. This way we got the worst of it over with all at once."

She settled one hip against her dressing table and began to fiddle with a perfume bottle, lifting the stopper out and putting it back, out and back. "Yes," she conceded, "I think you're right." It seemed he was going to behave himself. Speaking to him like this, alone, both of them in their night clothes, made her intensely uncomfortable. But there were things she needed to say to him right away, and she could see no immediate way out. "Actually, I think it went quite well. I was watching people's faces, and I saw nothing to indicate anyone having the least difficulty believing you were Nicholas."
As incredible as that seems
, her tone implied. "There were one or two things I wanted to mention, however."

Brodie folded his arms and waited. Even when she was insulting him, he loved to hear her talk. It was partly her voice, partly her upper-class accent, partly the words she used.

She was struggling for words now. She didn't want to tell him that he had a quality of repose, a quiet self-containment Nicholas had never had and that she found dangerously attractive. Nicholas had been restless, discontent, seeking. He'd wanted so much. Mr. Brodie didn't seem to want anything.

"Nicholas had an abundance of nervous energy," she began carefully. "He was hardly ever still. If he was sitting, he might drum his fingers or jog his foot up and down. Standing, he'd jiggle the change in his pockets or look around the room restlessly, even if he was speaking to you." Self-consciously, she stopped fidgeting with the perfume stopper and put her hands into her robe pockets. "Also, he... he didn't laugh at a joke quite as much as you. He wasn't a
hearty fellow
, you might say. Perhaps he—"

"Had no sense of humor?"

"I was going to say, perhaps he was more serious than you." Then again, maybe he had been humorless. She no longer knew. She had an idea that he hadn't liked people as easily as his brother, nor had he trusted them as readily. And tonight she'd made the further discovery that people warmed to Mr. Brodie much more quickly than they had to Nicholas.

Brodie stood up. "All right," he agreed, stuffing his hands in his pockets and twitching his fingers, "I'll try to act restless. And I'll try not to laugh so much, but you'll have to help me."

"I? How?"

"By not telling any more of those side-splitting jokes of yours, Annie. Sometimes you really kill me."

"Very funny." She pinched her lips together irritably. He moved toward her and she sidled away, going to the bureau. "Here's a book I'd like you to read. Keep it in your room, it's on web frames and side stringers, and Nicholas would've known all about that."

"I heard something about you tonight I didn't suspect," he told her, pocketing the book. "Why didn't you tell me you were an angel of mercy? I had to pretend I already knew it."

"What are you talking about?"

" 'Anna's poor-peopling,' Jenny called it. She said you've been single-handedly feeding half of Lancashire for months during something she called the 'cotton famine.'"

She clucked her tongue. "What nonsense. I've given some time to an organization that's helping to feed textile workers, that's all."

"Why can't they feed themselves?"

"Because their factories are closed. The North won't let any cotton out of Southern ports in America, and without cotton there's no work in Lancashire. Eighty thousand people have no jobs."

Brodie's face softened. "It's wonderful of you to do that."

"No, it's not, it's necessary. What's wonderful is the attitude of the workers. You'd think they would support the South in the war and press for England to help end the blockade, but they don't. They're suffering the most, and yet they sympathize with the North."

"Because of the slaves," he guessed.

"Yes. For these people the war boils down to a contest for the destruction of slavery. I think it makes it easier for them to endure all their hardships." In surprise, she watched his face close, go completely blank, before he walked away from her. She gazed at his broad back as he stood beside one of the bedposts, fingering the intricate swirls of carved wood. "Is something wrong?" So many seconds passed, she thought he wouldn't answer. But then he did, in a voice she'd never heard before.

"I saw a slave ship once. The captain was Danish, the ship was Spanish, the crew was every nationality under the sun. I was serving on an English merchantman, heading for the Horn and then San Francisco. I'll never know why, but the Spanish brig took us for the Royal Navy and threw all her cargo overboard before we could close with her."

Anna went white. "What do you mean?"

"We saw it start from half a mile away. At first we didn't know what they were, bags of something they'd been smuggling, we thought. Then we got closer. We saw hundreds of 'em,
hundreds
, being flung over the gunwales on both sides. Children. Women and men. We couldn't get there in time and they all drowned. All of them."

Imagining the horror, Anna pressed her fists to her lips and closed her eyes. "My God," she breathed. But the pain and fury were too sharp, too strong; she couldn't contain them. She thought of Brodie instead, of the life he'd led. What other human cruelties had he witnessed in the last fourteen years? What had they made him capable of? She shivered with an irrational fear, feeling his alienation, his separateness. It would be easy to allow her repugnance for the atrocities he'd lived through to color her feelings for the man himself, she realized. Because he was so different from the people in her tiny, civilized universe, his experiences so foreign. She knew nothing at all of his life, and it frightened her.

"Don't be afraid of me. I couldn't stand that."

She looked up, and saw that he was watching her. Had her face given her away, or could he read her mind? When he came toward her, she didn't move. "I'm not." She shook her head, whispering.

He didn't believe her. "I'm not a monster, Annie, I'm only a man. I've never touched a woman in anger. I would never, never hurt you."

"
I know that
."

She did. So he'd been wrong, fear wasn't the cause of the chasm between them after all, the mile-deep gulf he'd seen in her eyes for a few seconds. It was something wider, stronger, truly unbridgeable. He hesitated, weighing the risks, and then he put his arms around her, fast, before she could slip away.

Anna held her breath, amazed, not because of what he'd done but because she could feel his strong arms trembling. Her hands crept to his shoulders and she let him hold her, even while she pondered how this could've happened and why she was letting it continue. He rested his cheek against hers. His hands were still; he didn't try to kiss her. She felt the flutter of his eyelashes on her temple, heard his unsteady breathing, and a deep longing rose in her. She wanted to protect herself and she wanted to give him everything. "Please go now," she said, her voice muffled against his shoulder.

He didn't move. It wasn't enough yet, he was still starving, freezing cold, burning for her.

"Please." Now she was the one trembling.

Brodie tried to take the raw need out of his voice. "I want to kiss you good night."

"Why?" she cried. "What good will it do?" She felt his lips move against her cheek and suspected he was smiling.

"If you have to ask, you haven't done nearly enough kissing." He knew now she was going to let him, but she could never say the word "yes." So he stopped asking and drew back to look at her. The worry in her eyes calmed him down a little. He took his forefinger and brushed it with whispery gentleness across her upper lip. "This one," he murmured. "This one's my favorite." He leaned in and touched both of his to that one of hers, hearing her soft sigh. With the tip of his tongue he opened her mouth, and used it to prod her top lip between his, sipping gently, nibbling. He hadn't been going to touch her at all, but now he put his hand between them, over her heart, and felt its heavy racing. Anna tried to open her eyes, but she was drugged. His soft breath on her cheek warmed her. His mouth fastened to hers and the kiss deepened and deepened until there was nothing more it could be. Then it faded and blossomed into another, and another, and another. When they drew away, their breathing was harsh and seductive and their eyes were bleak with wanting.