The Seduction Of Elliot McBride(13)
Author: Jennifer Ashley

“I hoped, I so hoped…” Mahindar trailed off as he approached the bed. “Be careful, memsahib. Sometimes he does this, sleeps like a dead man for hours and hours. But when he comes awake, he can be violent. He doesn’t know where he is, and thinks I am his jailer.”

“But he’s safe now. He knows that.”

“Yes, yes, when he is awake and fine, he understands this.” Mahindar touched his forehead. “But inside his head, sometimes he is still confused. You must understand—he was left alone in the dark for a long, long time. Sometimes they fed him, sometimes they didn’t bother, sometimes they left him alone, sometimes they beat him for nothing.” Mahindar looked sad. “I know they must have done much more to him, but that is all he has told me.”

Juliana looked at Elliot, lying so quietly on the bed, his chest barely moving with his breath. His body was whole, only the scars on his back and face attesting to his ordeal. But perhaps healing outside and healing inside were two different things.

How did a man face such horrors and then return home to normal life? He’d never be the same, would he? How did he speak with people who’d never known his horror, people who’d lived in comfort and safety all their lives, who could never understand?

Such a man did what Elliot did. He kept to himself, bought a run-down house in a remote corner of the Highlands, and lost himself in the depths of sleep.

“What do I do?” Juliana’s question came out a whisper.

Mahindar, with his thickset body and intelligent eyes, gave her a look of vast sorrow. “I do not know, memsahib. I have tried everything to heal him. I hoped that when he came here to this country he loved so much, he would get better. Maybe now, that he is married to you, he will.”

Juliana drew her dressing gown more tightly about her and looked at her husband, her marriage one day old. “I barely know him, Mahindar. Not this Elliot.”

The Elliot of her youth, who’d helped her retrieve a kite from a tree, who’d smiled in triumph when she’d kissed his cheek, had vanished into the past. This Elliot was hard, marked with scars, and had been through more than any man should face. The world expected him to shrug it off, to keep a stiff upper lip, to ignore his pain, but how could he, in truth?

She’d have to get to know him all over again before she could even hope to understand him.

“I will help you, memsahib,” Mahindar said, with a quietness like a deep river. “You and I, we will bring him back together.”

“Ah, you are awake at last.” A voice swam out of the darkness to Elliot. “Thank all the gods. Your sister, she is here.”

Elliot peeled open his eyes to see a face hovering mere inches above him. He experienced a moment of panic—What now? What now? Couldn’t they leave him alone?

Then he realized that it was Mahindar’s kind and worried countenance studying him, thick brows drawn together under his white turban, the man’s beard tucked neatly inside his tunic.

“Damn it, Mahindar.”

Mahindar’s distress did not abate. “Lady Cameron has come to visit the memsahib. Your sister-in-law, she is here too, and she insists she see you.”

Rona and Ainsley. Elliot’s redoubtable sister-in-law and pretty, lively sister. Not what a man needed to face when he’d awakened feeling like he had a three-day hangover.

Elliot rubbed his face, finding it full of bristles. He must have been asleep for a long time. Another spell must have taken him, leaving him no idea how long he’d lain in darkness.

And where the hell was he? He squinted at the bedroom empty of drapes and filled with large, square furniture, the bed in the middle of the floor. “Is this McGregor’s place? How did we get here?” Only Great-uncle McGregor’s house could look solid and falling apart at the same time.

The last time Elliot had come here, to purchase the house, he’d bunked down in the warm kitchen—much more comfortable.

Mahindar looked troubled. “Do you not remember? Yesterday, you were married.”

Yesterday was a blank; all days for a long time had been a blank…except…

“Married? What the devil are you talking about? Tell me you brought me whiskey.”

“No, indeed. Her ladyship, your sister, forbade it. She said I was to get you up and down to the drawing room by any means necessary, except whiskey.”

“Ainsley said that?” Elliot wanted to laugh. He’d always been close to his little sister, who knew him in ways no one else ever could. That was the old Elliot, though. No one knew the Elliot of now.

Elliot threw back the covers. He was naked, but Mahindar neither noticed nor cared. “Draw me a bath. I’m not fit to be seen by decent women. Not even my resilient sisters.”

As Mahindar bustled around preparing the bath with ewers of steaming water, Elliot fought his way from the dense fog of his sleep. Mahindar was speaking, and Elliot struggled to focus on his words.

“I have put them in the morning room with the memsahib,” Mahindar said, “and there they wait.”

“The memsahib?”

Mahindar looked up, the water dribbling, unheeded, to the floor. “Yes, the memsahib,” he said in careful tones. “Until yesterday she was called Miss Sinj.”

Mahindar, who’d worked for Britons all his life, prided himself on getting British titles correct. He did have some difficulty pronouncing the names, however—and who can blame him? Some are bloody impossible.

Elliot rubbed his face again. “Miss Sinj? I’ve never heard of anyone called Sinj…” His eyes slammed open, letting in too much light. He rolled out of the high bed, landing hard on his bare feet, and the room spun.

“You mean Miss St. John?”

“Of course.”

“Bloody hell, and damn everything.”

Snatches of yesterday came to him—Juliana plopping down on his lap in a billow of white, her hopeful smile, her beautiful blue eyes.

The memory of her skin under his fingertips, the kiss he’d pressed to her palm. Elliot had drawn her warmth into him, which he’d clung to as though he hadn’t felt warmth in years. He’d longed to kiss her lips there in the chapel, but couldn’t bring himself to with a mouth sour with whiskey.

Then he remembered standing at the front of a packed church, almost panicking at the press of bodies, all those eyes staring at him as he promised to be a good and true husband to Juliana St. John.

Bits and pieces came to him of the journey here, too slow when all he’d wanted was to be with Juliana. Then they’d been at the run-down house, Elliot coming to himself with his knife at the throat of the terrified Hamish, Juliana’s voice cutting through the darkness.