Wicked Intentions (Maiden Lane #1)(34)
Author: Elizabeth Hoyt

“What was he like,” Lord Caire asked softly, “your paragon of a husband?”

She knew she should refuse to answer him, that the question was far too personal, but somehow, here in the depths of night, it seemed reasonable and right.

“He was tall, with dark hair,” she whispered, remembering that long-ago face. It had been so familiar once and was so faded now. She closed her eyes, concentrating. It seemed so wrong to forget Benjamin and all he was. “His eyes were a lovely dark brown. He had a scar on his chin from a fall as a boy, and he had a way of stretching his fingers and gesturing with his hands when he talked that seemed elegant to me. He was very intelligent, very proper, and very kind.”

“How ghastly,” he said. “He sounds a prig.”

“He wasn’t.”

“Did he make you laugh?” he asked quietly, his voice roughened from sleep or pain. “Did he whisper things in your ear that made you blush? Did his touch send shivers down your back?”

She inhaled sharply at his rude, too-personal questions.

But he continued, his voice impossibly deep now. “Did you grow wet when he looked at you?”

“Stop it!” she cried, her voice loud in the room. “Please, stop it.”

Caire merely watched her, his eyes much too knowing, as if he knew she’d grown wet—but at his look, not at the old memories of her husband.

She inhaled. “He was a good man—a wonderful man—and I didn’t deserve him.”

Lord Caire closed his eyes and for a moment seemed to have fallen asleep. Then he murmured, “I’ve never been married, but I think it would be quite awful to have to deserve one’s spouse.”

She looked away from him. This subject made her chest ache, brought a depressing melancholy to her brain.

“Were you in love with him,” Lord Caire asked, “this husband you didn’t deserve?”

And whether it was because she still half drifted in dreams or because they were curiously intimate in the near dark, she answered truthfully. “No. I loved him, but I was never in love with him.”

The room suddenly brightened, all at once it seemed, and she realized that the dawn had arrived unnoticed while they talked.

“It’s a new day,” Temperance said stupidly.

“Yes, it is,” Lord Caire replied, and the satisfaction in his voice made her shiver.

Chapter Eight

Well! This was a very unfortunate turn of events for poor Meg, for the dungeons of King Lockedheart were not very pleasant. The walls dripped with fetid water, and rats and other vermin skittered across the corridors. There was no light and no heat, and in the distance could be heard the cries of the other sad inhabitants of that place. Things looked very desperate, but as Meg had never had it very easy in her life, she resolved to face this crisis with as much bravery as she could summon.

And she vowed as well that whatever happened, she would tell nothing but the truth….

—from King Lockedheart

Temperance rode home in Lord Caire’s carriage as the new day dawned on London. She fell asleep during the journey, waking only when the carriage halted at the end of Maiden Lane. In fact, she was so exhausted from tending Caire that the consequences of a night spent away from home never even occurred to her until they descended like a great heavy boulder on her head when she entered the home.

“Where,” Concord, her eldest brother, inquired in a deeply disapproving voice, “have you been?”

Perhaps it was unfair to compare Concord to a great boulder, but finding him just inside the foundling home’s doorway was something of a shock. He nearly filled the hallway, his displeasure palpable.

“I… uh,” Temperance stuttered, not very eloquently.

Concord frowned heavily, his bushy gray and brown eyebrows meeting over his stern nose. “If you were held against your will by this aristocrat Winter has told us about, we will seek reparations.”

“We’ll beat his bloody face in is what we’ll do,” Asa, her next eldest brother, growled from behind Concord.

Temperance blinked at the sight of Asa. She hadn’t seen him in months. Oh, dear, this was not good. Asa and Concord rarely agreed on anything and, in fact, had made pains to speak to each other as little as possible for years. This morning, however, they stood shoulder-to-shoulder in the narrow foundling home hallway, united in their anger toward Caire—and their unhappiness with her. Concord was the taller of the two, his graying brown hair clubbed back and, like all her brothers, unpowdered.

Asa’s hair, in contrast, was a deep golden-brown, the color of a lion, and though he was several inches shorter than Concord, his broad shoulders nearly took up the width of the hall. His shirt and coat strained over his chest as if he did some physical labor every day of his life. Yet no one in the family knew exactly how Asa earned his living, and he was quite vague when asked. Temperance had long suspected that her other brothers feared to press him too closely in case his work was not entirely respectable.

“Lord Caire did not hold me against my will,” she said now.

Concord scowled. “Then what were you doing at his house all night?”

“Lord Caire was ill. I merely stayed to help nurse him.”

“Ill in what way?” Asa asked.

Temperance glanced down the hallway, toward the kitchen behind her brothers. Where was Winter?

“He had an infection,” she said cautiously.

Asa’s green eyes sharpened. “An infection of what?”

“A shoulder wound.”

Her brothers exchanged a glance.

“And how was he wounded?” Concord rumbled.

Temperance winced. “He was attacked the other night by footpads. One stabbed him in the shoulder.”

For a moment, both of her brothers merely stared at her, and then Concord’s eyes narrowed. “You spent the night with an aristocrat who gets himself attacked by footpads.”

“It was hardly his fault,” Temperance protested.

“Nevertheless,” Concord began pedantically.

Fortunately, Asa interrupted him. “She looks half dead, Con. Let’s continue this discussion in the kitchen.”

Concord glared at his younger brother, and Temperance thought he might refuse out of sheer contrariness. Then he pursed his lips. “Very well.”

He turned and stomped off down the hall. Asa gestured for Temperance to precede him. His eyes were unreadable. Temperance inhaled, wishing she could have this confrontation when she’d had more sleep.