The Duchess Read online

  It was an hour before Oman returned. “It is done,” he said.

  Claire, holding Trevelyan to her, barely glanced up at him, but when she did, she looked back, startled. There was something different about Oman. Since he’d seen her little sister, she could guess at what had transpired.

  “Where is your emerald?” she asked, for the big emerald in his turban was gone.

  Oman merely shrugged.

  “Did you lend it to her or give it to her?”

  “A mere three days have I lent it to her. The lowly jewel will benefit from the wearing by one so young and so beautiful.”

  “Brat,” Claire said under her breath, then looked back at Trevelyan’s sleeping form. No matter that her sister charged for her services, Claire knew she’d do a good job. No doubt Brat would delight in the melodrama of whatever lies she had to create to keep people from knowing Claire was not in her room.

  Claire thought that it was possible that you never knew a person until you’d nursed him when he was ill. Toward midnight Trevelyan was deep enough asleep that she was able to ease out from under him. For a moment she stood at the side of the bed and looked at him. She was beyond tired. Between the dancing, the two long walks, and the fear she’d felt at being near an illness as strong as Trevelyan’s, she wanted to sink into a feather bed and never get out of it.

  He was on his back, asleep at last. And those eyes of his were closed. Those black, intense, seen-everything, done-everything, bored-by-it-all eyes of his were at last closed. She bent over him and smoothed his hair off his forehead. His hair was too long but somehow it suited him. Oman had lit candles in the room and as she touched Trevelyan’s face she looked at him. Earlier she’d said he’d lost the greenish cast to his skin, and he had. Now his skin was a healthy tan and there was even some fat under his skin so he didn’t look skeletal, as he had when she’d first seen him. She put her fingertip on the long scar on his left cheek, then on the scar on his right cheek, and wondered how they had been made. Curious, she sat on the edge of the bed and began to touch his face. High cheekbones. A strong, square jaw covered with bristly black whiskers. His thick, drooping mustache was soft and she could see that it half concealed a very sensuous mouth.

  “My goodness, Trevelyan, you’re quite a handsome man,” she whispered. He didn’t have Harry’s blond, healthy good looks but he had—the devil’s looks, she thought. If there were a play, Trevelyan would make a perfect devil and Harry could play an angel. Perhaps she should suggest it to Brat’s friend who staged his one-man plays.

  “Is he well again?”

  Claire jumped, guilty at being caught touching Trevelyan. She turned to Oman. “I think the worst is over. Does he have these spells often?” Claire wanted to know if Trevelyan’s illness was permanent or temporary. But at the same time she didn’t want to know. She didn’t want to know if these shaking spells would eventually lead to his death.

  Oman didn’t answer, but merely shrugged in a way that could mean that he didn’t know, didn’t care, or that it was all up to Allah.

  “Would you get me some hot water? I want to wash him.”

  Within minutes Oman was back with a pitcher of hot water and Claire began to wash Trevelyan’s face and neck. She pulled back the cover and removed the belt that held his plaid in place. Carefully and with some reverence, she unpinned the laird’s badge that bound the plaid about his shoulders and placed it on the table by the bed.

  Trevelyan was sleeping the sleep of the dead and she didn’t think anything in the world could wake him. He didn’t so much as stir when she pushed him and got the plaid from under him. His linen shirt was soaked with his sweat. She unbuttoned it partway down and ran the clean, hot, wet cloth over his skin, which was covered with dried sweat.

  It was when she reached his collarbone that she saw the first scar. She didn’t know why this body scar should surprise her, especially when his face was so scarred, but it did. She unbuttoned his shirt farther and there were two more scars. No longer trying to be discreet, she unbuttoned his shirt the rest of the way and looked at him.

  His chest was lean but there was a great deal of muscle on him. In spite of his weakness now, he was obviously a man who had spent a lot of time in strenuous exercise. But what interested her were the many, many white scars over his ribs. She ran her fingertips over first one, then another. It was her guess that they were knife wounds. What had been done to him? she wondered. The scars ranged from an inch and a half to three inches long. They didn’t look as though they had ever been very deep or life threatening, but that there were so many of the pale scars was what was so unusual.

  She stood back for a moment and tried to imagine what could have caused such scars. She’d heard of the dreadful treatment English boys endured in their sadistic all-boys’ schools, but she’d never heard of anything like this. Suddenly, she wanted to get that shirt off of him and see what else had been done to him. She called Oman to her. “Help me undress him,” she said and didn’t meet the man’s eyes. Let him think this was common practice among American girls, she thought.

  Trevelyan groaned as Oman, with Claire helping, managed to get the shirt from Trevelyan’s big body. There were more scars on his back. There were four of them, in rows, curving from his spine up and over his left shoulder. They looked like claw marks, as though some great animal had attacked him and torn into his back. She could understand these marks more than she could the ones on his ribs. Her father loved to hunt and he had often come home from a trip to the wilds of the American West with horrifying stories about men who got too close to a bear or a mountain lion and had been clawed.

  But what puzzled her about these marks was that she had seen no evidence that Trevelyan liked to hunt. There were no skins of animals about his room as there were wherever her father went. Her father liked to remember every animal he had slaughtered, liked often to relive the event both in retelling the story and remembering it. But, she reminded herself, Trevelyan was in hiding.

  She sent Oman from the room and washed Trevelyan’s chest and back, then went to a trunk by the window and found another shirt for him. It was an odd shirt, made of fine cotton but printed with little brown and white figures that were, she assumed, meant to be people. She struggled to get him into the shirt and had only just succeeded when he began shaking again. Without a thought, she climbed into bed with him and held him close to her, stroking his brow and trying to soothe him as he thrashed about.

  Trevelyan woke slowly. He had trouble focusing and trouble remembering where he was. For a moment he thought he was again in Pesha and that the canopy overhead was Nyssa’s bed.

  But as he turned his head and saw the stone walls and the heavy oak of the bed—no gilding—he remembered all. For all that he had trouble remembering where he was, he knew that his head rested upon a firm, female breast. He turned to look up to see Claire holding him against her ample bosom, and he could feel his body between her legs. She was sleeping, but at his movement, she opened her eyes and smiled at him.

  And as naturally as day follows night, he put his hand on her breast and kissed her neck.

  Claire closed her eyes for a moment, feeling his lips on her neck. Without having any idea what she was doing, she moved her legs and Trevelyan rolled on top of her. She could feel the hard maleness of him on her body. He had changed from a sick child to a hungry man in an instant.

  His lips moved up her neck to her ear. He took the lobe between his teeth and Claire arched her neck as his hand caressed and massaged her breast.

  His hand moved down her side to her waist, over her hip, to her thigh.

  Then suddenly, his hand came up again. He roughly took her chin in his hand and turned her to look at him. It was as though he were demanding that she know who he was, that she see him not as a friend, not as a sick child, but as Trevelyan.

  She was not up to the challenge. She was not up to what she saw in his eyes. She turned her head away. “No,” she whispered.

  Without a word