“There’s no time. I’ll be all right.”
“At least let me examine the cuts.”
“Never mind.” Slade’s expression repelled the very idea of my seeing him undressed, hurt, vulnerable, and weak.
“You can’t go around bleeding like this,” I said. “The wounds may fester. Besides, you’ll attract attention.”
Slade couldn’t argue with that. He let me take him into the Rose and Crown. I was glad I’d registered under a false name, as a married woman. Anyone who saw us would assume Slade was my husband. They wouldn’t suspect that the famous spinster author Currer Bell was up to no good. I sneaked Slade into my room, which was luxuriously furnished with a four-poster canopied bed. The impropriety of the situation embarrassed me; the intimacy excited me as well as disturbed me. But I could not have done otherwise; Slade needed help.
While he removed his shirt, I went in search of the house-keeper, from whom I obtained washcloths, bandages, and a bottle of alcohol. I told her my husband had been injured in a minor accident and his shirt ruined. She gave me a clean shirt left behind by another guest. When I returned, Slade was sitting in a chair, stripped to the waist. Even as I felt a shameful thrill at the sight of his nakedness, I winced because his back was a gory mess of cuts, blood, and embedded glass fragments. As I poured water from the jug on the washstand into the basin, neither of us spoke. We didn’t look at each other. I carefully picked the glass out of his flesh. Luckily, I’d had some experience with nursing while caring for my sisters and brother, and the cuts weren’t deep. As I cleaned them, I tried not to notice his lean, strong muscles or the heat from his skin, or to glance over his shoulders at his bare chest, but I couldn’t help wanting to caress him; I couldn’t stop the molten, heavy sensation that spread through my body. Dabbing the cuts with alcohol, I tried to think of myself as a nurse and Slade as my patient.
I failed miserably.
“The bleeding’s stopped,” I said, bandaging the wounds. “You should heal just fine.”
He put on the clean shirt. His expression was cold, hard; he’d sealed himself off from me. He stood, ready to leave, and I knew it was unfair to keep him with me. I knew the agony of being in the presence of someone who had rejected me; I should let Slade go. But suddenly I was overpowered by emotion. His confession, Lord Eastbourne, the fire, Wilhelm Stieber, the death of Oliver Heald, and our own narrow escape-it was all too much, after Katerina’s murder, my arrest, and my ordeal in Bedlam. I began to cry.
Slade acted as remote as if he were a million miles away. “You’ll feel better when you’re home with your family.”
“My family is gone,” I said between sobs. “While you were in Russia, Emily, Anne, and Branwell died of consumption.”
“My God.” Slade was shocked, mortified. “I’m sorry. I didn’t know.”
He put his arms around me, but I cried harder because, even though Slade was still with me, I had lost him, too.
Slade spoke hesitantly: “You must be upset about Oliver Heald. Was he a close friend?”
I perceived that Slade wanted to know if I had been romantically involved with Mr. Heald. I wondered if Slade was jealous; but if so, what did it matter? I had enough other proof of his love, and I had rejected it. Once I might have been tempted to say I’d been in love with Mr. Heald to pay Slade back for his charade with Katerina, but that would have been disrespectful to Mr. Heald as well as untrue, and I hadn’t the heart for petty games.
“No,” I said. “He was just an admirer of my work. I’d only met him a few times.” I gave an incoherent explanation of how Mr. Heald had followed me around. “But he was a good man. I was mean to him. I wish I could take it back, but I can’t. He saved my life, and he died because of me.”
I wept, my face buried against Slade’s chest. Slade was as rigid as if I were a bereaved stranger who’d thrown herself at him. My requited love for him was as hopeless as every unrequited love I’d ever experienced. But sometimes the body does not accept what the mind knows. My face involuntarily lifted to Slade’s. Our eyes met. Mine streamed with tears. His were alarmed. I sensed him wishing to recoil-but he didn’t. I felt a rush of the euphoria that one feels when one has survived a disaster. With it came an instinctive hunger to celebrate life. And I knew Slade felt the same. The rigidness of his body yielded. He bent his head. His mouth met mine with a force as cataclysmic as the explosion at the workhouse. He kissed me with a need and passion that equaled mine.
I have always scorned novels in which the heroine sees stars or hears music when she and the hero kiss, but now I understood the truth in the cliche. Stars and music there were none, but flashes like lightning seared my closed eyes. Thundering sensation rocked us both. Longing vanquished my modesty and sense of propriety. I drank Slade like a woman dying of thirst gulps water; I tasted blood and smoke and fire. My body melted against him. The hardness at his loins pressed urgently against me. I then learned that when a man and a woman who are former lovers become lovers anew, they cannot start at the beginning, with chaste kisses on the hand or cheek. They plunge straight into the depth of engagement they once shared. I wanted more than what I’d done with Slade in the forest in Scotland three years ago. Shame and sin be damned-I wanted us to join in the ultimate fulfillment that I’d never experienced but always craved.
We moved toward the bed, until Slade suddenly wrenched away from me. Breathing hard, his face suffused with desire and horror, he said, “I shouldn’t have done that.” Either he didn’t realize that I’d instigated the kiss or he’d decided to take the blame himself. “I’m sorry.”
I was appalled at my rash behavior and frightened by the thought of the consequences that might have befallen me if Slade had been a weaker, less noble man. I stood there in an agony of helpless longing as he headed for the door.
“Please don’t leave me!” I cried.
“I would have to go even if we hadn’t almost-” Slade shook his head. “I have to deal with Stieber, then Niall Kavanagh. When I’m finished with them, I’m going after Lord Eastbourne.”
“You’re not going without me.” I hurried to the door and stood with my back against it.
Impatient, and angered by frustrated desire, Slade said, “We agreed that going in the workhouse would be the last thing you did.”
“That was then. Things are different now.” I tried to forget my own desire, calm myself, and speak rationally. “I want revenge against Stieber, too. Not only did he torture me in Bedlam; he killed my most loyal admirer, a man who saved my life. I owe justice to Mr. Heald. Besides, I have my own quarrel with Lord Eastbourne. I have to make both of those villains pay.”
“And how, pray tell, are you going to do that?” Slade deployed scorn as his shield against me.
“I’ll think of something. How are you going to find Niall Kavanagh?”
“I’ll think of something.”
“I can save you the trouble.”
Suspicion narrowed Slade’s eyes. “What are you talking about?”
“When Mr. Heald came to rescue us, you asked me if I had anything else to tell you. I didn’t get a chance to answer.”
“What is it?”
“I know of a place Niall Kavanagh might have gone,” I said.
“Where?” Slade demanded.
I folded my arms. “I’m not telling you unless you take me with you.”
Slade groaned. “Blackmail again! Why am I not surprised? All right, tell me where you think Niall Kavanagh went. I’ll go to my lodgings and retrieve my bag. We’ll meet at the train station in an hour.”
I could imagine arriving at the station and finding him long gone. “No. I won’t tell you where we’re going until we’re on our way.”
Slade’s expression turned ominous, but he realized that I wouldn’t back down. “Very well. But this will be our last venture together. And-” He paused, searched for words, then said, “About what happened in here: I promise it won’t happen again.”