To Desire a Devil (Legend of the Four Soldiers #4)(15)

Beatrice inhaled slowly. “You are correct. I do not know you.” She went to take the tea tray. “But then perhaps the fault for that is not wholly mine.”

She closed the door gently behind her.

EVEN THOUGH BEATRICE visited Jeremy Oates at least once a week—and more often two or three times—his butler, Putley, always pretended he did not know her.

“Who shall I say is calling?” Putley asked early the next afternoon, his pop eyes staring at her in what looked like appalled surprise.

“Miss Beatrice Corning,” Beatrice replied as she always did, suppressing an urge to make up a name.

Putley was only doing his job. Well, at least that was the most charitable explanation, and Beatrice did try to be charitable when she could.

“Very well, miss,” Putley intoned. “Will you wait in the sitting room whilst I ascertain if Mr. Oates is at home?”

Charity was one thing, ridiculous adherence to form was another. “Mr.” Oates was never anywhere but home. Beatrice rolled her eyes. “Yes, Putley.”

He showed her to the second-best sitting room, a musty room with very little light and an overabundance of heavy, dark furniture. She used the time waiting for Putley’s return to compose herself. Beatrice was still a little warm from her discussion with Lord Hope, and she’d felt ever so slightly guilty after she’d left his room. After all, should a lady set a gentleman down so thoroughly when he was bedridden and had just had a falling out with his best friend whom he’d not seen in nearly seven years? Wasn’t she being just a tad mean? But then again, he’d been so very nasty with her. She knew he must be frustrated—enraged, even—by everything that’d happened since his return to England, but really, must he use her as his whipping boy?

Putley returned at that moment with the news that Jeremy would indeed see her, and Beatrice followed the butler’s disapproving back up the two flights of stairs to Jeremy’s room.

“Miss Beatrice Corning to see you, sir,” Putley droned.

Beatrice pushed past the butler and into the room. Enough was enough. She turned a dazzling smile on Putley and said firmly, “That will be all.”

The butler rumbled under his breath but left the room, closing the door behind him.

“He’s getting worse, you know.” Beatrice strode to the window and shoved back one side of the curtains. The light sometimes hurt Jeremy’s eyes, but it couldn’t be good for him to lie in a dark room in the middle of the day, either.

“I try to think of it as a compliment,” Jeremy drawled from the bed.

His voice was weaker than the last time she’d visited. She took a deep breath and pasted on a wide smile before turning back around. The bed dominated the area, surrounded by the debris of a sickroom. Two tables stood within reach of the bed, their surfaces covered with small bottles, boxes of ointment, books, pens and ink, bandages, and glasses. An old wooden chair was to one side, a silk cord wound around the back, the ends tossed on the seat. Sometimes Jeremy found it easier for the footmen to tie him to the chair when they moved him before the fireplace.

“After all,” Jeremy said, “Putley must have some confidence in my ability to ravish you if he disapproves so much of your visits.”

“Or perhaps he’s simply an idiot,” Beatrice said as she pulled a stuffed chair closer to the bed.

There was an acrid smell; this near the bed—a combination of urine and other noxious bodily emissions—but she took care to keep her face pleasant. When Jeremy had first come home from the war on the Continent five years ago, he’d been horrified at the sickroom smells. She wasn’t sure now if he’d become used to the odors and ignored them or if he simply no longer smelled them, but in any case, she wouldn’t hurt his feelings by drawing attention to them.

“I’ve brought you the news sheets and some pamphlets my footman procured for me,” Beatrice began as she drew the papers from a soft bag.

“Oh, no, you don’t,” Jeremy said. His voice was teasing, even in his weakened state.

She looked up to meet his clear blue eyes. Jeremy had the most beautiful eyes of anyone she knew, either woman or man. They were a true light blue, the color of the sky in spring. No other color muddied their depths. He was—or had been—a very handsome man. His hair was a golden brown, his face open and cheerful, but the ravages of his illness had incised lines of pain around his mouth and eyes.

Jeremy’s mother had been a lifelong friend of Beatrice’s aunt Mary, so Beatrice and Jeremy had practically grown up in each other’s pockets. He knew her as no one else did—not even Lottie. When she looked into Jeremy’s eyes, sometimes she felt that those blue orbs saw right past the cheerful mask she put on in his presence, straight to the well of sorrow for him at her middle.

She glanced away, down at the coverlet of his bed. To the place, in fact, where his legs should’ve been. “What—?”

“Don’t pretend innocence with me, Beatrice Corning,” he said with the same grin he’d had at eight years of age. “I may be an invalid, but I still have my sources of gossip, and they are abuzz with the news of your viscount’s return.”

Beatrice wrinkled her nose. “He’s not my viscount.”

Jeremy cocked his head against the pillows. Usually he was sitting erect by this time in the afternoon, but today he was lying on his back. Beatrice felt a frisson of fear bolt through her vitals. Was he worse?