To Seduce a Sinner (Legend of the Four Soldiers #2)(55)

The man yanked on his horse, pulling it into a half rear. [o ap>< “I’m after a doctor. I haven’t the time.”

“Is someone shot?”

“A murder attempt,” the man cried as he spurred his horse. “Someone’s tried to kill Lord Hasselthorpe!”

“BUT WHY WOULD someone shoot at Lord Hasselthorpe?” Melisande asked later that night. Vale had bundled her into the carriage and ordered her home before going to the scene of the assassination attempt. He’d been away until after dinner, and this was the first she’d been able to question him.

“I don’t know,” he answered. He had come to her rooms, but now he paced as if he’d been caged. “Perhaps it was some kind of accident. An idiot practice shooting without a proper straw target to catch the bullet.”

“In Hyde Park?”

“I don’t know!” Vale’s voice was overloud, and he looked at her in apology. “Forgive me, my lady wife. But if it was an assassin, he was a damn bad shot. Hasselthorpe was merely winged on the arm. He should make a full recovery. I saw plenty of similar wounds in the war, and they were hardly worth noting as long as infection didn’t set in.”

“I’m glad the hurt is so slight, then,” Melisande said. She sat on one of the low armchairs before the fire—the one they’d made love in the night before, in fact—and watched him. “You hardly ever talk about the war.”

“Don’t I?” he replied vaguely. He was standing by her dresser, poking his finger in a bowl of hairpins. He wore a red and black banyan over his breeches and shirt. “Not much to tell, really.”

“No? You were in the army for six years, though, weren’t you?”

“Seven years,” he muttered. He moved to her wardrobe, which he flung open and peered at as if he’d find the hidden secrets of the cosmos amongst her gowns.

“Why did you join?”

He turned and stared at her blindly for a moment.

Then he blinked and laughed. “I joined the army to learn how to be a man. Or at least that was my father’s purpose. He thought me too lazy, too effete. And since there wasn’t any use for me at home”—he shrugged carelessly—“why not buy a commission for me?”

“And your best friend, Reynaud St. Aubyn, bought a commission at the same time?”

“Oh, yes. We were terribly excited to join the 28th Regiment of Foot. May it rest in peace.” He closed the wardrobe doors and went to brood at the window.

Perhaps she should leave it be. Stop poking at him, let his secrets lie buried. But some part of her wouldn’t let go. Every bit of his life was fascinating to her, and this bit that he kept hidden even more so than the others. Sighing, she rose from the armchair. She wore a heavy satin wrap over her chemise, and she slipped out of the wrap now, carefully laying it on the chair.

“Did you like army life?” she asked quietly.

She could see his reflection watching her in the black glass of the window. “Some of it. Men complain [. Mh=" of the ghastly food, the marches, the living in tents. But it can be a lark at times. Sitting by a campfire, trying to eat boiled peasemeal and bacon.”

She drew off her chemise as she listened, and he abruptly stopped talking. Nude, she walked toward him and laid her hands on his back. His muscles were rock-hard, as if he’d turned to granite.

“And the battles?”

“Like being in hell,” he whispered.

She smoothed her hands down his broad back, feeling the valley of his spine, the muscles on either side. Like being in hell. She ached for the part of him that had been in hell. “Were you in many battles?”

“A few.” He sighed and lowered his head as she dug her thumbs into the muscles above his hips.

She tapped his shoulder. “Take this off.”

He shrugged out of his banyan and shirt, but when he made to turn around, she firmly pushed him back. She pressed her thumbs in hard, small circles on either side of his spine. He groaned and his head fell forward again as he braced his hands on either side of the windowsill.

“You were at Quebec,” she said softly.

“That was the only real battle. The rest were skirmishes. Some lasted only minutes.”

“And Spinner’s Falls?”

His shoulders hunched as if she’d hit him, but he didn’t say a word. She knew that Spinner’s Falls had been a massacre. She’d comforted Emeline when word finally came back that Reynaud had not survived his capture there. She should push—this was obviously his weak point. But she couldn’t be so ruthless. She hated the thought of hurting him anew.

Instead, she took his hand and led him to her bed. He stood silently, passively, as she stripped him of his remaining clothes—although his cock was far from passive. Then she pushed him onto the bed and climbed in beside him. She propped herself up on an elbow next to him and drew her free hand down over his chest. She felt grateful that she had this man, at least for this time, for herself. Here, now, she could do with him as she wished.

It was a gift. A glorious gift.

So she leaned down and trailed soft, wet kisses along his side, licking the ridge of his ribs, nipping at the jut of his hip bone. Above her, he rumbled something, a warning perhaps, or maybe encouragement. She wasn’t sure, and she didn’t care. In front of her was her goal: his penis, bold and thick and hard. She touched it with just a fingertip, running along its length. Then she leaned down and softly, gently, kissed him on the weeping eye.