For Your Arms Only (17 page)

Her fingers flexed, trying to dig into the wood as he kissed her there, a lingering gentle kiss that pulled at her soul and poured heat into her body. Her nipples tightened and her knees softened. She wanted his arms around her, his mouth on her everywhere. She wanted to turn around and touch him and kiss his skin. She wanted him to know she wanted him.

“Alec,” she whispered as he nuzzled the soft skin at the curve of her shoulder, his hair brushing her cheek. “Alec…”

He stilled, and abruptly released her. Cressida swayed on her feet as she turned, her body still melting from his touch. Anything he wanted of her was his, and she was almost shaking with eagerness. But as she faced him, ready to surrender her heart and body, he cursed and took another step back. The flame-bright desire burning in his eyes faded into bleakness that made her almost ill to see.

For a moment they faced each other, both breathing hard. Just as she was about to reach for him he drew back a step. “I’m sorry,” he muttered. “Very sorry.” He hung his head and cursed again under his breath. “Forgive me.”

Cressida watched in astonishment as he turned and strode away, snatching up his shirt from the floor. She just glimpsed what appeared to be dozens of small marks on his back before he yanked the shirt over his head. Without stopping or looking back, he walked straight out of the room, pulling the door shut behind him with a boom that echoed in the still library.

Slowly she crossed the room. His coat, waistcoat, and cravat were scattered across the rug, as if he had ripped them off and flung them every which way. Perhaps he had. She picked up the coat and folded it, laying it neatly across the sofa. She wondered what tormented him, and how he managed to keep it bottled inside him so tightly. She held up the waistcoat. It was new and made of very fine—and expensive—cloth, but he had undone the buttons so forcefully one had been ripped right off. She looked around and found it on the carpet some feet away. Soberly she tucked it into a pocket of the waistcoat and laid it on top of his coat. A bit of handkerchief peeked from the pocket, and she found herself staring at it as she folded the cravat. Before she could think better of it, she whisked it from the pocket and tucked it into her sleeve, then hurried from the room before anyone could discover her.

In her room she took out her stolen prize. It, too, was new, freshly laundered. “ABH” was embroidered in one corner. When she held it to her face, it smelled only of soap and the slightly toasted scent of pressed linen. It might have been anyone’s. Cressida laid it against her cheek.

Who was he, really? The hellion, the officer, the traitor, the prodigal son, the man who looked at her with desire and despair in his eyes and wore a cloak of scars. She rubbed her cheek against the smooth linen. Perhaps he was all that, and more. But she was falling in love with him just the same.

26 June 1815
Forest of the Soignes, Belgium

D
o you hear me?” The voice sounded strange, guttural and foreign. He wondered who it was, and why he could hear that voice as he floated in a vast sea of darkness.

“Eh, soldier. You’d better wake up one of these days.”

One of these days. Alec let that thought roll around in his brain for a while. Wake up. Soldier. Now that she mentioned it, he realized it did feel as though he had been asleep for a while.
Soldier. Wake up. Soldier
. Ah…

He flinched, as if a French artillery shell had gone off nearby. But no; there was no rain of fragments and debris, no screams of wounded men, and he realized it was memory that had startled him. The French had shelled his dragoons horribly, decimating the unit. Men were cut down in mid-word, falling with the shock fixed on their faces. The French lancers came out of nowhere, the sun gleaming on their long, deadly lances, and sent half the men fleeing in a dead panic. Alec had gone after them, trying to rally them back into position, but they seemed to scatter on the wind.

You’d better wake up one of these days…

He forced open his eyes, just a little. “Why?” he croaked.

The old woman looked up from her knitting. Her face was like a dried apple, with shiny little eyes and a broad nose. “Englishman,” she said, and Alec realized then that she had spoken some sort of bastardized French before. She rose from her chair and came to lay her warm hand on his head. “No fever,” she said. “Good.”

“What has happened?” he asked, struggling with his French. “The battle?”

She shrugged. “The English duke held the field. The emperor fled.”

They held the field. Even in his utter weakness, Alec felt a surge of euphoria. It passed quickly as he pictured the battlefield, littered with dead and dying. “What is this place?”

“My farm.” She nodded. “Safer than out there.”

No doubt. Alec remembered the look and sound of a field in the aftermath of battle. The woman moved around the little cabin, adding a pillow behind his head and pressing a cup of clean, cool water to his lips. “How long?”

She thought a moment. “Seven days. If you had not woken by tomorrow, I would have taken you to the surgeons.”

There had been no surgeon? Alec’s heart jolted in alarm, and he began trying to move his arms and legs, vainly hoping he still possessed his limbs. He struggled to raise his head. “No surgeon? None was sent for? Was I bled?”

The old woman shrugged. “Why? It did not appear you had much blood left for the leeches. I left it in God’s hands.”

He couldn’t hold his head up for even a minute. Exhausted, he fell back onto the narrow cot. “Thank you,” he murmured. One by one, he flexed each finger and each toe. The tinges of pain that traveled up his arms and legs reassured him that he had apparently survived intact.

“Rest now,” she said. “I won’t throw you to the butchers yet.”

Over the next few days, Alec learned more. Widow Gustave, as she was called, had found him on the battlefield, stripped to his skin and bleeding from saber cuts that crossed his back and chest, as well as a lance wound to his side. He suspected she had been out looting the bodies with other industrious local peasants and been about to pass him by, seeing that he had nothing left to steal. Many corpses were picked clean by battlefield looters; it made identifying the dead virtually impossible, even when they weren’t disfigured by wounds and decay. It could take a week or more to bury the casualties from a major army action, and Alec judged there were few larger or more deadly than the one just fought.

But Widow Gustave hadn’t left him. She had seen Alec’s face, miraculously unscathed beneath the spatters of blood, and been reminded of her son, who had been lost at sea some years ago. In a fit of maternal pity she loaded him into her handcart—along with a few more practical relics of the battle—and brought him back to her tiny farm near the forest. She stitched up his wounds and wrapped him in a blanket before her hearth, and waited to see if he would survive.

Even after he woke, it seemed at times he might not. One long saber gash, slicing down his shoulder and deep into his side, turned red and rancid. The widow calmly took a dagger and split it open again, digging out putrefied flesh with the tip of her knife until Alec blacked out from the agony of it. Widow Gustave gave him her hard apple cider, in the absence of stronger liquors, and within two days the long, angry wound had started to close again. It took him a week to manage sitting up, and another week before he could stand, but slowly he was mending.

“I must go to Brussels,” he told her one evening.

She said nothing, just cast a skeptical eye on his bandages. She had given him her son’s old clothing, but there was so much linen wrapped around his chest, it barely fit.

“No one knows where I am,” he said. “I’ve likely been reported missing or dead. I should like to at least send word to my family that I’m neither.”

The widow shrugged. Despite her nobility in bringing him home and caring for him, she was a taciturn old lady, clearly more comfortable with her solitary life than with a restless invalid. “If you want,” she muttered. “It’s a long walk to Brussels.”

Alec looked at the dented tin cup in his hand, a cup that looked very like the ones used on campaign by his cavalry brigade. To the widow it was just a cup, saved from being wasted and put to good use. To him it was a gruesome reminder that the soldier who used it last was likely lying in a shallow grave, blown to pieces by artillery fire and trampled by fleeing horses. The urge to rejoin the army and send reassuring word to his family grew more strident by the day. “I shall manage.”

She shrugged again and said nothing. The next day she brought him a sturdy branch. He carved it into a makeshift crutch, and then rose at dawn and looked down the road that wound into the forest. In a few miles, Widow Gustave told him, it would meet the Brussels road, and then he would walk another few miles to the town. Alec took the sack of bread and jug of cider she gave him, tucked the crutch under his arm, and set out.

It took hours. Before long it was only raw determination making him put one foot in front of the other, as the long wounds in his side pulsed with agony. Sweat was rolling down his neck before he even saw the Brussels road. After taking a break to sit and eat, Alec forced himself back into motion, resorting to fantasies of fresh beef and good wine waiting in Brussels to keep himself moving. By the time he reached the city, it was growing dark, and he was so sore and tired he contemplated falling down to sleep beside the road until morning. He called up the image of his lodgings in town, comfortable and clean, and somehow kept moving.

The town was one giant army camp. Men in uniform were everywhere, and many houses bore marks on the door indicating wounded were quartered within. Whatever hospitals the surgeons set up would be overwhelmed. Alec hobbled through the streets, trying to find his way. His best hope was to run into a friendly face, another officer who could direct him and help him. The journey had severely taxed his strength, and he didn’t want to join the ill and maimed left to fend for themselves in the streets.

By luck a familiar figure crossed his path before long. Hurrying down the street, some loaves of bread under his arm, came James Peterbury, a junior officer who hailed from Hertfordshire like himself. They had been in the same division under Uxbridge. There was a bright pink weal across his cheek, but otherwise he seemed in good health, walking unaided and without visible bandages. Alec’s spirits lifted. He hated the aftermath of battle, learning which of his mates and friends had died. At least Peterbury was well.

“Peterbury,” he managed to call out, his voice hoarse from exertion. “James.”

The young officer stopped and turned, his gaze sweeping the street. Alec raised one hand. Peterbury froze. His mouth dropped open and he stood goggling.

“Good to see you again,” Alec added with a weary smile.

Peterbury came across the street, eyes still popping from his head. “Hayes?” he whispered in astonishment. “Is—Is it really you? Alec Hayes?”

He nodded. “More or less. I suppose—”

James jumped as if prodded from behind, dropping his bread, then seized Alec’s arm and began pulling him off the street into a nearby narrow alley. Alec sucked in his breath at the pain that shot through his arm and down his side at the rough handling, and started to curse when Peterbury shocked him by slapping a hand over his mouth.

“Shh, man, hush!” he ordered. He glanced around nervously. “Keep your voice down, for the love of God!”

“Why?” Alec frowned but lowered his voice. “What has happened?”

But Peterbury paid no attention. He peered closely at Alec’s face, craning his neck from side to side to see every angle, much to Alec’s bemusement. “I survived, as you can see,” he finally said. “Is it so very shocking?”

Peterbury made another shushing motion with his hands. “Quiet,” he said, almost harshly this time. He bowed his head and pressed his fists to his forehead. “Oh, Lord…”

This was not what he had expected from a friend, even one taken utterly off guard. Alec shifted his weight on the crutch and waited, an ominous feeling flooding him. What could be so wrong?

At last Peterbury looked up. “You’re dead,” he informed Alec, sounding as though he disapproved mightily that it was not so. “Your name was on the casualty lists.”

“But I’m not. Obviously. A farmwoman picked me out of a pile of corpses and took me home out of pity.” Alec cocked his head and forced a halfhearted grin. “You don’t seem quite as overjoyed by the news as I might have hoped. Has my brother already promised you my hunter?”

The other man just shook his head. “No. No, no, no, no, no. But now…” His voice trailed off. “Not that I was happy when I thought—but this—Oh
Lord
.”

“James,” said Alec, growing annoyed, “what the devil are you blathering about?”

“You’re better off dead,” his friend said then. “I hate to shock you by saying that, but…the papers. They found the papers in your effects. My God, man; I don’t want to believe it, but how could you?”

James’s shock seemed to be wearing off, exposing an anger Alec didn’t understand. Better off dead—this, from one of his oldest mates, a man who had been his friend since they were mischievous lads? “How could I what? You’re making no sense. And what is the news? I heard Bonaparte fled the field, but what of the Royal Dragoons? What of Lacey, Ponsonby, and Uxbridge?”

In the dim light, James’s face hardened. “Uxbridge has lost his leg. Ponsonby is dead, and so is Lacey. And you’ll wish that farmwoman had left you where you lay, if anyone else should see you. Why the hell have you come back?”

“It is my duty,” said Alec through dry lips. Ponsonby and Will Lacey, dead. It felt like a physical blow to his chest.

“You’ll be shot, you know. If you leave now, I won’t tell anyone, out of respect for your family, but if you ever return—”

“I’ve no idea what you’re talking about,” Alec interrupted. “I’ve been lying in a farmhouse for more than a fortnight, incapable of walking, and have heard no news at all, let alone why I might be shot for returning to my regiment as I ought to!”

“The letters.” Peterbury clenched his jaw. “To the French. You should have burned them.”

For a moment he just stared. “Letters?”

Some of his ignorance must have impressed Peterbury. He hesitated, and a frown creased his forehead. “You know what I mean.”

Woodenly Alec shook his head. His arm had gone numb from leaning so long on the crutch, and when he tried to shift his weight he almost lost his balance and fell. With one hand he groped for the grimy brick wall behind him, and leaned heavily against it. “I’ve no idea what letters you mean—to the
French
? Are you accusing me of…treason?” He whispered the last word as the implications crashed in on him. His breath felt short as he waited, prayed, for Peterbury to contradict it.

“Yes.”

“And you believe it?” Alec was appalled. If he hadn’t felt light-headed from the long walk, he would have thrown his fist into Peterbury’s face. Except that there seemed to be two of Peterbury at the moment.

Peterbury hesitated. “I didn’t want to.”

“It’s not true!” His legs were shaking. With a curse Alec gave up and collapsed, sliding down the wall to fall on his knees. The makeshift crutch clattered to the ground. “Bloody Christ, James. How could you?” He pressed one hand to his side, and felt the familiar warmth of blood seeping through his shirt.

Peterbury squatted beside him. “It’s not true? You didn’t correspond with the French and reveal how many men Wellington had and where they were camped?”

“Never!” He was losing his voice. He coughed, and his whole body seemed to spasm. Warm blood welled beneath his fingers and needles of pain jabbed at his side. He had forgotten how sharp that pain was, how it stole his breath away and made sweat roll down his back.

“Never?” Peterbury grabbed the front of his woolen shirt and hauled him upright with a firm shake. Alec hadn’t even felt himself slip to the side. “Do you swear?”

“On my father’s honor,” he said, before coughing again. Now there appeared to be three of Peterbury, all staring at him with thunderous scowls. “If you—
you
, of all people—don’t believe me, just walk away. I’d rather be left to die than branded a traitor.”

For a moment it seemed Peterbury would take him up on that. Alec closed his eyes; his brain felt slow, as if it had been muffled in that one word, “treason.” He would rather die here in an alley than be condemned for that. But then he felt an arm around his back. “I can’t let you die,” his friend muttered. “But you mustn’t stay here.” He shoved the crutch back into Alec’s hand, and began trying to push him onto his feet. “Come. We’ll puzzle it out somehow.”