Thief of Hearts (22 page)

"Signora?" It was Magdalena with a bowl of warm water and some strips of toweling. Anna motioned, and she brought them to the table. When the maid hesitated, Brodie glanced back and forth between the two women, brows raised in a question.

His skeptical faith in her nursing skills stiffened Anna's resolve. "Grazie, Magdalena," she said dismissively, and rose. "Come to the bed, Mr. Brodie."

A host of wonderful responses crowded his tongue, but he bit them all back and followed docilely.

They sat side by side. "Can you hold this?" She passed the bowl to him and he put it between his knees. "Raise your arm. Just a little. Does it hurt?" He made a noncommittal sound while she laid a water-soaked strip of towel on the tattered and bloody shirt covering the wound in his side. Waiting for it to saturate the cotton and loosen it from his flesh, she held very still, hardly breathing. The sight of his wide, hard chest, sun-browned and finely muscled, rendered her extraordinarily uncomfortable, in part because of the unreasonable longing she felt to touch him. Just touch him. Astonishing how much she wanted it. To slide her fingertips over the fascinating corrugation of ribs and muscles along his sides. Tangle them in the soft hairs in the center of his chest. Press them in gentle, narrowing circles around his hard little nipples…

"Try it now."

She took the towel away with a little guilty start. As gently as she could, she began to peel the bloody fibers from his side.

"Ow!"

"Don't be such a baby."

That would've irked him if he hadn't seen how pale she'd gone when she'd hurt him. "Rip it off all at once," he advised, stiff-lipped.

"No."

"Go ahead."

"
No
. It would bleed too much. I'm almost finished."

He hoped so. It wasn't a serious wound, but this slow peeling hurt like the devil.

"There, it's done. Now your arm."

They repeated the soaking process on the inside of his bicep. This time they spoke while they waited.

"Who shot you?"

"Don't know. O'Dunne says Union agents trying to stop Nick's deal."

"But they didn't even take the money."

"No. I went through the dead one's pockets. He was from Firenze."

"Florence! Do you think he followed you all the way to Rome and then to Naples?"

He shook his head, meaning he didn't know.

She swallowed and asked softly, "Did Mr. Flowers suffer?"

"Annie, no, he didn't. He never knew what hit him. I wanted to bring him back, but Aiden said we had to leave him." Rightly, he realized now, though it still struck him as cold-blooded.

The tears she blinked out of her eyes spilled down her cheeks. "I liked him very much," she whispered.

"He liked you, too."

"He did?"

"Yeah. He thought you were the best."

They fell silent, thinking of Billy. A minute later she pulled the soaked shirt away from the gash in his arm, then set about cleaning both wounds.

"Aiden said you saved his life."

Brodie made a dismissive gesture with his good arm. "No more than he saved mine."

"He said you could've left him there and taken the money."

He grunted. "Are you surprised that I didn't?"

She stopped what she was doing, but didn't look at him. She wasn't really thinking of what to say; the answer was clear and immediate. But something was happening in the air between them that frightened her.

"Well, are you?"

She looked into his eyes. "No, I'm not surprised." It was an admission of so much more than what he'd asked. And now was not the time to think of it, not now when it was time to wrap bandages around his arm and upper body, reaching around behind him to retrieve the strips of cloth, all but embracing him. She finished the task in silence and then began to put away the blood-red bowl of water and the dirty swabs she'd used. "You should rest now." She pushed him down to the pillow gently and began covering him with the sheet. "I'll tell Magdalena to bring you—"

"Annie, sit down, don't leave me yet. I have to tell you something."

His face was set and grim, the hand tugging on her wrist almost pleading. She should bring the chair over, she thought, but he was pulling her down beside him and holding on so tightly. "What is it?"

Abruptly he let her go, and scrubbed at his unshaven face with his hand. He put the back of his arm over his forehead and stared at the ceiling for a long time. Then he gave a brief, unamused laugh and plunged in. "Since I've got you in a believing mood, I thought I'd tell you a story. It's short and ugly, and I don't really know why I want you to hear it. But I do."

"I'm listening."

She was, with her hands folded in her lap, back straight, prim as the schoolteacher she could've been. He felt like putting his hand on her knee and just holding it there while he told his tale. It would've comforted him a great deal, that slender knee under his palm. But of course he couldn't. He wasn't allowed to touch her at all.

"This story starts in Bristol, four months ago. I'd just gotten my mate's certificate and I was waiting for my new ship to finish loading. I'd been in port a week, and hired on with a skipper from Norway for a run to Melbourne for wool. I was putting up at a seamen's boardinghouse near the docks and spending time with an old friend of mine. A woman. Her name was Mary Sloane." He took his arm away and looked at Anna directly. "I'd known her for four years or more. When I'd happen to be in Bristol, I'd always look her up. We… we'd be lovers for a few days, a week, and then I'd go away, maybe not see her for a year. I gave her money when I had it, and I knew there were other men who did the same. If that makes her a whore, it's your word, not mine. To me she was a friend."

He was staring at her intently, not letting her look away. She felt called upon to say something. "I understand," was all she could think of, in a small voice. But it wasn't true.

"On my last night, we went to a tavern and had a few pints of ale. When we were leaving, a little boy caught up to us in the street. He said a 'gentleman' who admired Miss Sloane and wished Mr. Brodie well wanted him to give us a bottle of wine. I stuck it under my arm and gave the boy a penny. I remember teasing Mary about her secret admirer, though she swore she had no idea who it might be. In my room, we opened the bottle and drank about half a glass each while we lay in bed. After that I don't remember anything until morning."

Anna brought her clasped hands up to her chest and rested her chin on them, waiting.

"Someone was pounding at the door. I stumbled up, feeling like I'd been keel-hauled in the night. It was the landlady. She started yelling at me, something about the maid coming three times with our breakfast, and then she broke off all of a sudden and started screaming. I turned to look, and there was Mary in the bed, white as the sheet, and blood staining the pillow all around her head. Her throat was cut. My bloody razor lay on the bed beside her."

He watched her cover the lower half of her face with her hands. The amber eyes above her splayed fingers stared at him in horror. He drew a long, shuddering breath and finished. "There was no wine bottle in the room. Our glasses were half-full of cheap rum. No one believed me about the boy, and he was never found. Mary didn't have an enemy in the world. So there was only me."

Anna lowered her hands. "The child?" she got out.

So O'Dunne had told her that, too. "Not mine. Mary was three months gone. I'd been on the other side of the world."

In the midst of everything else she was feeling, she was conscious of a fierce, unaccountable relief that Brodie's baby hadn't been murdered.

"All the months I was in prison, I kept asking myself why. Nothing was stolen, hell, there wasn't anything to steal in the first place. Everybody loved Mary; she was a good, gentle person. I kept thinking whoever had done it was doing it to
me
, not her. But why? I've had fights with men, plenty of them, especially when I was younger. But even then, none of those men was my enemy. They were just drunk, or mean, or both. I still don't have any answer."

He stared at her a moment longer, but her rigidly composed features weren't giving anything away. Except sorrow. He put his forearm over his eyes and spoke into the air. "Story's over. I think I could sleep now. Maybe the maid could bring me something to eat in a couple of hours."

Anna stood. She retrieved the bowl of water from the table and went to the door. She turned. "Mr. Brodie?"

He grunted.

"Why did you tell me?"

He pulled his arm away at that, but kept his gaze on the wall in front of him. "So you would believe me." He swallowed. "Do you?"

Her answer came easily. "Yes. I knew before you told me that you had never killed anyone." She saw him close his eyes tight, then turn to her stiffly on one elbow.

"You can't…Annie, you can't know what that means to me."

She had one more question.
Were you in love with her
? But the words wouldn't come. And then she began to fear they would come and that he would answer. Time passed. Somehow she broke the connection between their gazes and got out of the room.

"Aiden, how much longer?"

"I'm almost finished."

"That's what you said five minutes ago."

"Your interruptions don't speed things along."

That shut her up. She glanced at Brodie, wondering if he could possibly be as calm as he looked. His fate hung on the words in the message Aiden was decoding with such agonizing slowness. Would he ever finish? She didn't remember the message they'd sent two days ago taking this long to
encode
, and she'd even helped him with that, reading the letters he was to substitute from the paper he'd been given by Mr. Dietz before leaving England.

She went to the drawing room window and looked out, trying to compose herself. It was silly to worry about what the London telegram would say. After what Brodie had discovered in Naples, surely it was only reasonable that Mr. Dietz would want him to continue the impersonation in Liverpool. Someone at Jourdaine was a thief, after all, perhaps even a murderer, and Mr. Brodie was still the key to finding out who that person was. Sending him back to Bristol now when his job was only half-finished would be foolish and unreasonable, out of the question. That was what logic told her. Her emotions weren't listening, though, and she was almost shaking from a deep and puzzling premonition of disaster.

She caught herself setting off on a new round of pacing, and made a forced detour to the window seat. If she didn't stop, she'd wear a trough in the expensive rose-colored carpet. Brodie still had his nose in a book. As usual. This time it was
The Origin of Species
. She'd never known anyone who liked to read as much as he did. Once she'd asked him about it; he'd told her he'd been away from books for fourteen years and was making up for lost time. But how could he do it at a time like this? Didn't he understand what this telegram meant?

"I'm finished."

"Thank God." She stood and went to the desk where Aiden sat and clasped her hands behind her back. "Read it." She glanced over at Brodie on the sofa. He shut his book, but didn't stand.

O'Dunne cleared his throat. His lawyer's face was expressionless. " 'Acknowledge report of A.O'D. 3 June'. "

"A-O-D?" interrupted Anna.

"That's me."

"Oh." Of course. "Sorry."

" 'Acknowledge report of A.O'D. 3 June. Matter of M.S.' that's the
Morning Star
' under advisement. Take no further action. Request re. J.B. denied; proceed at once to Bristol. Acknowledge receipt.' It's signed, 'R.D.'"

O'Dunne lined the message up four-square with the desk top, his fingers patting its edges carefully, over and over. The silence expanded. At last he looked up. Anna blocked his view of Brodie. She hadn't moved; she stood stock-still, paralyzed. He got to his feet, took up his crutch, and hobbled around the desk toward Brodie. "I'm sorry, John," he murmured. "I don't know what else I could've done, what more I could've told them. If I could think of anything—"

"Forget it. It's not your fault, Aiden, you did all there was to do." He stood too, restless. "It's only what we expected, isn't it? Nothing's changed. For a few days I hoped for something different, but now that's gone. I'm no worse off than I was a month ago." He was staring at Anna's rigid back, hardly listening to his own words. "'Proceed at once,' they say. I can be ready any time. But what about your leg?"

"It's much better. I could go tomorrow or the next day."

Anna whirled around. "Tomorrow! Aiden, so soon! You... you're not well enough, you still have pain. Why risk hurting yourself again? If the wound should open or become infected—"

"The wound is mending perfectly, Anna. There's nothing to keep me here."

"Oh, but—"

"What's the point in dragging it out? All that's left is to arrange for Brodie's 'funeral,' and the authorities in London will take care of that. You'll stay in Rome until you hear from mea matter of a week or two, no more. You'll be told when to write home of your husband's sudden death. Your cousin Stephen will probably come for you. I'll insist on coming with him. It'll be over within a month, Anna. Then you can go home."

Home. Her hand crept to her throat. Her shocked eyes darted to Brodie, away, back again. "This is" She held out her arm, then let it drop to her side.
Monstrous
was the word she wanted to say. But she couldn't say it to Brodie, not now. Not ever. She had to get out of the room, quickly, before something terrible happened. What? Something, some admission or confession. "Excuse me," was all she could think of to say, and then she dashed past Brodie and Aiden and out the door, all but running for the stairs.