With This Ring (14 page)

Elektra could only stare down at him.
“You stayed?
All night?”

He groaned and wrinkled his entire face in an expression that said
That was the worst night’s sleep of my life
, then gazed blearily up at her.

“I said I would, didn’t I?”

“Y—yes, you did.”
Elektra bit her lip, rather fiercely moved by his grumpy steadfastness.
Her experience with asking male persons for irrational favors had led her to believe they would flight off at the slightest excuse, dismissing her needs with a laugh or, worse, mockery.
Oh, she knew her brothers would die for her—but God forbid she ever ask them to protect her from imaginary nightmares!

Lifting her skirts slightly, she lowered herself to a demure squat to gaze into Mr.
Hastings’s sleep-smudged features.
He looked absolutely awful.
Dark circles ringed his eyes, his thick sandy hair stood straight up on one side, and there was a reddened patch on his face where the carved pattern on the door had pressed a design into his skin.

Elektra gave him her very best smile—the one that almost no one got to see, the one she saved for her dear Iris and Attie.
“Mr.
Hastings, you are not an ordinary man.”

“No, miss,” he agreed hazily.
He seemed a bit gobsmacked.

Poor fellow.
Still smiling, warmed by his consideration and charmed by his lopsided hair, she rose to her feet.
“Shall I order breakfast for you, sir?
I should like to resume our journey directly afterward.
Eggs and bacon?”

He turned a little green and shook his head.
“No, miss.
No thank ye.
I’ll see to the horses, straightaway.”

Elektra took pity on him and pretended that she knew nothing about men and liquor and hangovers, although she’d hauled one or both of the twins off to their beds during their younger, wilder days, then poured hot black coffee and raw eggs down their throats the next morning.

She smiled brightly at Mr.
Hastings.
“Excellent!
I shall gather up Miss Bliss and we shall join you out front very soon.”

He moaned something and wiggled his fingers good-bye at her, then dropped flat on the floor once more.
Elektra stepped neatly over him and ventured down the stairs, where she knew Bliss would already be.
Bliss, she had no doubt, was one of those people who was always precisely where she was supposed to be.

All night.

He’d watched over her all night long.
She’d been far away from her home and family, all those brothers and father, too—and yet she felt so safe.

Just as she had in the ruins.

*   *   *

Aaron lay on the floor, knowing he looked ridiculous sprawled half in, half out of the room.
That seemed to be a recurring problem with him.
When his soul wanted out—as it had when Miss Worthington had requested his help to go home—his honor kept him in.
When his soul wanted in—as it had when she’d stood so close to him dressed in naught but fine-spun linen and golden hair—his honor kept him out.

Now, when all he wanted to do was to find his room—which he’d never even seen!—and sleep the morning away, she wanted him to help her on her way.

Had any other woman in recorded history ever turned a man so inside out?

Helen of Troy.

Lady Macbeth.

Guinevere.

He’d have done it all over again, just for another glimpse of that smile.
I am an idiot for that smile.
He thought about the innkeeper, and poor lovelorn Siegfried, and every other fellow caught in the beam of that smile.
I must remember that I am nothing special to her.

He rolled—or rather, flopped—over onto his face, feeling the stretch of cramped muscles but also the welcome sensation of his numbed arse joining the party.

I am not Alexander, or Macbeth, or Arthur.

They had all lived their lives.
He blinked at the carpet, which was much too close, and pushed himself up on his hands and knees.
At this rate, he was definitely destined to die young.

I just might be Achilles.
He most definitely had a weakness.

He made it all the way to the stables without his numbed legs giving way beneath him.
He even managed to saddle his horse himself, although he gratefully accepted the groom’s help with Bianca and the pony cart.

Therefore, he was impressively ready for action, despite the pounding in his head and the storm-at-sea feeling in his belly, when the ladies emerged from the inn, looking as fresh and rested as a good breakfast and a good night’s sleep can make one look.

Aaron tried not to snarl as Miss Elektra thanked him prettily for his prompt attention to details.

In fact, she was astonishingly good-natured toward him for at least an hour after their departure.
At first he’d welcomed the respite from her sharp tongue.
Then he began to worry.
Sweetness and courtesy were not natural states for her.
She must be feeling the strain by now.

He became convinced that danger was nigh.
She could blow at any time.

*   *   *

In a house in a once respectable, now genteelly shabby neighborhood in London …

Time for breakfast.
Lysander Worthington sat up in his bed, where he’d been lying fully clothed.
As usual, sleep had eluded him, so he’d stared at the cracks in the stained plaster ceiling all the long hours of the night.

He’d had a long hard ride home yesterday from Shropshire, all night and all day, slowed by pounding storms and hock-deep mud.
His mount was the second-best horse in the family, but even a fairly decent-quality creature could not slog home any faster than that.

He ought to be weary, he supposed.
He sat on his bed and waited, trying to feel weariness.
He felt nothing much at all.

He rose to his feet and reminded himself to join his family downstairs.

Most of the time, using his own gray-washed memories, Zander tried to be a good brother and a good son.
The only problem was, it would have helped if he could actually be a good person first.

He didn’t feel like a human person.
Not a real, warm, flesh-and-blood, feeling, thinking, reasoning being of the human persuasion.
He’d been one before and he remembered that once, he’d been just like everyone else, a real man.

Now he was more like a reflection of one in a smoke-darkened mirror, or a crisp shadow on a sunny morning—the outline upon the ground complete, but with nothing but black inside.

Everything looked fine on the outside.
Even he could see that in his looking glass.
He breathed, he walked, he ate, sometimes, and on rare occasions he even slept.
His oldest brother took him to a tailor, so his prewar clothing looked as if it belonged to him, the postwar Zander.

Yet there was no denying that something was wrong.
He was broken, damaged, probably forever.
He felt as though, if someone cut him open, they would find cables and pulleys instead of blood and muscle.
He felt as dry and dark inside as a long-neglected attic room—empty but for the leftover possessions of past existence, worn and covered in dust.

How could he even begin to fill that empty room?
How did one refurbish a vacant heart?

The stairs led down.
He went down.

In the sunny, shabby breakfast room, he found his eldest brother, Daedalus, along with his younger brothers Castor and Orion, bolting down breakfast and discussing the journey ahead.
Ah yes, Elektra’s rescue.

Pausing, Lysander tried to recollect the atypical urgency that had led him home at a gallop to report his sister’s actions to the family.
It had seemed very important at the time, so he’d pushed himself and his horse with single-minded purpose.

He remembered everything that had happened, of course.
It was the emotional content of the events that had drained away too quickly, like water on sand.

He did not speak or make a sound, but abruptly all eyes turned to gaze at him standing in the doorway of the room.
From his vague and dreamy parents to his intensely vibrant youngest sister, Atalanta, those eyes asked him a question.
Even his new sister-in-law, Miranda, gazed at him as if looking for something in him.

Don’t bother
, he wanted to say to them.
You won’t find anything. I am an unoccupied husk, wearing tailored clothes.
Of course, he said nothing.
He never did.
Nonetheless, they all seemed to believe he was better, because he hardly ever shouted out in the night anymore.

He couldn’t remember feeling that nightmare horror.
He couldn’t even remember why he’d cried out, except for a nauseating sensation of falling that sometimes still interrupted his infrequent sleep.

He missed Elektra’s presence.
Her determined focus and brisk assertiveness always made him feel as though she made up for any lack in him.
Add in her irritable, silent compassion and he knew that with her, he need not pretend to be a person, or brother, or son.
When he was with his bossiest sibling, he simply did as he was told, relieved from the strain of thinking for himself.
He was ill equipped for that, what with his dusty-attic mind.

Unfortunately, it seemed that Elektra was not as sensible as he’d believed her to be.
Now he’d helped her do something that Daedalus and the others—well, mostly Dade—thought was odd or unsafe or appalling in some way.

Zander knew that what he and Elektra had done was wrong.
He just wished he could remember why it was wrong.

Miranda looked the most worried.
Well, she was somewhat new to the family and therefore still fairly normal.
Cas looked unhappy about leaving his pretty wife behind in her condition but otherwise not so worried about Elektra herself.
Orion looked as though he were considering the radial symmetry of sea urchins or some such thing.
Zander knew that Orion’s perpetual distraction was nothing like his own broken speechlessness.
Orion had a whole mind, a very fine one—one much too busy with important thoughts to be fully engaged in silly matters such as paltry runaway sisters.

Little Attie gazed up at Zander with narrowed green eyes.
At thirteen years of age, Atalanta was a spindly creature made up mostly of freckles and iron will.
Out of all of the family, Zander rather thought Attie understood him the best.
Attie was broken, too, in her way.
She had no concept of the rules of right or wrong that applied to the world outside these walls—or if she did, she frankly chose to ignore them.

Zander knew the rules as well.
There was nothing wrong with that part of his memory.
He just couldn’t remember why they were supposed to be so important.

Dade shoved a last bite into his mouth and stood, still chewing.
“Come on, you lot,” he said to his brothers.
“The mounts I’ve rented should be here by now.”
Daedalus had a horse of his own, a fine spirited black named Icarus, of course.

Zander’s horse, a brown gelding that he’d acquired, didn’t strictly belong to him in the usual sense of ownership, but no one else had seemed to want it so he’d untied it from the post in front of the military hospital on the day he decided to depart from it and ridden it home.

The stolid brown beast had no name at all.
It breathed, it ate, it trotted on his wordless command.
It was enough for Zander.

He hadn’t eaten, though no one seemed to notice anything different about that.
His horse had been fed.
That was likely good enough for Zander’s purpose.
Though the both of them had just ridden into London the afternoon before, the sun was barely up before they joined the others and rode out again.
The horse seemed rested enough, so Lysander didn’t complain.

Complaining required talking—and it also required giving a damn.

Zander had mostly forgotten how to do either one.

Mrs.
Philpott scuttled into the breakfast room.
“They’re here, missus!
They’re home!”

*   *   *

The city grew around them as they neared the center.
Low buildings turned to high ones, scarce houses became attached rows.
The noise of a thousand souls and their doings began to hammer at their ears, causing them to raise their own in response.

The city.
Aaron had intended to avoid London entirely.
So, of course, the dangerous Misses Worthington needed to be returned to London.
He slouched down on Lard-Arse, pulled Hastings’s battered hat low over his face, and hoped for the best.
This had been the location of the worst of his youthful offenses.
The throbbing heart of Society—and worse.
A restless and bored young man, with a long and powerless heir-hood before him, could find plenty of mischief with which to occupy his senses.

He had, indeed he had.
Now that past weighed upon him like a millstone strapped to his back.

See her home, then be on your way.

Still, he couldn’t keep his mind off the puzzle that was Elektra Worthington.

Aaron had learned through very difficult years of trial and error never to judge by appearances, first in his error-filled youth, then later as he’d tried so hard to rebuild his character and regain his honor.

Along the way he had come to understand that heroic-looking fellows could be the greatest cowards, and sweet, demure ladies could vindictively destroy one’s life with a single word.
In the end, he’d learned to keep to himself but for a few worthy companions, carefully chosen not for their rank or wealth, but for their fine deeds.
Even rascally, gutter-born Hastings had shown Aaron moments of outstanding valor and a hidden streak of gentlemanly decency—at least, on rare occasions.

Actions told the truth, as outward show did not, and there was surely no certainty to be found in anyone’s idle words!

So what did he know of Miss Elektra Worthington?
From beneath the brim of his hat, he studied her straight back as she sat beside her cousin driving the pony cart.
Her bonnet hid her golden hair and her astonishing face from him, making his task a bit easier, although every swaying motion of the cart draped her gown across her tiny waist and rounded hips—thank goodness the low seat-back hid her bottom from his view!

With determination, Aaron cleared his mind.
Yes, she was most pleasing to the eye.
So was a fine sunset or a well-formed horse.
Setting aside that delicate beauty and mouthwatering figure, looking past her fine gown and polished manner, what did he see?
What had she shown him through her actions?