Page 43 of A Deal With a Notorious Devil
“Oh, don’t worry,” she said. “I had it sent on to Charity.”
“Charity!” Hieronymus tumbled down into his lap as Chris shoved his elbows beneath him once more. “Why the hell would you do that?”
“I—well, I assumed—a man gives jewelry to his mistress, yes? Who else might it have been for?”
With a groan, Chris collapsed back onto the pillow. “Lord Jesus,” he said. “It was meant for you.”
“Me?” She sounded genuinely perplexed. “Whatever for?”
“Hell if I know now,” he said, and cast his arm over his eyes. “I suppose I thought it would go well with your stolen cravat pin.” And he’d spent such an unreasonably long time searching for something he’d thought would suit. All that effort, wasted.
“Oh,” she said, though there was the edge of amusement in her voice as she gently collected Hieronymus, who had gotten stuck upon his back with his small turtle-legs churning in the air, and righted him once more. “I’m sorry. At least Charity will be pleased.”
“She damned well ought to be,” he groused. “She had a ruby necklace from me not too very long ago.”
“Perhaps she’ll thank you for it tomorrow,” Phoebe said.
“Tomorrow?” Chris peered at her suspiciously from beneath his arm.
“She’s coming to visit,” Phoebe explained. “She asked if she might come round today, but I sent a note back to tell her that you hadn’t woken yet and it would be best to wait until you had. So she’s coming tomorrow. We’re taking tea.”
“Are you mad? You can’t take tea with my mistress.”
“Whyever not? She seems a pleasant enough woman.”
“Because—because—” Chris flailed his hands in the air in a surfeit of unexpected temper. “Because it isn’tdone!” Blast and damn. How many times had she said the very same to him? How many times had he laughed at the thought, as she laughed now?
“Well, it is now,” she said, her lips still curled in amusement. A scratch at the door prompted her to rise, and she took Hieronymus with her, cradling the creature in her hands. She admitted a servant, who entered with a tray to lay across his lap. “I’m taking Hieronymus back out to the garden,” Phoebe said blithely. “Enjoy your dinner. And I wouldn’t recommend rising; the staff have been instructed to inform upon you if they catch you wandering about.”
“They’re mydamned staff!” The affronted growl availed himnothing. Phoebe waltzed clear of his room and Chris was left alone to a dinner of white soup and braised beef, contemplating how he was meant to prevent his wife and his mistress from taking tea together when he wasn’t certain he could manage to keep his feet long enough to piss.
Fuckingwomen.
∞∞∞
Phoebe had forgotten her book. It had long been a habit to read a few chapters before bed as a pleasant end to the day. Only, when she’d returned to her bed chamber after feeding Hieronymus his regular midnight snack of half a strawberry and a curled leaf of cabbage, she’d realized—she had left it upon Chris’ nightstand.
He’d spent the remainder of the evening sending the staff running for one thing or another, hollering at the top of his lungs, and if it had irritated her to the back of her molars, at least it had also reassured her that the worst she ought to expect of him in the coming weeks was a poor temper.
She’d heard nothing at all in the last hour or so, and so she supposed he must’ve gone back to sleep. Soft and silent, she eased open the door, blinking into the darkness within, a candle held in her hand. “Chris?” she whispered, just in case.
Only a low drone of a snore answered, and she breathed a sigh of relief as she slipped inside. The curtains around the bed had been drawn half-closed, and through the shadowy void within, one of Chris’ arms had flopped out to dangle over the edge of the bed.
As she crept closer she skirted the bed as widely as she wasable, her imagination conjuring up a strange unease that he might be only pretending to sleep, lying in wait to grab at her as she passed. Probably she’d let the Gothic horror ofFrankensteinslip a little too deeply into her mind.
But it did seem like the sort of thing he might do. Just for the fun of it.
There. She snatched the book off the edge of the nightstand and turned—and the light of the candle slipped through the bed curtains, sparkling off tousled gold hair, carving shadows beneath high cheekbones and into the cleft of his chin. He really was an attractive man, she thought.
It was just so unfair that he, who was so prone to growling and shouting and who seemed perpetually short-tempered in his waking hours, should appear so positively angelic in sleep. As if he’d never set a toe upon the wrong path in the whole of his life. Phoebe half-expected to find a halo hung up upon the bedpost, waiting for its owner to reclaim it upon waking.
There wasn’t a bit of the sinister in him when he was sleeping. But that idle musing slipped away from her as his brow creased and he squeezed his eyes closed tighter against the disturbance of the low light of the candle. His hand, draped down the side of the bed, flexed and shifted, and as he threw it up over his eyes, the velvet counterpane slipped down his body, settling about his hips.
And she was reminded that the sinister had been donetohim. His bare chest was covered in an assortment of scars; some neat white lines that suggested shallow wounds and some with thick raised edges indicating deeper ones. A study in suffering, carved into his skin with each line. How strange it was to think that any of them might have ended his life; if not the wound itself, then an infection taken afterward.
How much more bland and boring the world would be without him.
Cautiously, she eased a step closer, but his breathing had evened out once more into a low snore and he’d turned his head away. He’d been given another dose of laudanum when Haddington had changed out his bandage an hour or so ago, she knew. Probably there would be little that could truly wake him.
