Page 71 of A Deal With a Notorious Devil
Chris burst into Phoebe’s bedroom, and she startled to the sharp crack of the door smacking against the wall as he entered, one hand drifting in a shaky arc toward her heart. She sat at the edge of her bed in a ruffled white nightgown, holding very still as her lady’s maid dabbed at her neck with a bit of cloth.
“What the hell has happened?” Chris inquired as he crossed the room toward her, the tip of his cane sinking into the plush carpet draped across the floor. “I had hardly set foot in the door before Brooks was on me. Said you’d been injured.”
Phoebe gave a brief nod and winced as the lady’s maid clucked disapprovingly at her for moving. “Yes, I—I was at a bookshop in Whitechapel—”
“Whitechapel!” Chris snarled the word as he stopped at the edge of the bed. “You don’t go to Whitechapel.”
“I do when I’m looking for books beyond what the usual shops sell,” Phoebe said. “Not often, of course. And I always take a footman—”
“Yes,” he said tightly. “I can just how well that worked out for you.”
“Don’t be snide, Kit,” she said, and there was no heat to the words, just a sort of fragility he’d seldom heard from her. “Ireally can’t bear it this evening.”
Christ. He’d promised not to shout, but sometimes—sometimes it was damned difficult. Like when his wife took herself off toWhitechapelwith only the company of a footman for her security.
“Out,” he said, nudging the lady’s maid’s knee with his cane.
The woman looked up, flustered. “But, sir. I’ve not finished.”
“Leave everything. I’ll do the rest.” He’d tended enough of his own wounds in his life to have a passable competency in the care of them. As the woman vacated her position beside Phoebe and slipped out the door, Chris sank into her place and glanced at the things left behind. Salve, clean cloths, a bowl of water. A few droplets of blood stained the neckline of Phoebe’s nightgown where they must have rolled down from the cut on her throat. But the bleeding had slowed, at least.
Chris grabbed a cloth, dunked it in the bowl of water, wrung it out, and dabbed it delicately to the wound. “Imagine,” he said, “you are having quite a pleasant day, all things considered. You spend the afternoon at your social club with your friend, and even the intrusion of altogether too damned many of your brothers-in-law is…entertaining, in its way. You drink. Converse. A few other members of the club, while not precisely friendly, at least acknowledge your presence with somewhat less than the antipathy you might have expected. And then you return home to find that your wifehas been injured because she decided on a whim to go toWhitechapel.”
Phoebe swallowed so hard he felt the working of her throat roll against the bit of cloth he’d pressed to her neck. “I haven’t got a wife,” she said. Her shoulders lifted and fell, and her fingers gave an agitated flutter. “And it wasn’t on a whim. It was—”
“Phoebe.”
“—an important errand. You asked me to fill the library, andI—”
“Phoebe.”
“—am fulfilling my obligations. I thought you’d be pleased!”
“Phoebe.” He caught her flailing hand in his, set it firmly back into her lap. “No damned book is worth your life. I—”Hell. “I don’t want to be a widower, either.”
Her shoulders sank, and somehow he had the feeling that that one quietly-spoken sentence had chastened her more than a shout could have done. Her lips trembled, pursed as he pressed a fresh cloth to the wound on her neck which had finally stopped seeping blood.
“It doesn’t want stitches,” he said. But he could tell by the clean edges of the gouge that it had been made with a knife, or a dagger, or some other such bladed weapon. She hadn’t only been injured; she’d beenattacked. “Tell me what happened,” he said.
Her lips parted, and her breath hissed through her teeth. “Someone—a man who called himself Russell—grabbed me outside the bookshop,” she said. “While the footman was loading the books into the carriage. He had a knife.” Her blue-grey eyes had gone glassy, and she blinked back the mist of tears that shimmered in them.
“He grabbed you?” he asked. “Where?”
“Just—just my arm.” She gave a vague little gesture.
For the first time Chris noted a smear of blood upon the sleeve of her nightgown. He picked at the tie that secured the neckline of her nightgown, wrenched it loose to shove it down and bare her right shoulder and the uppermost part of her arm. Already it had begun to bruise, wreathing her soft skin in bands of purple in the impression of hard fingers. And there, in the tender flesh of her inner arm, were several deep gashes in the shape of crescents, as if overlong fingernails had bitten into the skin.
The hair at the nape of his neck prickled. It had been a longdamned time since he’d seen marks like these, since he’d known a man altogether too eager to make them. But he’d had gouges just like them aplenty in his youth, and if they’d faded somewhat from his skin in the years since, they had not been erased from his mind. The sting of them, the bite of sharp claws better suited to a bird of prey than to a man, carving chunks of out his flesh.
It was impossible. It had to be. Didn’t it?
“Did you see his face?” he asked.
She shook her head, her curls bouncing against her cheeks. “No, I—my back was to him. He made threats against you. Against us.” Her breath hitched in her chest. “He said—he said he could get to us anywhere.”
The house was as secure as it could possibly be, but there was no amount of security that could dissuade someone so reckless and determined, so fixated upon revenge that Phoebe had become a target. Her safety ought to have been sacrosanct, assured because there was no man alive foolish enough to target her.
Only now, it seemed, a dead man had done it. Or a man he’d believed to be dead, for well over two decades now.
