“Benedict,” she laughed.
“You can rinse with the gin. I won’t even complain that it tastes vile,” he offered, which he rather thought was generous, as gin was truly vile. It was the sort Bella used to drink before he’d taken to the ring and they could afford better. “Please, Eliza?”
She softened, then reached for the jar at the precise moment they both heard it.
“Oh, yes, the house is just right through here. You can wash up and Effie’ll make you both something to eat.” Benedict recognized the voice of West’s father—quite a lot louder than usual. Much as he cursed the timing, he appreciated the warning.
Benedict groaned, his head falling back to stare at the ceiling. “I need a shirt,” he muttered, then shut himself in West’s room as the knob turned on the front door.
Silently, he cursed every deity he could name and a few he made up for good measure as he pressed a palm against his too-interested cock.
Glancing around for his bearings, he happened to cast his eyes upon a mirror and laughed. He looked positively unhinged. Every inch of him soot-streaked, save the bottom half of his face and some of his torso. No wonder Eliza hadn’t swooned at the sight of him.
He drew an exhausted hand over his face before opening one of West’s drawers at random. The first held nothing but a bundle of letters and trinkets, but the next held clean linen shirts. Benedict would owe his friend a new wardrobe at the end of this. He tugged it over his still filthy frame. As eager as he was to be shirtless in Eliza’s presence, that desire did not extend to her father.
Satisfied that he wasn’t about to scandalize the man he hoped, though certainly in vain, might be his father-in-law one day, he stepped out into the main room, only to find four pairs of eyes upon him—though only one so lovely as to steal his breath.
“I see the freshening up has gone well,” Effie said from her resting place by the stove.
“I’ll wash in the pond,” he announced, then strode from the room before Effie or Weston offered any more amusing observations for the crowd.
The dawn air smacked into him as he strode toward the water. There, he scrubbed at his face and torso.
She had held him, tended him, let him glimpse what their life could be—but she hadn’t forgiven him—not truly, not yet.
Until she spoke those words in the harsh light of morning, he had no right to believe her tenderness was anything but kindness and borrowed hope.
Chapter Forty-Nine
The restof the day blurred into a different, much less terrifying sort of disarray. Augie’s guarded transport arrived with the ruinous sum Papa had collected—an amount that made Eliza’s skin crawl. She knew how much more Blackwood had demanded. A physician was summoned, who worked over Draycott, then moved through the rest of them with brisk efficiency.
By the time the constable appeared, her father was ready with a smoothed-over tale of accidental tragedy, and no one—least of all the constable—seemed inclined to mourn Blackwood or question the convenient narrative.
With Blackwood dead, Draycott failing, and Enys and Stark fled into the night, there was no outlet for anyone’s lingering fury.
Effie made order out of ruin—finding beds, food, blankets, even clothing for those who needed it. Eliza remembered little but hands guiding her from task to task, bowls of broth pressed into her palms, voices murmuring reassurance she could not hear. The day flitted away from her in smoke-tinged fragments until exhaustion finally towed her under.
Though she did not recall falling asleep—she was certain it wasn’t in the bed she woke in. The last thing she remembered was sitting down beside Benedict to partake once more in the bland broth the physician ordered in the late afternoon.
The sun was just beginning to kiss the sky when she sat up. A quick glance around revealed that she was in her assigned bed—in West’s former room.
Her body ached, but Eliza knew sleep would not return. She stretched her tensed muscles, biting back a groan at the pleasurable pain. Her eyes, nose, and throat were still raw, but she was alive—and so were her father and her… Benedict.
Eliza stood and padded over the soft rug, her feet bare. The chemise she wore—one of Effie’s—was far too short and cut a little tight across the bosom. But it was clean, and if it smelled of anything, Eliza’s damaged nose could not detect it.
She managed her toilette, as well as several of the other, more revolting, aftereffects of smoke. Effie had laid out a robe for her to wear. A repurposed robe à la française fashioned in a dusty mauve silk, it reminded Eliza of some things her mother wore on lazy mornings—once her stepmother’s.
Eliza was pleased when she looked in the mirror—far from the filthy, frightful creature she had seen the day before—she looked rather pretty. Her eyes and nose were still a little too red, but her cheeks were a pleasing pink, and the robe complimented her pale skin and dark hair nicely. Her hair, though it had taken more than an hour to tame the snarls and tangles the day before, fell down her shoulders in elegant ringlets instead of the usual undefined fluff.
She slipped out into the main room of the house and into Effie’s too-big boots with the express purpose of doing something she absolutely should not.
She wasn’t certain where Benedict had slept, but she remembered Effie pointing around to the back of the smolderinghouse when she spoke to him. Eliza tiptoed past the stables, which held both the guards and the brigade, who remained to ensure nothing reignited—a terrifying consideration that had not occurred to Eliza.
Fresh dew covered the sparse grass as she strode through the foggy morning air. Far from the ravenous sensation from—was it two or three nights before?—the morning on the moorland revealed a new tranquility as waterfowl flew over her head to land in the pond in front of the house with a splash.
Eliza tried not to look at the ruins of Benedict’s home, but the bite of smoke still lingering in the air, or perhaps in her nostrils, made such efforts an impossibility. The east wing was still standing practically untouched save for soot damage, from what she’d overheard the day before. But the west… only the barest of skeletons remained, centuries of history gone in mere hours. Bricks and rubble spilled onto the lawn surrounding it, the earth charred.
How close she had come to never seeing another dawn—to never knowing if she could forgive Benedict, never learning if her heart was true. The thought hastened her pace.
