He offered her his arm to escort her inside. “Yes, yes, Miss Dean. Follow the rules, fill out the proper forms. Consult the law. Everything done the right way.”
She ignored his arm, fisting her hands in her skirts as she swept inside ahead of him.
“But what is the right way? Who decides? And what if they’re wrong?” he asked, following, hurrying to catch up. For a woman of no significant height, her steps were long. Were her legs long, too? And encased in red?
“Impertinent questions.”
Mindreading was impossible. Good God, he was ruined if she had somehow figured it out. She’d know everything, see every lewd imagining.
“Who decides which way is right hardly matters. The important thing is to follow the rules.”
Oh.Thosequestions. Right. “I bow to your superior understanding, Miss Dean. And I swear to you there is no cause for worry with Timothy. The Grants will take good care of him. They’re a good family. The best.”
“The scandal…”
“You know they made the only good choice. They may have given away secrets, but they did it to save lives. They have King William’s praise.” He’d not been exiled for his support of the Grants, but he had lost a few friends. Not that he cared. Alchemists congregated in London and Manchester. In Bristol, he hardly noticed the loss of a few friends.
She chewed her bottom lip then gave a solid nod. “You’re right, of course.” She paused before the schoolroom, smiled. Hell. What a rare gift, that upward curve, that glorious glint in her eye.
He pressed his hands to his heart and stumbled backward.
“Are you ill?” she asked, her arm extending, her fingers fluttering at his sleeve.
“I’ve been decimated, thank you for asking.”
Confusion furrowed her brow. “Decimated?”
“By your smile. Like an arrow to the heart, a tree branch to the head. It wallops.”
She rolled her eyes. Those lips thinned again. And she picked up her skirts to bustle inside the hospital. But not high enough for him to see her stockings. “I’ve warned you about flirting, Sir Nicholas.”
“Oh yes, I remember. Apparently I need to warn you about smiling. Lethal, it is. What a way to go, though, bludgeoned by beauty.”
She snorted. “Really, Sir Nicholas. You are, and have ever been, absolutely absurd.”
Sometimes. Like right now. He wanted to kiss her. Again.
But she did not know who he was, what he’d done. And if she did, she’d never allow his flirtations again.
Better this easy friendship, even if it did end eleven times out of ten with him in a cold bed, his cock in his hand, the memory of their one coal-hot kiss driving his wrist like a piston.
He followed her into the schoolroom. Almost twenty children of various ages sat in tidy rows bent over slates. They did not even look up. But the woman who’d been monitoring the children—a local widow who often volunteered—did.
“Thank you, Mrs. Tottle,” Miss Dean said. “It’s time for the children to go outside.”
Chairs screeched against wood and whispers broke out like low distant thunder across the classroom as the children stood. A stampede toward the hooks lining the side wall, then the widow helped them put on coats and cloaks before ushering them outside into the bleak and tangled garden.
In the front courtyard of the hospital, it was possible to imagine it a cheerful place. The yellow façade, the smooth limestone, the well-maintained drive—every detail offered reassurance the children housed here were safe and happy. The hospital had been glamoured past all reality. The duke’s transcendent talent was strong. Nico would not have known had Miss Dean not told him. The children would know, though. A talent like the duke’s could settle beauty onto a carcass with so much precision everyone thought it living. Until they tried to touch it.
God, he hated that man. For hiding neglect beneath glamour. And for exiling his sister.
He’d meant to hate Miss Dean after he’d learned she’d allowed his gifts to be confiscated after Christmas. Even the coal. But he understood. Of course she’d told Mr. Jameson and her brother the next morning, hoping he might improve security, fix the locks on the windows at least.
The duke and his secretary had put new locks on the windows and bolts on the doors. For several months of the new year, the hospital had been included in the constable’s patrol route. All that good. Necessary. But the duke had also, in a fit of cruelty, thrown away the toys.
But had she saved her stockings?
Dead leaves and gravel crunched beneath his boots as he followed her outside. The children had gone wild, running, hiding, yelling. He grinned. A dead garden turned into a wonderland. Childhood was like that, everything full of possibility. Even the most mundane lump of lead a potential toy.
