Page 137 of Immortal Rose

He was sick with it. The knowledge lived in him like a festering sore, burning with each smile or glance from her.

“Can you honestly say that you aren’t preoccupied with more than just protecting her?” Reddy continued.

Preoccupied. Hugh resisted a dark laugh. If only it was a preoccupation.

Just last night, instead of working out a plan, he’d found himself staring at the wall, silently pleading to God to bring her back to his cold bed after he’d returned her to her own. His pathetic, desperate heart had almost beaten itself free from his chest when, no more than an hour later, his door had creaked open and she’d slid beneath the bedclothes. He’d sighed, his soul settling, as she’d curled her warm, soft form against his back. Neither said a word. They hadn’t needed to.

He had never felt so rewarded in his life.

He’d carried her back to her own bed at sunrise to spare her the embarrassment of being discovered with him. Both times he’d left her there, he’d resented the loss. Resented whatever weakness of the spirit that had turned him into this.

Hugh couldn’t remember the last time he had simply slept beside a woman for the comfort of it. He’d never lingered after lovemaking; the society matrons and widows he’d dallied with had always seemed to prefer a quick assignment. He’d certainly never brought a woman into his home, let alone his bed. Only her.

Only her.

The source of all his fears, desires, frustrations, needs, impossibilities.

He had to put a stop to it. He had to.

Reddy was right—she was a distraction. After she’d been poisoned he hadn’t spared a thought to propriety as he’d brought her up to his room. He’d simply carried her to the safest place he could think of, a place no man would dare enter without permission.

But Keyes was no man, and Hugh had felt a sting of embarrassment when she’d come to change Viola into a dry, clean nightgown. At the knowing look she’d leveled at him.

Hugh had helped lift Viola’s prone form, trying his damnedest to be a gentleman about the whole thing. It had been only a glimpse, accidental and glancing, but the sight of her back had drawn a ragged noise from him. Keyes and Felicity had warned him, but they had spared him the worst of it. A new nightmare seared into his memory.

“God,” he’d ground out, watching as the woman applied ointment to the fading bruises, the new crosshatch of pink scars laid over older, thicker lines. Brutal scars, meant to mark her forever. He could barely speak, suffocated as he was by his own rage. “What in all of hell would cause wounds like this?”

Mrs. Keyes held out a quelling hand toward him as Viola murmured with pain at the ointment’s touch. Hugh nearly came out of his skin at the sound, moving to stop her.

“Don’t interfere, darling,” Mrs. Keyes warned. “She has enough scars, hasn’t she?”

Hugh had forced himself back against the wall, pressing his hands to it to keep from touching her.

“You said her father,” Mrs. Keyes began, glancing back over her shoulder at him, “was a captain for one of the trade groups?”

Hugh’s heart sank into the roiling pit of his stomach. “Until he suffered some sort of injury. Fell out of favor at the company when he couldn’t work.”

“If he lived as a captain,” Mrs. Keyes continued, “he likely meted out discipline as one, too, with a birching. Or perhaps with a rope’s end—a length of it dipped in tar, to stiffen it.”

“My God,” he murmured. Viola hadn’t even reached her age of majority at the time of her father’s recorded death. Which meant she had been younger still when he had done this to her. His own child.

For the first time in his life, Hugh felt only satisfaction at the knowledge he was destined for hell. He would cross a thousand of them to find this man’s soul and tear it to shreds.

When she’d finished, Mrs. Keyes stood, handing him the tin of ointment. “Wake her before she’s ready and I will do worse to you, my darling.”

Hugh almost wished she would. Anything was better than the chaotic knot of emotions in his chest. Every attempt to soothe and straighten the tangled mass only tightened it. Fed his fury.

He is half mad with longing. Sending her to Fairgate was justifiable but unforgivable all the same. And now this would be his punishment, one he rightly deserved: to yearn for fire that would only ever be extinguished by her touch.

He knew Reddy was right, because Hugh had felt the shift in himself, too. He felt it even now, that slide into increasing desperation. It was as if her clever hands had robbed him. Little by little, so carefully he’d hardly noticed, she’d stripped away everything else, until protecting her had become his very reason for breathing, the rhythm of his heart.

“This is not real,” Reddy told him in the darkness. “I understand, I do. She is wonderful, Fox. Intelligent. Certainly enough to excite a man—”

“Careful,” Hugh warned sharply.

“—but she is not actually yours,” Reddy finished. “And now you’ve tied a knot with your tongue you cannot untie with your teeth.”

Hugh’s hands curled on the stair rail, his silence daring his friend to continue.