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Bloody useless lookout. He couldn’t tear his eyes from her. She had one of the pins in her mouth, bending it with her small white teeth. Then she was at the lock, hands moving quickly. He could watch this woman sift flours until the end of time. Pick locks until Judgment Day.

His eyes strayed from her hands to the curve of her waist, the generous slope of her hips.

Click.

She pushed through the door, blue silk trailing behind her. Once she’d passed out of view, he could blink, and glance about, to make sure they weren’t observed. He pressed his fist to the cool wall. Time slowed. Then the door opened. A beautiful criminal slipped out and lifted up her wrist, set her reticule to swinging. She had the letters.

She came to him, swiftly, and he took her elbow, escorting her back to the stairs. His blood was pounding through his veins. She smelled like a rose, and she bloomed all over with roses of silk that rustled as she walked, and his every sense was flooded with her. Which was why he failed to consider his steps.

They were on the stairs when a bolt of pain made him stumble. He corrected quickly. But she felt it, and he felt her eyes on his face the rest of the way down. He guided her away from the ballroom. His cane tapped the marble floor. Away from the band, the laughter, the clinking glasses. He braced himself.

“Your cane,” she said at last. “It’s not like your spectacles. It’s not for show.”

He didn’t answer, only slanted a look at her.

“You have a limp.” She was worrying her bottom lip.

“A slight limp,” he agreed. “Sometimes.” He flicked his eyes down at himself. “And yet I wasn’t lamed in battle or by disease. My legs are of equal length and development. You can examine them, if you like. I’ve asked plenty of doctors to do so over the years.”

“You told me you fell.” She lowered her voice. “And ended up in the operating theater. I assumed . . .”

“I fell,” he confirmed, turning them through an archway.

Why not speak of it here, now? He’d just crossed the Rubicon and robbed his own brother. He was falling now, had been falling every moment, for weeks, in hopeless love with this more-than-remarkable woman, whose brother he was also poised to destroy.

His life was teetering out of control.

They entered the picture gallery. It was nearly empty, only a few other partygoers drifting down its length.

“I did fall,” he continued. “I initiated it, though. By jumping through the window.”

Chapter Twenty-four

A stunned silence opened between them. Nina looked from the pictures lining the long room back to Alan. She felt as though her eyes were straining. He’d been right, last night. She did try to see all the way inside him. He’d been wrong as well. There was beauty there, a great, troubling beauty.

His silver irises went steely as he looked back at her.

“I wasn’t trying to end my life,” he said, his mouth edging into a sardonic smile.

Perhaps he’d misinterpreted her pained thoughtfulness for revulsion.

They’d stopped walking, still linked at the elbow, and she pressed mutely into his side. He started moving again, leading her across the room.

“I didn’t care if I lived or died, so long as I got away. My room was on the second story, not very high. But the courtyard was stone flagged.” He cleared his throat. “The daftest thing I’ve ever done.”

She tried to reward this attempt at humor with a laugh and failed. She twined her arm more tightly with his. “The most desperate, perhaps.”

“I should have made a desperate dash through the orderlies. But they’d come to move me to the hospital, and instinct sent me in the opposite direction.” He slowed their pace as they neared the far wall. “I wasn’t about to let a surgeon experiment on my lungs. Take out the upper lobes, and some ribs along with them.”

She felt his movement, something between a shrug and a shudder.

“After that day,” he said, “I never heard anyone mention pulmonary surgery again. I was already bedridden. It must have seemed superfluous.”

“Because confining you to bed was the goal.” She had a metallic taste in her mouth. His cane kept ticking, like a metronome.

“When I woke up in the hospital, an operation had been performed, on my hip, or on the neck of my femur. The doctors I’ve seen since draw different conclusions from the scars. They agree, though, that I have a normal range of motion. Normal strength. If the injuries were crippling, as my mother claimed, then Dr. Barbieri saved my leg.”

He stopped in front of a landscape. “I almost wish I’d lost it. An amputee can verify his experience with a glance. He can adapt to new mechanics. I didn’t lose my leg.” He shifted, and she shifted too, uneasily.