Page 40 of Every Rogue Has His Charm

The moment his eyes drifted closed, he saw the cracked bottom of the boat again, felt the icy claws of the sea—of his grandfather—dragging him to his death. He sat up with a start, sloshing water over the side of the tub, sensing he wasn’t alone.

“Still here?” he said, in French. “Then fetch me my dressing gown.”

From behind him came the quiet answer, in English. “It’s not Monsieur Leclerc.” Caro’s voice.

“You needn’t worry about me,” he insisted hoarsely, when he’d recovered from the surprise. “I’m fine.” When she didn’t take the hint and go, he added, “If you wish it, I’ll tell Leclerc to pack my things, and we’ll leave in the morning.” It was the last thing he wanted, but after last night, what use was it to trouble her longer?

He heard her draw and release a slow, shivery breath. Relief?

“Out of sight, out of mind, I suppose?” The mocking note in her voice was unmistakable—and closer. Rather than retreating, she’d stepped further into the room. “Only I don’t find it works that way, do you? You can have no idea how much time and energy I’ve spent trying not to think of you over the last six years.”

Oh, the stories he could tell of how hard—and how fruitlessly—he’d worked to forget her… A wry answering laugh gusted from his weary chest. “Can I not?”

That reply seemed to catch her off guard. “At least,” she retorted after a moment, “you know why you left.”

Did he? In all those years, he’d never managed to concoct an explanation that would make sense to her. His reasons for leaving didn’t really make sense, even to him.

“I wracked my brain, trying to understand how I’d displeased you,” she told him, “what I’d done to drive you away.”

“You didn’t—”

“I even,” she spoke across him, her words punctuated by a laugh that was almost a sob, “managed at one point to convince myself that you had been sent on some secret mission for king and country.”

A shudder passed through him, stirring the now-tepid bath. “The simplest explanation is usually the correct one, my dear. Perhaps I am the heartless monster I was rumored to be.”

“No,” she said. But her protest sounded unconvincing—and unconvinced.

“The water’s grown cold.” He laid his forearms along the tub’s sides. “I’m getting out.”

It was her cue to leave. A threat. She didn’t want to see what was, for now, hidden by copper and murky bathwater, any more than he wanted to show her.

But she didn’t flee. “I’m your wife,” she said, albeit a trifle hesitantly.

So he stood.

Rivulets ran down his chest and over his torso, tracing his injuries as he unfolded himself from the tub; droplets splashed into the water from his fingertips when he dropped his arms to his sides. No sense in covering himself. He couldn’t imagine Caro had found anything in the crate that truly explained the extent of his suffering. But his body would be explanation enough.

With his back to her, she would see little more than the thin scars on his shoulders, the ghostly memories of a few boyhood birchings and one or two more recent wounds. Oh, and the knotted and twisted sinews of his thigh, where they’d fought to hold the pieces of his broken leg together. The front was far worse. But she wanted to know, didn’t she? Wanted to see?

Still standing in the tub, he turned to face her.

She was carrying a stack of towels, and the fading scrape on her cheek had been underscored by a smudge of something. Dust, ink. He blamed the contents of the crate. Her hair was slipping from its pins, and her dress looked like a castoff. He could’ve mistaken her for a housemaid, and the discovery irritated him beyond measure. She was a duchess, for God’s sake. He’d made her a duchess—thinking, somehow, that he was doing the right thing, for once.

Her eyes, which were locked on his face, blinked but did not wander.

“Go on,” he urged, softening his rough voice as much as he was able. “Look.”

He’d spent most of a lifetime shielding others—even, occasionally, himself—from the extent of his gruesome scars. He’d never kept a valet; he’d taken care to dress and bathe only after he’d sent the servants, even Leclerc, from the room. Still, when her gaze began to drift lower, he was caught off guard by the vulnerability that washed over him, stronger even than the icy waves that had tried to make him their prisoner forever.

This room’s windows were comparatively small, nothing like the wall of glass in the rooms facing the channel. And the light passing through them was gray, filtered through clouds and a spit of rain. But it was still midday, and thus bright enough to reveal…everything.

He watched her eyes scan slowly downward, taking in the breadth of his chest, the size of his arms. His maman had delighted in telling him that he was built like the men of her family, tall and broad shouldered, even as a boy; the fact that he looked more like a sturdy French peasant than his own father had only further displeased his grandfather. Nevertheless, after the accident, he had worked hard to strengthen his upper body, to make up for the weakness of the lower. And because he was angry, always angry, he’d done most of that honing with his fists. Now Caro could see the truth of him, scraped by this morning’s misadventure, scattered with scars and bruises that never seemed to fade, sun browned where a true gentleman shouldn’t be.

Light as a feather, her gaze drifted lower, over a pair of broken ribs. And woven between them, a long, jagged, puckered seam—the remnant of a more recent knife wound, hastily stitched up, which he’d really thought might be the end of him.

Lower still. He knew just when she reached his groin: one daring look, then away, a maidenly flush of color across her cheekbones, then a swift glance back. His cock wasn’t hard—that frigid dawn swim had sent his bollocks into a retreat from which even the warm bath hadn’t yet coaxed them—but it was still large. And ugly. Just like the rest of him.

Finally, her gaze came to rest on his leg, and the ghastly cleft in his thigh where the horse’s hoof had torn through it and part of the muscle had withered away. Everything mangled, nothing whole. The reason his grandfather had sneered and told him he would never walk again. The proof that he’d defied the old bastard through sheer force of will.