“I was invited, apropos of nothing, to dine with your friend here”—Belfry jerked his chin in Penvale’s direction—“at his sister’s house. I accepted. At said dinner party, your wife requested that I show up at your home disguised as a physician and make some sort of dark prognosis. I declined, naturally. She was persistent. I’m sure that doesn’t surprise you?”
It did not.
“Not having any desire to remain trapped at that dinner table for the rest of my natural life, I eventually agreed, provided she and Lady Templeton agreed to attend a show at the Belfry. I’m trying to attract a more respectable clientele.”
“Why did you give me your card, then?” James was genuinely curious. “I wouldn’t have recognized you under all that fur you had plastered onto your face.”
“I dislike being managed by women,” Belfry said, crossing one knee over the other. Even clad in a banyan, barefoot, dark hair mussed, he looked like a prince.
“I strongly advise you not to marry, then,” James suggested.
“No need to tell me that,” Belfry said with a thin smile. He gave James an assessing look. “I also thought, based on your reaction to my news, that your wife might have rather misjudged you.”
“What do you mean by that?” James asked. It was galling to have a man he barely knew making judgments about the state of his marriage. Belfry merely smirked.
“What are you going to do, Audley?” This was Penvale, who was eyeing James warily. As well he should be, considering the role he had played in this entire bloody mess. “Speak to Violet, I hope?”
James gave him a tight grin. “Something to that effect.”
Cataloguing a library from the confines of a bedchamber was no easy task, Violet reflected. She had thought that after the excitement of last night’s outing, a day of relapse might be called for, and had thrown herself into the role with great enthusiasm, especially since it had given her an excuse to revoke the invitation to tea she had extended to her mother the day before. She’d had all of her meals delivered to her chamber on trays, and had spent no small amount of time selecting the most innocent- and virginal-looking of her chemises—invalids, of course, being entirely excluded from the realm of earthly pleasures. She had braided her hair, then unbraided it, allowing it to flow over her shoulders in dark waves. She had practiced her cough several times, until she thought that she had it calibrated to a perfect degree of frailty.
And then she had taken to her bed and rung for Price. She did not think she was imagining the look of weary resignation that flickered over her maid’s face when she repeated her request of the day before. Violet supposed Price had better things to do than spend her day hauling small stacks of books up and down the stairs. However, she—Violet—also had more important work to do than reading improper novels in bed, and to do this work, she needed Price’s assistance.
And so Violet had set to work again. However, the work gave her less satisfaction than it had done before. Productivity was all well and good when one had the freedom to roam about the house when necessary; after hours and hours of nothing but books, papers, and a tea tray for company, she was growing a bit . . . well . . . restless. She was discovering that there was a vast difference between being an invalid when one was truly ill and being an invalid in the full bloom of health. And while some society ladies did nothing more strenuous than lift a teapot each day, Violet was not one of them. A day in bed did not suit her, to say nothing of three days in bed in a row.
In a brief moment of weakness, she wondered if this plan of hers was not, in truth, an entirely disastrous idea. James was proving overall to be a less doting and devoted attendee at her sickbed than she would have wished. In her mind, she’d had vague fantasies of a dimly lit room, herself lying prone beneath the bed linens, her face pale. Sitting at her bedside was the worried husband, a tragic, romantic figure who clutched her hand and mopped her brow and proclaimed that she had never been more beautiful than she was in that precise moment, at the point of expiring.
Of course, Violet found upon closer examination of this fantasy that neither participant remotely resembled herself or James. Which, in turn, might explain why none of this was going precisely to plan.
It was as she was pondering how soon would be too soon to appear downstairs, fully clothed and miraculously on the mend, that there was a light tapping at her bedroom door. She started at the sound.
“Bugger,” she muttered. She had been so engrossed in her fantasies of freedom that she hadn’t heard footsteps approaching in the hallway. While Violet rather prided herself on never losing her head, there was no denying that there was a slight panic to her motions as she hastily yanked a blanket over the books on her tray, just as the door opened and James walked in.
Violet’s heart—treasonous organ that it was—immediately picked up its pace. Why, oh why, did he have to be so handsome? He was dressed in fawn-colored breeches and a dark blue coat. His dark curls were slightly mussed, as though he’d been outdoors. It was as though, whenever he walked into a room, something primal within her cried out to him, and some part of him answered.
It was, as ever, thoroughly unnerving.
And, most unsettling of all, at the moment his full attention was focused entirely on her.
With effort, she resisted the urge to pull the bedclothes up to her neck. She was a married woman, she reminded herself, not an innocent girl of sixteen. There was no need to cower in the presence of a man—not just any man, but her husband. He had, after all, seen her naked on any number of occasions. Recalling the rather large number of such occasions—and the creative locations in which some of them had occurred—brought warmth to her cheeks, which she hoped James would mistake for fever.
Wait. Was fever a symptom of consumption?
Drat. She had no idea.
“Violet,” he said, bowing slightly before shutting the door behind him.
“James.” She watched warily as he approached the bed with purpose. He reminded her of a graceful predator in the wild, stalking his prey. A lion, perhaps, or a tiger. There was something catlike about his movements.
“When I returned home and Wooton informed me that you were ill once again, I knew I must come see you immediately.” He stopped at her bedside, close enough for her to catch a whiff of his scent—a combination of sandalwood and soap. She tried not to admire the way his coat fit across his broad shoulders. “How are you feeling?” He reached out and seized her hand, and she allowed herself one moment of weakness in which to savor the warmth of his grasp, the comfort it conveyed.
“A bit better,” she said weakly, then coughed. “Certainly less poorly than I was feeling this morning.” She smiled at him, allowing the corners of her mouth to tremble a bit, as though she were merely putting on a brave face. This was not entirely an act—she had risked death by boredom today, which she felt was brave in its own way.
“Good, good,” James muttered, though Violet was not certain he had listened to her words as carefully as he ought. There was something rather . . . odd . . . in his eyes, and he was lavishing a perhaps undue amount of attention upon the hand he held so tightly in his own. It was a bit disconcerting, after the woefully inadequate displays of concern he had offered until this point. Violet was immediately suspicious.