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CHAPTER FIFTEEN

S he’d asked him to refuse her. She’d as much as advised him to repudiate her here, before all his mother’s guests.

Was that what she wanted?

Hew was a man of discipline, a soldier. He was accustomed to enduring discomfort. He was used to forcing his will against his feelings like an iron plow breaking dry sod. He was practiced at rigor and denial.

Yet he couldn’t keep away from Anne Sutton. And he didn’t want to.

No man alive could ignore the soft allure of her beauty.

The way the candlelight cast a honeyed glow over her fair skin and struck glints of guinea-gold from her hair.

The delicate arc of her fingers as she held her cutlery.

The demure, quietly amused curve of her mouth as she spoke with her dinner partners, Robert Allard, the surgeon, on one side and David Edwards, the engineer, on the other.

Both men looked as fascinated as Hew felt, unable to glance away when she lifted her cornflower-blue eyes to theirs.

Anne Sutton, with her quiet radiance and subtle grace, was a woman a man would pursue to the edges of the earth.

She was a woman whose face would linger in the chest of the man who’d left her, creating a hollow ache that couldn’t be filled until he returned to hold her in his arms.

Hew desperately wanted to hold her in his arms again.

“Mister—Captain Vaughn.” May Powell, seated to his left, looked pensive. “Do you really suppose the French might try to invade us?”

She’d dropped the provocative smirk and the flirtatious flutter of her lashes. He guessed her slight lisp was not affected.

“It’s happened before,” he reminded her.

“The Duc de Choiseul thought to cross the Channel in 1759 and raise the Jacobites in Scotland. The next year, the Royal Navy captured Francois Thurot in the Irish channel after the French sent him to stage an invasion. And you would be too young to remember the Armada of 1779, but the French fleet came within sight of English shores, causing widespread panic. I sailed with men who’d been under Admiral Hardy’s command when he chased off the French and Spanish that summer. ”

Hew passed her the bowl of stewed cucumbers near his plate.

“The English Channel is one hundred fifty miles at its widest, scarcely more than twenty at the Strait of Dover. The French thought as recently as last summer to bring their Army of England upon us. The plan was to draw off the Royal Navy by sailing the fleet to the West Indies, then turn back to England and attack. Napoleon was only lured away by the promise of taking Egypt.”

She tasted a cucumber, and her lips puckered. “So we ought to fear?”

“Suppose they might assay an attack again,” Hew said gently, “but not fear they might land.”

She hesitated, then laid down her fork and nodded slightly. “Thank you.”

He slid his gaze toward Anne. She was watching him, her quick eyes moving from him to his companion, now dipping a spoon into her soup.

Her eyes didn’t narrow with jealousy or displeasure, nor her luscious lower lip curve into a pout, as another woman might do.

Instead, she smiled, as if she understood that the girl was afraid, and Hew had tried to soothe her.

A strange heat prickled his shoulders, not quite the ache of his wounds, but something else.

He was accustomed to women pouting and flirting and fighting around and over him; women habituated to military men didn’t stay demure for long.

But he’d never had a woman’s approval for his manner, his actions. He’d never wanted such.

Until Anne.

Margaret Griffith, on Hew’s right, was not through with her provocations.

“Captain Vaughn.” She leaned forward, affording him a view of her breasts nestled into the shelf of her low neckline.

She was a generously shaped young woman, moreso than Anne, who was comparatively slender.

But Miss Griffith’s bosom, even on admirable display, didn’t tempt his eye the way the sheer tunic Anne wore made him hunger to lift the veil and peek at the treasures beneath.

He tried to focus on Miss Griffith’s words.

“—prison,” she was saying, licking her lips with curiosity. “But how long were you held captive?”

His back ached, but from a memory, not from sensation. He doubted he’d ever have sensation there again. “Not above a handful of weeks. A month, at most.” It had felt like a lifetime. An eternity spent in a circle of hell.

“But what had you done?”

A band of fury tightened across his forehead. “I went against my major’s orders. He said I obeyed a foreign authority over his. Which is treason.” The subtle taste of his white soup was gone, erased by the taste of bile.

He wouldn’t tell Margaret Griffith the true argument had been over a woman; the story made Hew look a fool.

A courtesan coming to offer herself, reeking of neroli oil and her lover’s tobacco, a rich silk gown gone too long without cleaning.

He’d supposed it nothing at the time; women were ever trading themselves to soldiers for a bit of reward, coin or favors.

Hew was selective. A woman who’d been claimed by another, particularly a superior, didn’t tempt him.

He’d service himself before he’d be embroiled in a jealous love triangle.

He’d assumed his commander would know this of him.

But the major didn’t care whether Hew’d had his whore.

The major only cared that she’d wanted Hew.

And when Hew ignored the man’s orders and worked with Farhi, carrying out his and Antoine’s plans, their fortifications had defeated Napoleon.

Hew emerged the hero of Acre, one of those whose quick minds and ready hands had saved the city, and the major came off looking a narrow-minded fool who couldn’t satisfy his own woman.

A sentence of a hundred lashes wasn’t the greatest punishment he could have ordered. He didn’t want to kill Hew with his own hands, only humiliate and permanently scar him. Let the courts set the noose.

“But what will happen to you?” Miss Powell asked, eyes wide.

“The matter is being discussed higher up the command,” Hew said. “They’ll decide whether to discipline me or hold a court-martial.”

“Death is the sentence for traitors,” Miss Griffith said, and she was not wrong.

The fire spread down his back, the claw of memory.

Anne hadn’t seen his scars, hadn’t touched them.

She didn’t know yet what he was accused of, what he’d done.

He had no right dragging a delicate beauty into his beastly embrace.

Soiling her with the muck of his nightmares, the rubble he’d made of his career, his life.

But he couldn’t stop looking at her anyway. The price of damnation. She was the pure, good, beautiful thing he once could have had and now would never be worthy of.

“I think you are a hero, Captain Vaughn,” May Powell said softly. Her brown eyes shone with admiration. But it didn’t move him like Anne’s glowing at him did.

Hew cast his eyes down the table, looking for a gentleman—not Sutton—to drink with him. He couldn’t hold Anne to her promise, not with the sentence hanging over him. They would have to end things as agreed.

He wouldn’t be able to let her go. He was as bad as a shepherd boy ambushing his favored dairymaid behind a hayrick. He was more fevered for her than he’d ever been for the Morgan cousin. She would need to sever them.

And the longer he made her wait to do so, the deeper the blow would land.

She must see how ill he fit in this glittering world, Hew thought as the party rose from table and adjourned to the drawing room for music and cards.

He wasn’t one of these men in their tailored fashions and curled hair and polished boots whose talk was of corn prices and the winners of the latest race.

Hew didn’t know how to speak to these women as lovely as a flock of wood pigeons, fluffy and collared and cooing, their eyes bright and inquisitive.

When other men had been learning to dance and pay compliments, Hew had been learning to build fortifications and take apart a gun.

Yet this was Anne’s world, the decorated rooms and lovely gowns, the parties with their chatter and music, the table laden with dishes and gossip. And Hew wasn’t a man who lived by his wit; he was trained to build things.

Or blow them up.

“Fearsome smart lady,” Robert Allard said, coming to stand by Hew before the tall French windows that let out on the paved terrace running behind the house. “Knew Cicero when I quoted him.”

“Miss Sutton?” Hew didn’t need to ask. The focus of Robert’s interested stare was the same as Hew’s.

Anne stood talking with Mrs. Griffith and the tall, severe spinster who served as the Powell aunt and chaperone, an older woman Hew had not yet seen wear anything other than a look of grim concentration.

Anne, on the other hand, wore a small, steady smile, a permanent curve of pleasure, as if everything were a delight to her.

It softened her face and balanced her bold features, giving her a look of animation and intelligence that Hew knew was not feigned.

“She’s had an excellent tutor,” Hew allowed.

“I think her Latin is better than mine.” Anthony Hawkins joined them, seeming to know already the topic of their discussion. “And possibly her Greek. She mentioned the works of Hippocrates.”

“But not a bluestocking,” Allard said. “Likes lawn bowls and archery. Don’t think she hunts, though.”

“But she sails,” Hawkins added. “Mentioned boating around Lake Tegid. Told me the legend of the monster who dwells below. The afanc , think she called it.”