An English Lord's Love Affair

Chapter 11.2. Desperate Fantasies

   Benedic scratched the dog's ears, his low laugh of satisfaction echoing against the walls of the dark tunnel. "Well, that was a little close, but we've gotten our letter back. I won't be so careless again."

   If careless was even the word for it; obsessed seemed a more appropriate description of his behavior. Obsessed with revenge. Obsessed with regaining what was his.

  Obsessed, all of a sudden, with a beautiful young woman, who with good reason, should want nothing to do with him. Why else had he knelt at her bedside and tormented himself with those stolen touches? What a stupid risk to take. But look at his hands. He was still shaking from touching her.

   She could have awakened. She could have opened her eyes and screamed to bring the house down. Or, as he no doubt secretly wished, she could have submitted to all the things he wanted to do to her. She could, at least in his desperate fantasies, have asked him to give her everything he wanted to.

   Clearly she was curious about sexual matters, and he would have loved to totur her. But just as clearly she was not an empty-handed maiden unable to form an original thought.

   She had hidden the note under her pillow. Had she guessed the significance? He doubted it. And yet he also doubted that she had kept the paper close to her as a sentimental memoir of their encounter.

   His intellectual nature found her behavior rather intriguing. His body ached for her in a more straight-forward fashion.

   He lifted the brass telescope he had taken from her room to watch her window. He was rewarded several moments later when she appeared in her white muslin nightrail. Of course she could not see him, hidden like a fox in a ferny hole. She was probably cursing him to the heavens, but not, he hoped, in a too-loud voice.

   "Did you like your rose?" He asked the distant image with a chuckle.

   As if to answer him she flung a pale unidentifiable object out the window. He could only guess it was the flower he had calmly substituted for the coded letter.

   He glanced around. A light had flickered in the window of his estate. In his own bedchamber window. He saw the silhouette of his uncle behind the curtains, a grim reminder that he could not afford to prowl outside Charlotte's room like an animal in heat.

   He lowered the telescope, his smile fading. "Well, good night again, Charlotte," he said in a wistful undertone. "I have some haunting to do . . . and you, my dear, you haunt me, too."

   Charlotte lit a candle on the nightstand and got down on her hands and knees to reach under the bed. With relief she found her journal where she had hidden it beneath a broken floorboard.

   She pulled the slim volume out and carried it back to her bed. On the last page was her most recent entry. An exact copy of the coded letter that Benedic had sneaked back into her room to collect.

   Obviously it meant enough to him to take a chance retrieving it. She congratulated herself on having had the foresight to make her own copy. And on forcing her brother Henry to teach her a few tricks on the art of deciphering a code.

   It was time to put her knowledge to work on what was perhaps Bernard's last message. She had not helped Benedic without expecting something in return.

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