But not, she was desperately afraid, quite so similar as that. She had seen that particular pattern of scars in dreams—in nightmares—for years upon years.
The harsh breath she had taken disturbed the peaceful silence of the graveyard. The man’s head jerked toward her, dark hair ruffled by the slight breeze, a frown already tugging at his mouth. And yes—itwashim. It could only be him.
She had stitched that scar which neatly bisected his lower lip herself. With hands that had trembled with exhaustion, fingers that had slipped in the profusion of blood which had poured over them. Slow, delicate stitches, in the futile effort of saving flesh that had been beyond ruined when he’d come to her, as so many others had before him.
Charity fisted her damp palms in the blazing red fabric of her skirts, striving to rub away the slickness of sweat that had come upon them. Her breath whistled shrilly through her teeth. He was meant to be dead. She’d assumed he was. All these years, she had had no reason to suspect otherwise.
His one good eye—the only one left remaining to him—narrowed upon her as he rose to his feet once more. “You need not stare, Madam. I am well aware of my appearance; I do not require any such horrified theatricality to remind me of it.”
The rebuke was delivered in such a frosty tone that it shook Charity free of the bewildered stupor into which she had so suddenly plunged. Her shoulders snapped straight; her mouth shut with an audible click of her teeth. “My apologies,” she said, and the words sounded solid and even despite the rapid patter of her heart behind the cage of her ribs. “It wasn’t my intention—”
“I don’t give a damn for your intentions.”
Her spine straightened to steel rigidity, jaw taut and tense. Her eyes narrowed to a glare to rival his own. “You surprised me,” she ground out between clenched teeth. “I have just come from burying my father. I did not expect to cross paths with another. Your face is not of the least concern to me. It is your manner which I find appalling.”
A sneer curled up one corner of his ruined lips. “I like liars no better than gawkers.”
“For what reason would I lie? To you, a—a stranger to me.”
“You would hardly be the first to do so. Do you think me unaware of what is said of me? How people whisper to one another of the duke with so monstrous a face?” he accused, spitting the words with no small amount of rancor. “You cannot expect I would so easily swallow such a feeble excuse. What manner of daughter wears such a color to her father’s funeral?”
A bloodyduke? “One who is mightily glad to be rid of the miserable old bastard at last,” she said. “He will not be missed.” Somehow she managed what might have passed for a polite nod—or as polite of one as she could—and snapped, “If you will excuse me.”
He took a swift step back as she charged past him, as if he feared she might bowl him over on her progress. Charity kept her eyes fixed straight ahead, straight upon the carriage waiting for her return. She could feel his gaze upon her as she retreated, and she dared not look back for even a moment.
The driver jumped down and flung open the door as she charged toward it, and her heart did not begin to slow until the door had closed behind her once more and the carriage had begun to roll away.
A duke. A damnedduke! Charity pressed her cold hands to her hot face, let her breath escape on a wheezing sigh of devastation.
Somehow, a dead man had resurrected himself. Her long-dead husband had crawled out of the grave she had thought him buried within sixteen yearsago. And Charity Nightingale found herself now, against all odds, a most unlikely duchess.
∞∞∞
Major Neville Rowe had died at Waterloo, and Anthony Sharp had not visited his grave until now. For a great long while—well over a decade now, and closer to two—he’d not been in England to do it. And it had seemed a fruitless thing, besides, given that he’d known that in the inescapable carnage of war, what little there had been left of the man would hardly have been enough to justify a proper burial.
There was a headstone here, weathered with years of rain and sun and snow. But the grave itself, he knew, would likely be empty. Just a plot of land for the man’s bereaved family to come to mourn. A space reserved, but unoccupied.
Weeks it had taken to clear the battlefield of the war dead. Tens of thousands of lives lost. Men whom Anthony had come to know throughout the campaign, come to respect. Men he had mourned, once he’d learned of their fates. Men whose bodies had been carried back to camp on carts. Men who had come back in pieces. And men who had simply gone missing, marked down as dead when the reality had been that there had been little enough left of them to be found to put proof to it.
And Anthony—Anthony had been languishing in a medical tent through most of that last battle which had taken so many lives, the victim of a spate of shrapnel that had shredded his face and taken his right eye. He’d thought himself the most unfortunate, the most miserable, God-abandoned wretched soul. But so many of his brothers in arms had given so much more than had he. Too many had given all.
“God rest you, Major,” he said, placing one hand upon the weathered surface of the headstone. A good man and a better officer. “I’m sorry it has taken me so long to pay my respects.” But then, he thought—Rowe would have understood. That some things were simply too painful, that years might pass and the pain of it would still feel fresh and raw.
The clatter of carriage wheels on an ill-maintained road sheared through the stillness, disturbing once more the peaceful silence of the graveyard. She was gone then, the woman in scarlet. The one who had lookedupon his face with such horror.
It wasn’t an unusual reaction to the severity of his scars. He’d long been intimately acquainted with the instinctive horrified gasps, the widened eyes, the disgust evident in the curl of a lip. Then would come the dropped gazes, perhaps even a hasty retreat or a swift sidestep away from him—as if the ugliness which had been carved into his face had rendered him more beast than man.
It had been bearable, once, when he had still been only a third son. The spare’s spare, not remotely expected to inherit. It had become unendurable when the title had been thrust upon him—when those same people who would have cringed from him had instead begun to attempt to curry favor, making halfhearted efforts to mask their distaste. It had never been convincing. Not once.
Mamas eager to see a beloved daughter become a duchess shoving their little treasures before him, never mind that those daughters had too often gone green and sickly-looking at the mere prospect of an introduction.Not even to be a duchess, one such girl had whispered behind her fan.Not even to be a queen, she had continued, much to the chagrin of her mother.
Anthony had much preferred the honest revulsion to the feigned acceptance. But the stares and the gasps had worn on him over the years, a chorus of shock and dismay that followed him wherever he went. Worse, now that he was back in England at last, and so much on public display.
Slowly he climbed to his feet, wincing at the tug and pull of stiff muscles, remnants of damage sustained in the war which had never quite repaired itself. In the distance, revealed now over the tops of headstones and between the ornamental statues which peppered the rolling lawn of the graveyard, two men labored beside a mound of displaced earth, heaving massive shovelfuls of dirt down into the gaping grave that lay between them.
So she hadn’t lied, then, he supposed. Shehadcome for a funeral. He wondered that there did not seem to be any other mourners present. A miserable old bastard, she’d said. Perhaps that much had been true as well.
A rustle of grass to his right had his head swiveling about, a snarl clenched between his teeth. “Do notever,” Anthony said harshly, to the mousy-looking reverend who had leapt back at the sudden attention he had attained, “come up upon my right side.” The side most severely wounded, with the eye he had lost.
