Chapter 5.3. Stripped Emotionally To The Bone

   "It isn't a man, James," she explained in a soft voice. "It's only my Uncle Humphrey."

   The mention of the stalwart baronet was apparently enough to dim James's hope for a successful midnight seduction. He blew Charlotte a string of kisses and promptly vanished into the mist, leaving Benedic to glare after him in satisfaction.

   "What a preposterous fool."

   Charlotte swung around to regard him. "I should have given the chance to rescue me. I—"

   She realized all of a sudden that he was no longer listening to her. He was staring out the window at his estate with an intensity that filled her with apprehension. He looked determined, dangerous again.

   "What is it?" she whispered. "Do you see the man who followed you here?"

   "Don't worry. I lost him in the woods."

   "Don't worry?"

   Benedic glanced at her, momentarily distracted by her undeniable appeal to the senses. Little surprise that other men stole kisses from her ripe mouth and prowled beneath her bedroom window. Those deep blue eyes definitely put wayward ideas in a male's mind. In fact, he thought it highly likely she would be swooning in the mist with her admirer at this very moment if not for him.

   "My gamekeeper assumed I was a poacher," he said, returning to her question, "and chased me off the estate."

   "Why didn't you reveal your identity?"

   He smiled. "Because I am a poacher, in the process of laying a trap for my murderer. Finni, for all his cleverness, did not recognize me."

   "Considering the way you look," Charlotte remarked with a grimace, "I'm not surprised."

   "Yes, well, we can't all wear decadent corsets and  beautify country musicales with our presence, can we?"

   Charlotte stared past him to the massive outline of his Elizabethan house. He claimed to be well informed. Had he heard the talk that his mistress had been a frequent visitor there in the days of following his funeral? It was assumed in polite company that the woman had been advising Benedic's cousin Edward on her lover's personal affairs. But naturally, in private, people believe the worst.

   Especially when the lady had been seen visiting the estate late at night.

   "Does Lady Ramsleigh know you're still alive?" she asked without looking at him.

   "No." There was a resigned tone to his voice that discouraged further inquiry.

   "It seems cruel," she said, "not telling the woman who loves you that you aren't dead."

   The look on his face as he turned to her gave her pause. Yes, she had hoped for a reaction, a clue to his feelings, but not the sudden vulnerability she saw, the raw anguish of a man who had been stripped emotionally to the bone.

   "Love," he said in a light tone that belied his expression, "is ghastly emotion, overrated by poets and idiots who live with their heads in the clouds."

   "It's a good thing that everyone doesn't share your cynical views," Charlotte said after a moment's hesitation.

   "Most people have not had the misfortune to be murdered in their beds."

   "That is true," she conceded, "but your friend wasn't at fault for that, was she?"

   Again his silence revealed more than words, perhaps even more than Charlotte wished to know. Had the fair Lady Ramsleigh been involved in his murder attempt? No. The thought of a well-bred woman lying in bed while her lover was stabbed to death was so appalling that Charlotte preferred to believe his reaction was only a symptom of his cynical nature.

   "Your brother fought with my brother Bernard," she said, in a deliberate attempt to change the subject. "Henry said that you had been investigating the attack on their party in Nepal."

   Benedic's face darkened at the reference. "Yes." he said tersely.

   "Well, what did you learn about them?" she demanded.

   "Probably little more than you already know," he answered evasively.

   Charlotte examined his profile with curiosity. She had always wondered if there could be more to Bernard's death than the reported Gurkha rebel attack on his party. She had suspected that her brothers had been hiding the truth from her. Yet as a young woman in a family of men who restricted her every move, she could hardly sail off to Nepal to investigate.

   "You know something," she said softly. Which was half a guess in her part and half intuition; Benedic's shuttered features told her nothing one way or the other.

   "What I know," he said, moving from the window to kneel down on the floor, "is that I have told you quite enough for one evening."

   "Tell me, and I might gladly help you."

   "There's nothing to tell," he said curtly.

   There was, and her instincts knew it. For that knowledge alone she would cooperate. Bernard had been more than a brother. He had been best friend.

   But this man was clearly not in a frame of mind to trust anyone, and Charlotte might even have felt sorry for him had he not taken over her life in such an abominable manner. For example, the way he was rifling through her trunk again, diving into her most personal underclothes with no propriety whatsoever.

   "What do you think you are doing now?"

   "Looking for a dressing robe that has a little more substance. Your state of undress is a distraction I do not feel strong enough at this moment to ignore."

   Charlotte paused. She might find the underlying sentiment behind that statement very interesting if she actually stopped to ponder it. He found her attractive. Yet obviously he was not going to allow that to interfere with what he needed to do.

   "What's wrong with the robe I'm wearing? It's less than a month old."

   He glanced up in exasperation. "Be thankful for the mist tonight. If your idiot admirer had gotten a good look at you, he'd be climbing that tree in a trice. I'd have to take care of him too, and not as nicely as I am dealing with you, either."

  "Nicely? I should certainly hate to be in your company when you consider yourself in a bad temper." She knelt beside him to rescue a favorite fan from his hands. "Anyway, if you hadn't been leering over my shoulder, I might have had the presence of mind to be properly dressed."

   "Would you have gone down to meet him if I weren't here leer over you? No. There's no need to answer. Your brothers undoubtedly were justified in exiling you."

   She gripped the fan in a death vise. "I was sent to the country for the health of my lungs. I am prone to coughing ailments."

   "You were caught kissing. A baron, wasn't it?"

   Charlotte felt suddenly stripped of all her defenses,  laid bare before a man it would be impossible to mislead. "I have no idea where you come by this information."

   "Suffice it to say that I have."

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