The Legend of Nimway Hall: 1940-Josie Read online

  “Let’s just say it was dark and I fell–“

  ”Off the snowy precipice?” She slipped his hand between both of hers, soft and warm and healing. “That would make sense, Gideon, a fall like that could easily break a bone. Did you take anyone with you, I hope? Off the precipice, I mean.”

  “Three Germans went with me into an icy stream. We fought, they lost.”

  “Three against you?” He hoped it was admiration for his prowess that pinked her cheeks. “And then what?”

  “I managed to climb back up the cliff side to my unit—“

  ”In the dark, with that horrible broken leg? How?”

  “Doesn’t matter how. Only that by the time I reached them, we had lost two of our fellow officers in a fire fight and then another during our escape.” Images he could never erase. Would never want to.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “So were the dozen bastards who ambushed us. We brought out our fallen comrades, made it back to the fishing boat before we were spotted, and only there, in the chaos of leaving the pier did someone notice that my leg seemed to be broken.”

  “Someone else noticed? Not you?”

  He’d suspected that something was wrong when he landed below the cliff, but he’d been trained that if he could move through the pain, it wasn’t serious. “Too busy, I suppose. Too damned cold to feel much of anything.”

  “Hmmm… if you say so.” She finally released his hand, sorted through her supplies for a wad of gauze, then upturned a bottle of tincture of iodine and dribbled a few drops onto the pad. “Keep talking, Gideon.”

  “I don’t have many memories of the fishing boat—it was a British intelligence asset.” She began dabbing the pad against the trail of blood that had run down the side of his calf, working her way upward toward the wound itself. “Apparently, I caught a fever early on and wasn’t fully conscious again until I woke up in an evacuation hospital somewhere in Kent. Woke again in still another hospital ward and discovered that my surgeon had given me that ugly thing when he opened my leg and reconnected my fibula to my knee.”

  “It’s a thing of beauty, this incision.” She smiled up at him from her gentle tending, had placed a warm compress of mint and lemon over the entire length of the incision. “I hope you thanked him.”

  “For ensuring that I’ll never again see the front lines? I did not.”

  “Bugger that attitude, Gideon! The man gave you back a normal life. Your knee will heal.”

  “Well enough to keep me posted here in the hinterlands, alongside the rest of the stay-at-home army, waiting for an invasion that will never come, paddling around like ducks in a pond.”

  “How dare you!”

  “I dare, Josie, because it’s the truth. My truth. I’m a soldier by trade, that’s all I know, all I want to know. I’m trained in special operations behind enemy lines, not writing reports and approving engineering drawings.”

  “And I’m just a duck, paddling around in a pond? You still believe that?”

  He wasn’t sure what he believed. Only that his leg had begun to feel better within minutes of her touch, the wound cleansed and looking less inflamed. “I believe that you are a miracle worker, Josie. But all the surgeons and all your tender nursing can’t mend me well enough to send me back to the front lines where I want to be.”

  “Have you even tried?” She was frowning hard as she began dabbing the raw flesh dry with a gauze pad, as efficiently as any duty nurse.

  “Over-tried, ouch!”

  “Sorry, Gideon.” She gentled her motions, then inspected the entire length of the incision. “Over-tried? What does that mean?”

  “Tried to rush my recovery, according to the surgeon, my mother, the rehabilitation unit nurses then the private physical therapist hired once I was recovering at home with my family.”

  She narrowed her eyes at him. “That would have been during the evacuation of Dunkirk.”

  “It was.” Drained by the memory, he dropped back on his elbows against the end of the bed, soothed by Josie’s gentling touch against his skin as she dressed and wrapped the wound in gauze, secured it in surgical tape. “Yet, the closest I could get to the action was a few hours spent watching from the terrace of one of our cliffside farms near Broadstairs. Fishing boats and steamers heading toward Margate, passing under my position on their way to and from Ramsgate, returning with all those soldiers, more than three-hundred thousand saved by—”

  “—the stay-at-home Navy?”

  He felt his chest flush with anger, shame. “All I could do was sit and watch.”

  “That was your assignment at the time, Gideon.” She rose suddenly, rested her knee on the bench beside him, hovered in her umbrage. “To let others do their best for the war effort when they were called up.”

  “I should have been there.” He sat up, feeling exposed, besieged by Josie and his own anger.

  “How? With your leg like this? You’d have been a liability. Or do you mean that those fishermen and yachtsmen, the fireboat pilots were less brave than you would have been, less patriotic because they hadn’t commissions and weren’t wearing combat uniforms?”

  “That’s not it, Josie.” Wasn’t exactly his meaning. “Of course, I admire and respect their miraculous achievement. I do. Their Dunkirk Spirit.”

  “But you could have done better, is that it? Because if that’s your thinking, that you must do it all, Gideon, then it explains why your body is wracked with tension.”

  “I’m fine.” He actually felt more relaxed than he had in months.

  “You’re not. Lean back. I’ll show you.” She pressed her hand into the middle of his chest, able to force him backward against the bolster of pillows only because she was kneeling over him, enchanting him, smiling softly, her hair falling around her shoulders. “Will you lie still?”

  “Probably not.” He propped himself on his elbows, wary of the challenge in her smile. “What do you plan to do?”

  “I promise not to hurt you.” She backed off the bench and carefully braced his good leg across the seat of his dressing table stool.

  “I’m not in the least worried about you hurting— Oh, gad, Josie!” He sat upright, would have rocketed off the bench had her hands not been encircling his thigh, kneading the muscles above his knee, sending waves of pleasure straight to his groin. He clamped his hand over hers, stopped her from moving any higher. “What the devil are you doing?”

  “Showing you that all your hitching around on your bad leg just to prove something to yourself, has made every muscle in your body as hard as a rock.” Seeming to demonstrate, she flexed her fingers beneath his hand—creating a jolt of rawboned lust that would have brought him to his feet with Josie in his arms, but she had managed to pin him down in the only way possible. His good leg on a stool, his bad leg useless, and the luscious woman standing between them.

  “That’s enough!”

  She straightened, her hands on her fine hips. “Do you see what I mean? How much tension you’re living with?”

  A dangerous woman, that’s who he was living with. “I do see, Josie, very clearly.”

  He stood, caught his sash around his waist and stepped away from the woman’s little infirmary.

  “Where are you going?”

  “We’re finished here, Josie. I appreciate you dressing and bandaging my injury. It much feels better. Now, if you tell me where you keep that kit, I’ll do it myself next time.”

  She pulled the stool to the center of the room. “Plasters and surgical tape might protect your incision, but that won’t help with your biggest issue.”

  “Which is?”

  “Sit here.” She patted the seat of the stool. “I’ll show you. Or don’t you trust me?”

  “Give me a single reason why I should.” He could count them in the dozens. In a few short weeks the woman had turned his life upside down.

  “Because I can see from here that every muscle and tendon in your body aches like fire. Am I right?”

  Damn
ing himself for a besotted fool, he closed his eyes, took an instantaneous inventory of his limbs and torso, and found no part of himself that didn’t ache. Only cramping spasms radiating from his injured leg, shooting into his back and shoulders, his arms, his chest. She was staring at him when he opened his eyes, her head cocked as though she’d been listening for his pain.

  “Suppose you’re right, Josie, and I do ache all over; what can you possibly do about it?”

  Her smile grew soft and kind, the wry slant of it thrilled him. “Sit and I’ll show you.”

  Knowing full well that he was walking toward his doom, Gideon sat carefully on the stool, bracing his bad leg in front of him. He listened to her puttering behind him, was fine until she slipped his dressing gown off his shoulders.

  “What are you up to back there? Ohhhh—” Her fierce thumbs found the knotted muscles on the ridge of his shoulders, knot on top of knot, the exquisite pressure hissing the breath out of him like fire and ice.

  “Good, yes?”

  “Yes.” So good. So unlike the hands of any therapist he’d consulted. Hers were warm and fluid, followed through to his deepest pain, lifted it, dispelled it with her magic.

  “This works best, Gideon, if you relax each muscle as I address it.” Her breath brushed against the back of his neck. “Feel this knot?”

  “I do.” And the warm shifting of her breasts across his back as she moved her kneading pressure down his left arm, leaving him growling and sighing like a beast. His bare arm hung limp in her skilled hands and yet quickened with energy as though she were resurrecting his limbs. By the time she finished his right arm he was hunched over his knees, boneless and nearly incoherent when she took away her touch.

  “You’re not finished?” He didn’t want her to be, not yet, not ever.

  “I just need you to take off your vest. I’d do it myself, but my palms are full of liniment.”

  He turned, only one eye willing to fully open, found her standing close, both hands raised like a surgeon’s before a procedure. “What do you plan to do with those?”

  “Massage your back, and then your arms again.”

  He groaned at the thought of the pleasure. “I won’t be able to walk.”

  But he shucked out of his vest and gave himself over to her healing generosity, steeled himself against her touch, the rhythmic movement of her chest against his back as she pressed her thumbs along his spine, followed every rib all the way down to the band of his knickers.

  He wondered suddenly at this particular talent, upon whose aching muscles she had learned. Which man she had treated with such intimacy? “Do you do this sort of thing regularly?”

  “Why?”

  “Because you’re very good at it. At getting right to the—ahhh, the spasm, the knot of things. How did you learn?” He hoped his question sounded casual, when he was beginning to resent whoever this other man was.

  “Promise you won’t laugh?” She came around and knelt in front of him.

  “Old Godby?”

  She laughed, touched his good knee. “I leave that to Mrs. Godby. No, my only patients have been lame horses—”

  “That stuff is horse liniment?”

  “Medicinal herbs from our own garden, concocted in our own kitchen by Mrs. Lamb to ease the aches and pains of man and beasts of Nimway Hall.” She pulled a blanket off the end of the bed and covered the spread. “Now. stand up and lie here on your stomach so I can do the same to your legs. The muscles of your back were a jumble of knots and gnarls, your arms nearly as bad, but your legs have been taking all the punishment as you compensate for your injury.”

  The only sense he’d made of her explanation made him ask, “You want me laid out across my bed?”

  Her smile, her eyes, the perfect rise of her breasts, more worldly than virginal. “I’d not put it that way, Gideon, but yes, I do.”

  Chapter 12

  Given her disillusionment and fury when she discovered that Gideon was agent Invictus, Josie had never expected this night to end with him standing, bronzed and glistening and nearly naked in front of her, bandaged and bruised. Hadn’t anticipated the lush feel of his skin beneath her fingers, the feral power of his muscles against her palms, the brush of her nipples across the sinew of his shoulders. His unmistakable arousal at her touch or when he looked at her just that way, a durable tumescence that she wanted to fondle, to explore.

  But now he was looking sleepy as he staggered toward the bed, an enormous bear shambling toward his winter cave, dangerous, because he might snag her for one last meal before settling down to sleep until spring.

  “Can you make it to the bed, Gideon?” She caught his forearm, the hard-shifting power beneath his skin confirming that he had forced himself through a program of rehabilitation in the months since his injury, targeting every muscle and bone in his body, including his beleaguered leg. “How does your knee feel when you walk on it?”

  “Hardly any pain at all.”

  “Here you are. Just slip onto the bed, on your stomach, please. That’s it.” Like leading a child toward his nap.

  He mashed his face into the pillow, then turned out to her, eyes half-lidded. “If you were an enemy agent, I’d suspect you drugged me with your liniment.”

  “You found me out. I treated my bare hands with the antidote before massaging the sleeping drug into your bare skin. Do you want the antidote?”

  “Not ever.” His voice had grown low and groggy.

  Josie retrieved her jar and set it on the bedside table, trying to ignore the heap of man sprawled out across the mattress, dwarfing the bed, the bolster and the bank of pillows. His broad shoulders relaxed, rising and falling as he breathed.

  Her “live drop” in the flesh.

  Damn the man and all his faults. He was perfect for her, perfect all around. Honorable and witty, opinionated and intelligent, handsome beyond all thinking. He loved children and dogs and birthing calves, was charmed by Nimway Hall and her beloved wood. Had even come to accept her word that the Orb of True Love was a strange family legend and not a threat to world peace.

  But he would never accept that she was, and needed to remain, Arcturus, and she dreaded his scorn when he discovered the truth. The clock was ticking on their idyll, the war was about to intrude in a way she could never have anticipated when he arrived at Nimway.

  He groaned and muttered when she began kneading the hard-packed muscles along the back of his good leg, her hands aching to range freely over his firmly-shaped, muscular backside beneath his knickers, but that would lead to an eventuality she had longed for but could no longer afford.

  By the time she finished with his massage, he was snoring softly into his pillow, his breathing steady and deep. She would have risked pressing a kiss on his temple, but that might wake him and break her heart completely.

  Best to keep a professional distance while she was still able. She was about to slip the message capsule out of her trouser pocket when she realized his eyes were half-open and he was looking at her.

  “Have I been asleep?’

  “You still are.”

  “I thought so, Josie. You’ve always been my dream. Or have you been here all the time?”

  “Both.”

  “Then come, love, join with me.” He beckoned her with his curled finger and she knelt on the rug beside the bed, couldn’t help herself any more than she could stop herself from loving him. He sifted his fingers through the hair at her nape, his eyes half-lidded and smoky as he drew her close. Kissed her softly, deeply, nibbling and crooning, his gaze wandering over her face. “You are a wonder to me, Josie Stirling, Guardian of Nimway Hall. Commander of the Orb of True Love.” He kissed her once more and settled back against the pillow. “What shall I do without you?”

  “Are you going somewhere, Gideon?” she whispered.

  His answer was a long, deep breath and a soft snore.

  Hers was a quiet sob.

  Because the truth was immutable. She was Arcturus. He was Invictus. The
country was at war and needed them both equally. In the most hopeful part of her heart she knew that Gideon was wise enough, perceptive enough to accept her as his peer. But would he be able to invoke that fairness in himself when he learned the truth?

  If he couldn’t, he would just have to apply to the SOE for a new posting, a new partner. She damn well wasn’t going to resign just to soothe the man’s brittle pride.

  She loved him, would have proudly served their country along side him, gladly spent the rest of her life with him. But, if all that happiness was the sacrifice she must make to help win the war, then so be it.

  Her heart broken and aching for what she was about to do, Josie packed up her first aid gear and removed it to the sitting room. By the time she returned, Gideon had rolled onto his back, one arm crooked over his head on the pillow, the other resting at his side, fingers flexed and relaxed.

  Never in the realm of tradecraft had there been a more perfect example of a live drop than Arcturus delivering the message into the closed fist of Agent Invictus while he slept.

  Her next moment would set in motion a cascade of consequences which would cloud the rest of her days and prove to the orb once and for all that she and Gideon were not compatible and would never be.

  She drew the capsule from her pocket, still warm from its hiding place. Overcome by an aching heart, she pressed it to her lips then easily slipped it into the cradle of his palm, his fingers still relaxed and curled, as though he’d picked up the dead drop, only to be bewitched by a spell that had sent him to sleep before he could read it. And perhaps he had been.

  But he would read the message in the morning, would realize in an instant that she was Arcturus and come looking for her.

  And just in case their paths didn’t cross during the day, as so often had happened, she’d added a note to the back of the Aux Unit list, instructing him to meet Arcturus tomorrow night in the cider mill.

  Then Heaven help them both.

  She carefully settled a blanket over him, her dear, handsome, intractable Gideon. He slept on in his dreams, his chest rising and falling in a rhythm she would have loved matching with her own in some fairy tale future, drifting to sleep every night to the sound of his steady breathing, waking every morning wrapped in his arms.