Candace Camp - His Sinful Touch

“Pray permit me to show you to the Caroline chamber,” he said to Sabrina, bowing.

“No need, I’ll take her,” Alex said, ignoring the butler’s pained look. As he and Sabrina walked away, he leaned down and murmured, “Poor Phipps despairs of any of us ever showing the proper respect for our station. But his knees are getting arthritic and he oughtn’t to be tromping up and down the stairs. Besides, he’d have nattered on at you about the grand history of the Morelands all the way up, which might very well have sent you running again.”

Sabrina laughed. “I don’t think I’m in danger of that. Frankly, all I want to do at the moment is sleep. I’m rather tired.”

“I imagine you are. You must have been up before dawn if you got into London as early as you did. Not to mention that whatever happened to you must have been an ordeal.”

They climbed the staircase, which up close was every bit as wide and elegant as it looked from a distance. They turned to the left and were on the top step when a piercing noise, resembling the screech of a steam whistle, split the air.

Sabrina jumped and whirled. A large shaggy animal was bearing down on them at full speed.

“Steady on.” Alex said, his hand going to Sabrina’s elbow. “It’s only Rufus. And my nieces.”

The animal, she saw now, was a long-haired dog of some indeterminate origin. And hot on his heels was a red-haired moppet, hands outstretched and face gleeful. It was she who was emitting the ear-piercing noise. A little behind her came a slightly smaller girl of similar coloring, doing her best to keep up.

An attractive woman with hair the color of dark cinnamon hurried after the pair and called, “Athena! Brigid! Come here!”

Between the large dog, the madly running children and the wide marble staircase, it looked like a disaster in the making.

But then the woman called, “Rufus, stop!” She followed that with “Grab them, Alex, do—before they reach the stairs.”

Before Sabrina’s amazed eyes, the dog slid to a halt and ducked behind Alex, peering out around Alex’s leg at his pursuers. Alex grinned and reached down to scoop up the girls, one in each arm, and place noisy kisses on the cheek of each. “Escaped again, have you?”

The little girls giggled, their quarry apparently no longer of interest, and chanted, “Uncle Alex, Uncle Alex!”

The smaller girl reached up to pat Alex’s cheek, but the larger, faster one reached inside his jacket, searching. Alex laughed. “I haven’t any peppermint sticks today, you little thief.”

The children both began to chatter, rendering it almost impossible for Sabrina to understand anything either said. Then one of them turned and pointed at Sabrina and said clearly, “Who’s she?”

“She’s our guest,” Alex told them. “Sabrina, I’d like you to meet my brother Theo’s daughters. This little imp is Athena and this one is her sister, Brigid. Say hello to Sabrina, girls.”

“Hello, Sabrina,” they said as one.

Brigid turned her face into Alex’s shoulder in an apparent attack of shyness, but Athena grinned at her with unabashed interest and said, “Are you a boy or a girl?”

“I’m a girl, but I’m wearing boys’ clothes.” Sabrina couldn’t keep from smiling back at the girl.

“I want to wear boys’ clothes,” Athena decided.

Alex did his best to hide his own smile. “This poor beleaguered woman is their mother. Megan, allow me to introduce you to Sabrina. Sabrina, this is the Marchioness of Raine.”

“Ma’am.” Another title. But of course she would have one. Wasn’t the heir to the dukedom often a marquess? Did that mean that Theo was the oldest? And was Alex actually a lord? Well, at least she could blame her lack of memory for not knowing the order of precedence.

“Call me Megan,” the girls’ mother declared.

“You’re American,” Sabrina blurted in surprise.

“Yes, I am. A stranger in a strange land.” She reached out to shake Sabrina’s hand in a firm, businesslike manner. “Pleased to meet you.”

“Mama, I want to wear boys’ clothes,” Athena said, drawing the conversation back to the topic which most interested her. “Can I?”

“May I,” Megan amended. “I don’t know. I hadn’t really thought about it.”

“Me, too,” Brigid announced. “I wanna wear boys’ cloves.”

“Clothes, silly, not cloves.” Athena giggled.

“We’ll discuss this later,” Megan told them firmly. “Come here, you two.” She reached out and took them, setting them down on the floor. Squatting down to their eye level, Megan went on, “Haven’t I told you not to chase Rufus? You scare him. And it’s not fair to run from Alice when you know she turned her ankle yesterday.”

The girls nodded, the little one’s lower lip beginning to tremble. “Yes, Mama.”

“We won’t do it anymore,” Athena said gravely. “Promise.”

“Good. Now you run back to Alice.” Megan gave them a little push in the direction they had come from. Sabrina could see a harried-looking woman at the other end of the hallway hobbling valiantly toward them. “And apologize to Alice.”

The girls took off at a run, and Megan rose, turning back to Alex and Sabrina. “Sorry for the interruption.” Though her voice was friendly, her reddish-brown eyes studied Sabrina curiously. Sabrina suspected that the woman didn’t miss much.

“I was just showing Sabrina to her room. She will be staying with us for a while,” Alex explained. “She’s in rather a spot. I was hoping you might be able to help us.”

“Of course.” Megan’s gaze grew even shrewder. “What do you need?”

“For one thing, perhaps you could lend her something to wear? These are her only clothes.” As she nodded, Alex went on, “I also wondered if you had heard anything about a young lady going missing. Or perhaps some sort of accident or even a crime where a young woman might have been injured.”

“No...not yet. Why? Were you in an accident?” She leaned in a little, peering at Sabrina’s bruises.

“I’m not sure,” Sabrina replied, and Alex launched into another retelling of Sabrina’s predicament.

Megan listened with interest, but the warm sympathy that had marked the duchess’s face mingled with a certain skepticism in Megan’s eyes. Her first words when Alex finished were “If it were Con telling me this instead of you, I would be certain this was a prank.”

Alex chuckled. “No, no, I promise you, it’s not. It’s all true.”

“I’ve heard of people losing their memory after being hit in the head, which you obviously were. I’ll check with my contacts and see if they’ve heard anything.”

“Megan is a newspaper reporter,” Alex said in an aside to Sabrina.

“Really?” Sabrina looked at her in amazement.

“I was.” Megan nodded. “Now I write mostly longer investigative pieces for magazines. I’ll look into it and see what I can find.”

“Especially Newbury. That’s the departure point for her train ticket, so we’re assuming that whatever happened would probably have taken place around there. But, of course, if it was that she had been kidnapped, that could have taken place anywhere and she merely happened to escape at Newbury.”

“Kidnapped?” Sabrina gaped at him, but Megan seemed to find nothing odd in this idea and merely nodded.

“I don’t know how much I can find out about something happening in Newbury unless it was really big news, but I will ask around,” Megan told them. “And I’ll look through my dresses for something you can wear, Sabrina. Some of my dresses would be too old for you, but I’m sure we’ll come up with enough things. Anna may have left a few frocks here, as well—anything of Kyria’s, of course, would be much too long.” She whipped around and walked away in the same brisk manner with which she seemed to do everything.