Whisky soured the wool of his coat where some fool had spilled it on him hours earlier. Smoke clung to his cravat, and beneath that lingered the stale discomfort of too many crowded rooms, too much noise, and far too little sleep.
He had just reached for the door when?—
“Gideon!”
He stilled.
For one exhausted second, he thought he had imagined it.
Following a man for five days and nights gave one far too much time to think, and Gideon had spent an inexcusable portion of those hours thinking of Beatrice Beckman.
Not merely her mouth, though that was bad enough.
But the little curls that escaped at her temples whenever she exerted herself. The precise furrow that appeared between her brows when she was concentrating. The flash of triumph in her eyes when, during the lessons, she had twisted free of his hold and sent him to the floor.
And that pale dusting of freckles just above her décolletage, invitingly visible when she lifted her chin.
A gentleman ought not to have noticed them.
Gideon had noticed every one.
“Gideon.” The voice came again, closer this time.
He turned.
Fatigue, it seemed, had finally driven him into a full-blown hallucination.
But then she came closer, striding along the pavement as though it were a perfectly reasonable hour to be out in London alone.
Not a hallucination.
Beatrice was here.
At this ungodly hour.
Every scrap of fatigue burned clean away.
“What the devil are you doing wandering Mayfair at this hour?” he asked more harshly than he intended. He was too tired. Too frustrated. And his heart sure as hell shouldn't have leapt the way it had just then.
Gideon dragged a hand through his hair.
Slowing to a stop before him, a little out of breath, Beatrice was looking a little sheepish now that she’d reached him.
“I couldn’t sleep,” she said.
Gideon looked at her properly then—the shadows beneath her eyes, wrinkled gown, the careless tilt of her hat…
And a tightness around her mouth that made him want to reach out and?—
No.
“Why couldn’t you sleep?” he asked.
She glanced away. “I… I just…”
At first, his mind went to nightmares.
He knew too well how old terrors could find a person in sleep. Harrowgate had taught him that certain memories did not remain politely in the past. They waited until darkness. Until silence. Until one was defenseless enough to dream.
