‘If you are sure, dear.’ Her father smiled affectionately.
‘I am. You know I love nothing better than a silent house when the muse strikes. And no disrespect to you, Papa...’
‘But I have been under your feet these past months while I have been recuperating.’ He patted her hand. ‘I understand completely as I too value silence as I work. Enjoy the quiet, darling. You’ve doubtless earned it.’
A good half an hour and a great deal of her parents hollering at the tardy Charity later, Hope finally waved them all off. Then armed with a hot cup of tea and promising herself she would not allowthatregrettable kiss to intrude onthisperfectly splendid day, she took herself upstairs to her bedchamber and out to her lovely little balcony overlooking the private and secluded communal garden beyond their terrace.
She had fought tooth and nail for this room when they first moved here, arguing that if Faith had her own little artist’s studio downstairs and Charity had her own music room up in the attic, it was only fair she got to have the only balcony the house possessed because she loved to write outside when the weather permitted. It wasn’t particularly spacious. There was only room for one wrought-iron chair and its tiny matching table, but it was private, quiet and surrounded by nature and out here she could forget she was in a big, crowded city and instead pretend to be in the blissful quiet of the countryside.
As she sipped her tea, she read over the pages she had written the day before, adding corrections as she went as was her habit, so that by the time she reached the end of the words, she had forgotten the rest of the world, and almost forgotten the brute Lord Thundersley existed. Instead, her odd head was teaming with fresh words to add to the story.
She had a good feeling about this book. Which was staggering really after the blows her confidence had taken over the last one. From the moment the first shoots of the idea formed, it seemed to effortlessly grow and flourish, so much so, she was starting to believePhantasmamight finally be the book to get her published. It certainly felt different from all her previous rejected efforts. Or at least it did on the odd occasion when she allowed herself to feel proud of it, which was a vast improvement on the usual doubts she harboured about her writing talent. Doubts which had increased tenfold after her self-confidence had been eviscerated by the three respected publishing houses she had been brave enough to send her last book to—two of which hadn’t bothered reading beyond the first chapter before they had rejected it out of hand.
ButPhantasmastill felt stronger. And not at all what she had seen on any bookshelf before.
She had left her intrepid heroine all alone in a derelict building on the edges of the slum. The moonlight leaking through the remnants of the long-collapsed roof picked out the cobwebs covering the cold, ancient walls as she climbed the worn wooden stairs upward towards the flapping sounds of bats beneath the creaking eaves. In her mind, the next scene was already fully formed, and the heroine would finally meet the monster. Except the villain wouldn’t be the malevolent ghoul that she and everyone else expected—it would be her fiancé. A man, she would rapidly discover, so twisted by greed and devoid of all conscience he had married repeatedly for money, assuming a new identity each time in case the authorities questioned his motives, then disposed of those unfortunate wives in a shocking, gory and premediated manner once he had complete control over them.
From there, the intricate Gothic mystery she had diligently constructed over three hundred tightly packed pages would finally unravel as it reached its terrifying crescendo. After all his sickening and twisted secrets had been revealed, and as the heroine battled to free herself from his murderous clutches, the building would burn in a ferocious fire. Then, it would collapse in the inferno, taking the much-feared Phantom of St Giles and all his wicked secrets with it, as she escaped into the night towards freedom.
Hope’s pen moved quickly as the story flowed and she lost all sense of place and time. The sun was already high in the sky when the nearby slosh of something which sounded like water snapped her out of her fictional world and pulled her attention to the neighbouring balcony at Number Twenty-Two.
A balcony which, to the best of her knowledge, had never been used in all the years she had lived next door to it. However today, she could hear someone moving about in the room beyond.
Intrigued, she craned over the railings to investigate further. The glass on the narrow French doors steamed and dripped with condensation. Behind the misted windows she could see a fuzzy and indiscernible human shape. It paced from one side of the room to the other, its arms constantly moving above its head. Then it stopped and stretched, the skin-coloured smudge practically filling the doors until it flung them open and the mystery occupant strode out to stare over his own railings a split second before she gasped in shock.
‘Lord Thundersley!’
Hope clamped her hand over her mouth as his head whipped around, and then blinked like an idiot as she took in the full extent of the unexpected and scandalous sight of him standing practically nude in broad daylight.
He was obviously fresh from the bath. Obvious, because he was positively soaking wet and the only thing he was wearing was the towel loosely wrapped around his waist. Droplets of water fell from his shoulder-length hair, over his broad chest and dripped off his pebbled nipples. Others trickled from his short beard to the gully formed by his impressive pectoral muscles down over his abdomen, lazily following the dark dusting of hair that arrowed beneath the folds of the towel.
‘Hope?’ He smiled back, more water spiking his black eyelashes, clearly vastly amused to see her. ‘Well as I live and breathe! What a surprise. Don’t tell me you live here?’ His big hands rested on his hips as he laughed, apparently oblivious of his distinct lack of clothing. ‘Fate certainly has a sense of humour.’
She pushed herself upright in her hurry to escape the unexpected and shocking sight, knocking her forgotten chilled tea all over the top sheets of her precious writing as she did so. Her face burning and her eyes much too curious, she snatched the pages up and clumsily used the front of her dress to mop away the damage while the dry ones decided to flutter haphazardly in the breeze.
‘You’re naked!’ The words came out in a mortifyingly missish squeal as she tried and very definitely failed to catch the pages.
‘That I am.’
She crouched down and hastily attempted to gather up the last six months of her work before it flew away on the breeze and entirely failing in her feeble attempts to avert her curious eyes as she did so. ‘What sort of a person walks out on to a balcony in just their birthday suit?’
Their very impressive, sun-kissed and beautifully sculpted birthday suit.
‘The sort who has just got out of their bath and wasn’t expecting to find anyone else out here when nobody seems to get out of bed before noon in Mayfair. Clearly that isn’t the case here in Bloomsbury, so...’ He pointed back towards his doorway with a jerk of his thumb. ‘I’ll spare your blushes and go and put something on.’
Thankfully, he disappeared back inside leaving a very disconcerted Hope to briskly tidy up the mess she had made. She was frantically picking up the last of her pages when he returned, still shamelessly sporting a towel on his lower half but he had at least donned a shirt to cover the rest of him. She knew he had donned it in haste because he hadn’t bothered drying himself and the soft linen was twisted as it clung to the water and was doing a very good job of translucently moulding itself to his chest like a second skin. Somehow, that effect was even more distracting because she now knew exactly what lay underneath that shirt and her vivid imagination seemed determined to picture it. He bent to pick up a single sheet from his own balcony, which in her panic she hadn’t noticed had escaped, causing the damp fabric to stretch taut over his back, shoulders and muscular arms, which to her shame, flustered her further.
Good gracious he was something! She had never seen anything quite like it.
‘I believe this is yours.’ He stretched the few short feet between the railings to hand it back and she snatched it and clumsily stuffed it into her pile, wishing her stupid face wasn’t glowing like a beacon, her mouth didn’t feel quite so dry and her stupid palms weren’t so moist. ‘I am truly sorry for startling you. I really didn’t expect to see anyone out here.’ He appeared genuinely contrite.
As well as wet and sinfully and alluringly wicked.
Drat him!
‘I’m a country boy, used to the privacy and solitude which comes with wide open spaces and I am still not acclimatised to the way things are done here.’ Then he smiled, drat him, not in a smug or lecherous or patronising way, but in a rather shy, boyish and attractively lopsided manner as his gaze remained refreshingly locked to her face.
‘And while I am apologising, I most definitely need to apologise for the other night too, Hope.’ His expression was all earnest. ‘Not that it is in any way a defence of my ungentlemanly behaviour, but I was a tad drunk, more than a little overwhelmed and my brain wasn’t quite as sharp as it should have been. Therefore, when you asked for my help, in my inebriated and confused state I got the wrong end of the stick and stupidly thought kissing you was the best way to get rid of your unwanted admirer instead of simply telling him to leave you alone and threatening to punch the blighter on the nose if he dared bother you again.’ He smiled. A wary, apologetic and slightly wincing smile. ‘I am glad you pushed me in the pond, because I thoroughly deserved it.’
