Pleasures of a Notorious Gentleman Read Online Free Page B

Major Lyons said, before glancing back down at John. “Although I daresay there is little I could do at this point that would ruin her reputation any more than it’s already been.” Once again, his gaze leaped across the distance separating them to land on her as powerfully as a touch. “Miss Dawson?”
    She rose on unsteady legs. “Yes, Major. I would very much like to take a stroll with you.”
    It was a lie, of course. She dreaded it with every fiber of her being.
    H e didn’t remember her. That truth disturbed Stephen more than he could voice with words, because if there was anything about the past two years that he should have remembered, it should have been her—or at the very least her eyes. An unusual shade, they reminded him of whiskey. But they were haunted, no doubt by things he couldn’t even begin to imagine, but with which he should have been intimately familiar.
    War, blood, death.
    The scars riddling his body and the still healing wounds served as a testament that he’d experienced the worst man had to offer, but his mind couldn’t recall a single detail of what he’d endured. He’d awoken in a regimental hospital on an odorous, thin pallet on a rickety wooden cot, tormented by physical pain that made no sense. Because the very last thing he’d remembered before he became fully conscious was having tea in the garden at Lyons Place with Claire.
    The scent of flowers had been replaced by the pungent stench of oozing and rotting flesh. The sweet song of the meadowlark had been replaced by the moans and cries of dying men. So many calling out for their mothers, needing a familiar bosom upon which to take a final rest. The green of England had been replaced by the gray squalor of the Crimea. Even now he could still taste blood at the back of his throat, and he despaired of ever being free of it. An imperceptible red mist, it had been thick on the air, had saturated what remained of his tattered uniform. His blood, the blood of countless others—men he couldn’t remember. His inability to draw up memories of them dishonored them, disgraced him.
    Lying beside them in the hospital, he’d wallowed in his own filth, his own pain, his own anguish. They would talk to him of battles fought and courage shown. He would pretend that he shared the recollections. They would talk fondly of those who were gone, and he felt he’d betrayed those who had died for his country—who might have died for him. What he didn’t know, what he couldn’t truly appreciate gnawed at his conscience, day and night. He remembered England, his family, his lovers in precise detail. What he couldn’t remember was how he had come to be in that wretched place.
    He’d yearned to escape the reality of his surroundings. He’d longed to feel the silky softness of a woman’s body. He’d craved the solace her soothing hands and warm voice could offer.
    But nothing was as it had been. The joy he’d once taken in women had been replaced by an almost desperate need to rid himself of what he’d become: a man who had lost two years of his life. He had an abbreviated past, had leaped over a chasm of time.
    And now here was this woman who had emerged from that gaping, black nothingness that tormented him. He’d known her, bedded her, filled her with his seed. . .
    Yet he couldn’t remember the flavor of her kiss, how soft her skin might have felt against his caressing fingers.
    Perhaps that was the greatest tragedy: that she was obviously a lady of good breeding and she’d willingly given herself to him. It would not have been something she’d have done lightly. The way she constantly averted her gaze alerted him that she harbored guilt over their assignation. Yet for the life of him he remembered nothing at all about her.
    He could tell—in spite of the unflattering black dress that might have given an unhandsome woman the appearance of a crow—that she was not easily forgotten. Yet, forget her he had.
    She was tall for a woman. He