Yours Until Dawn Read Free Page A

his head sadly. “Very little. There have only been one or two documented cases in which such a loss has reversed itself.”
    Samantha bowed her head.
    Mr. Beckwith rose, his fleshy cheeks and drooping countenance making him look like a melancholy bulldog. “I do hope you’ll forgive us for squandering your time, Miss Wickersham. I realize you had to hire a hack to bring you out here. I’ll be more than happy to pay for your return to the city out of my own pocket.”
    Samantha stood. “That won’t be necessary, Mr. Beckwith. I won’t be returning to London at the moment.”
    The butler exchanged a baffled glance with Mrs. Philpot. “Excuse me?”
    Samantha moved to the chair she had originally occupied and scooped up her portmanteau. “I’ll be staying right here. I’m accepting the position as the earl’s nurse. Now, if you’ll be so kind as to have one of the footmen fetch my trunk from the carriage and show me to my room, I’ll prepare to commence my duties.”
     
    He could still smell her.
    As if to taunt him by reminding him of what he’d lost, Gabriel’s sense of smell had only sharpened in the past few months. Whenever he rambled past the kitchens, he could tell with a single sniff whether Étienne, the French cook, was preparing fricandeau of veal or a creamy béchamel sauce to tempt his appetite. The faintest whiff of wood smoke would inform him whether the fire in the deserted library had been freshly stoked or was dying to embers. As he collapsed on the bed in the room that had become more lair than bedchamber, he was assailed by the stale smell of his own sweat that clung to the rumpled sheets.
    It was here that he returned to nurse his bruises and scrapes, here he tossed his way through nights distinguished from the days only by their suffocating hush. In the still hours between dusk and dawn, he sometimes felt as if he were the only soul left alive in the world.
    Gabriel flung the back of his hand over his brow, closing his eyes out of old habit. When he had stormed into the parlor, he had immediately identified the lavender water favored by Mrs. Philpot and the musky hair pomade Beckwith lavished on his few remaining strands. But he hadn’t recognized the crisp, sunlit fragrance of lemons scenting the air. It was an aroma both sweet and tart, delicate and bold.
    Miss Wickersham certainly didn’t smell like a nurse. Old Cora Gringott had smelled of mothballs, the widow Hawkins like the bitter almond snuff she was so fond of dipping. Nor did Miss Wickersham smell like the shriveled spinster he envisioned when she spoke. If her withering tones were any indication, her pores should have emitted a poisonous fog of day-old cabbage and grave dust.
    As he had drawn near to her, he had made an even more startling discovery. Underlying that cleansing breath of citrus was a scent that maddened him, clouded what little was left of both his senses and his good sense.
    She smelled like a woman.
    Gabriel groaned through gritted teeth. He hadn’t felt a single stirring of desire since awakening in that London hospital to discover his world had gone dark. Yet the warm, sweet smell of Miss Wickersham’s skin had evoked a dizzying jumble of scarlet-hazed memories—stolen kisses in a moonlit garden, husky murmurs, the heated satin of a woman’s skin beneath his lips. All pleasures he would never know again.
    He opened his eyes only to find the world still enveloped by shadows. Perhaps the words he had hurled at Beckwith were true. Perhaps he needed to engage the services of another sort of woman altogether. If he paid her handsomely enough, she might even be able to look upon his ruined face without recoiling. But what would it matter if she did? Gabriel thought, a harsh bark of laughter escaping him. He would never know. Perhaps, while she squeezed her eyes shut and pretended he was the gentleman of her dreams, he could pretend that she was the sort of woman who would sigh his name and whisper promises of