Free Still Life With Murder by P. B. Ryan Page B

It’s you who’ve lost your soul, Dr. Hewitt, and I pity you for it, but I despise you, too, for bringing this grief upon a woman who’s shown you nothing but a mother’s true, heartfelt love. Perhaps you really do deserve to hang.”
    Uncoiling from the cot, he closed the distance between them with one long stride, the blanket slipping to the floor. Tempted to back away, Nell held her ground, hands fisted around the bars, not flinching from his gaze. For a moment he just stared down at her with his bloodied shirt and battered face, eyes seething, a hard thrust to his jaw. Reaching inside his coat, he produced a match, which he scraped across one of the iron bars; it flamed with a crackling hiss.
    “You were told to keep your distance,” he said softly.

CHAPTER THREE

    N ELL ’ S HEART THUDDED IN HER ears as she considered the prospect of her skirts bursting into flame, and what to do about that if it happened. She didn’t step back, though, nor did her gaze waver from his.
    He looked away first, at the burning match, and then again at Nell. “You
are
a cool one, when you want to be.” Turning, he tossed the match into the chamber pot. The letter ignited. Nell lowered her head and closed her eyes as it burned, the smoke stinging her nostrils.
    “It was a two-week furlough,” he said quietly, with little remaining of his former rancor.
    Nell opened her eyes to find him leaning a shoulder against the bars, thumbs tucked in his leather braces, his gaze on the floor.
    “Robbie and I arrived home the morning of December twenty-fourth—Christmas Eve. I made it through that day and the next without too much familial melodrama, but on the day after Christmas, I was, shall we say, discovered in an indiscretion. A minor thing, really, or it would have been, had it not been that monster of morality August Hewitt who discovered it.”
    “Indiscretion?”
    “He came into my room that morning to wake me for a shooting party and found a pair of ladies’ drawers on the floor next to my bed.”
    He glanced at her, no doubt wondering if he’d shocked her, or perhaps hoping he had. Nell kept her expression bland and refused to step back, although he was unnervingly close, mere inches away. From this vantage point, she could see how he shivered, despite the sweat that soaked him.
    “He went into one of his quiet, cold rages about my having smuggled a woman into the house. In fact, he was crediting me with initiative where none existed, since the woman in question had merely slipped down the service stairs during the night. Of course, if I’d told him that, he’d have sacked the poor wench on the spot and tossed her into the street like so much rubbish. Not quite what she deserved just for having had the poor judgment to favor the likes of me.”
    “She was one of the house staff?” Nell asked.
    “A chambermaid—my first and only, if you can believe it. Some men are enchanted by those white, ruffled aprons, but they were never quite my cup of tea. Of course, as far as Saint August was concerned, it may as well have been my hundredth offense as my first. He ordered me out of the house forthwith, but not before informing me, rather starchily, that his precious Robbie would never have done such a thing. He was right. Robbie was a good son, a good man. He was the only one of us who was worth anything—except perhaps for young Martin. He had possibilities. Harry was always…” he shook his head “…a bit too much like me, I’m afraid. My fault, to some extent.”
    “Why do you say that?”
    Dr. Hewitt rasped a hand over his unshaven jaw, his gaze still trained on the floor. “I never had very much time for him, during my visits home. He was three years younger than Robbie—
six
years younger than me—so taking him along on our…evening adventures was out of the question, although he begged to be included. And, too, I saw something of myself in him—those of us with an appetite for sin always recognize it in