Free Slightly Sinful by Mary Balogh Page A

Mr. Smith.
    "I believe," he said, "that I will shave myself if someone would be good enough to help me sit up higher in the bed."
    "Anything to do with beds is my department," Geraldine said. "Out of my way, Will."
    "If in my usual life I am a duke, of course," Mr. Smith said, grimacing slightly as Geraldine hauled him upward and stuffed the pillows behind his back, "I have probably never done this before in my life and am about to slash my own throat as surely as Sergeant Strickland would have done."
    "Lord love us," Phyllis said, elbowing her way past Geraldine, "no more talk of blood if it is all the same to you, Mr. Smith. I'll do it. I have shaved a thousand men in my time, give or take a hundred or so here and there."
    "Did they all survive?" he asked, grinning at her.
    "Give or take a hundred or so here and there," she told him. "But they all agreed it was a lovely way to go. Look at this jawline, Gerry. Have you seen any more firm and masterful? Lord love us but he's a beauty!"
    It was the moment at which Mr. Smith's laughing eyes alit upon Rachel just beyond the doorway. They did not stop smiling, but there was an arrested look in them for a moment, and she knew that his awareness of her was different from the way he felt about her friends. She felt suddenly breathless and horribly self-conscious. He was pale, and she knew that the wash and all this fuss were tiring him and probably causing his head to ache, but even so, with his clean nightshirt and damp, clean hair and roguish smile, he looked quite devastatingly handsome.
    She had given the wrong impression yesterday, she thought as Phyllis brushed soap over the stubble of his beard and waved the open razor with a flourish in the air. She really ought not to have sat so boldly on his bed.
    But when everyone left the room ten minutes or so later, all still in high spirits and talking and laughing, it was Rachel who stayed to pull the curtains closed across the window to cut out some of the bright sunlight. She approached the bed and straightened the bedcovers, though Bridget had just done it before leaving.
    He was looking at her, a guarded smile still lurking in his eyes.
    "Good morning," he said.
    "Good morning." She felt somewhat tongue-tied. "I can see that you are tired. And that you have a headache."
    "I am exhausted from doing nothing." The smile had disappeared to be replaced with a somewhat bleaker look. "I awoke in a panic this morning, searching my nonexistent pockets for the letter."
    "What letter?" She leaned over him slightly and frowned.
    "I have no idea." He raised one hand and set the back of it over his eyes. "Was it just a meaningless dream, or was it some fragment trying to detach itself from the pervading fog?"
    "Was it a letter to you or from you?" she asked him.
    He sighed after a few silent moments and removed his hand. "I have no idea," he said again, and his smile was back. "But I am not entirely without memory, you know. You are Miss York-Miss Rachel York. And I am Jonathan Smith-mister. You see how perfectly my memory works provided you ask it to perform its tricks only upon events of the past few days?"
    He made a joke of it, but she realized suddenly that his loss of memory was a more devastating injury to him than any of the more obvious ones.
    She had not intended to stay, but she sat down anyway, pulling the chair closer to the bed as she did so. She guessed that terror probably lurked behind his cheerful manner this morning.
    "Let us discover what we do know about you, shall we?" she suggested. "We know that you are English. We know that you are a gentleman. We know that you are an officer. We know that you fought in the Battle of Waterloo." She was counting the points off on her fingers. She tapped her thumb. "What else?"
    "We know that I am a poor rider," he said. "I fell off my horse. Does that mean I am not a cavalryman? Perhaps I had never ridden before in my life. Perhaps I stole the horse."
    "But you had been shot in the