Free Slightly Sinful by Mary Balogh Page B

thigh," she reminded him. "The musket ball was still embedded there. You would have been in great pain, and you were losing blood. And you had already ridden some distance from the battlefield. You are not necessarily a poor rider."
    "Kind of you," he said with a faint smile. "But when I was wounded why the devil-I beg your pardon-why did my men not carry me off the field to the nearest surgeon? Why was I alone? Why was I on the way to Brussels? I assume that is where I was going. Was I deserting?"
    "Perhaps," she said, "you have family members here and were coming to them."
    "Perhaps I have a wife," he said. "And six children."
    She had not thought of that possibility since discovering that he was alive. But of course there was no reason in the world to feel disappointed at the very real possibility that he was married. Perhaps he was happily married. And perhaps there really were children.
    "She would not have brought children to Brussels," she said. "She would have stayed in England with them. How old are you?"
    "Trying to trick me into remembering another detail, are you, Miss York?" he asked her. "How old do I look? Twenty? Thirty?"
    "Somewhere in between, I would guess," she said.
    "We will say for the sake of argument that I am twenty-five, then," he said. "I would have to have been a busy man to produce six children already." He grinned and looked suddenly boyish and vital despite his pallor.
    "Three sets of twins," she suggested.
    "Or two sets of triplets." He laughed. "But I surely could not have forgotten a wife, could I? Or children? On the other hand, perhaps they are the very reason my memory has decided to take a leave of absence."
    "We also know," she said, "that you have a sense of humor. All this is very distressing for you, is it not? But you can still joke and laugh about it."
    "Ah, now we are getting somewhere," he said. "I have a sense of humor. A key piece of evidence. Now we must be able to work out exactly who I am. But, no, perhaps not-there are no such persons as court jesters these days, are there? So much for that apparently promising clue."
    He set an arm over his eyes and sighed.
    Rachel gazed at him with sympathy. Her life had not been filled with a great deal of happiness, but even so she would hate to wake up one day and find that everything she had ever been or known was erased from memory. What would be left?
    It seemed almost as if he had read her mind.
    "I am perhaps the most fortunate of men, Miss York," he said. "We are frequently encouraged, are we not, to look on the bright side of every event, even the worst disaster? With the loss of my memory I find myself quite unencumbered by my past and all its burdens. I can be whoever I want to be. I can create myself anew and shape my future without any restraining influence from my past. What should I become, do you suppose? Or, perhaps more to the point, who should I become? What sort of person shall Jonathan Smith be?"
    She closed her eyes and swallowed. He spoke lightly still, as if he found his words amusing. She found them terrifying.
    "Only you can decide that," she said softly.
    "Naked I was born into that other life I cannot remember," he said, "and naked I have been born into this new life. I wonder if, when we are born the first time, we forget all that has gone before? William Wordsworth would have us believe it is so. Have you read any of his poetry, Miss York? His Immortality Ode? 'Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting'?"
    "Now we know something else about you," she said. "You read poetry."
    "Perhaps I write it too," he said. "Perhaps I go about declaiming bad verse wherever I go. Perhaps this demise and rebirth is the greatest favor I have ever done my contemporaries."
    Rachel laughed aloud, and he removed his arm and laughed with her.
    "You, of course," he said, "fell out of heaven through a hole in a cloud. I have decided that it is the only explanation."
    She laughed again and looked down to brush an invisible speck from