Free Since the Surrender by Julie Anne Long

visitor.”
    “Visitor.” What a polite euphemism for someone who routinely vigorously pressed Marie-Claude into a mattress. Chase suddenly wondered whether he wanted to press MarieClaude into a mattress. She was one of the girls who had decided a pout suited her. It certainly did. Her pillowy mouth could tempt a man into writing her into his will, into doing rash, reckless things for her if she would only do certain things with it.
    “I’ll…tell him.”
    The Duchess noticed the direction of his gaze. “What can we do for you this evening, Captain Eversea?”
    The “we’ had a whiff of appealing decadence, and she knew it. Chase acknowledged that with a leap of a brow and half smile, and tried to imagine those four lovely girls transferring their attentions from faro to the needs of his body. But it was like trying to grasp hold of a reflection in water: the harder he tried, the more scattered and turbulent it became—the image wouldn’t take shape. He was suddenly freshly angry with Rosalind.
    Because not even forty women clamoring to pleasure him for forty nights could assuage the particular need that had led him here. He’d come here to forget. But now it was clear that he first needed to make himself remember.
    All of it.
    “I’ll have whiskey,” he told the Duchess. “And keep it coming, please.”

Chapter 6
    What the devil!
    Rosalind’s head swung like a weathervane in a windstorm, searching for that voice. And then she saw him.
    Or…it?
    Gooseflesh rose on her arms. At the top of a ladder pushed against the wall near that enormous marionette was a…man. But at first glance he seemed indistinguishable from the puppet. His hands glance he seemed indistinguishable from the puppet. His hands were so gnarled and brown they appeared carved of wood, his cheeks glowingly ruddy and as hard and round as if he were using them to store nuts; in contrast, gravity softened and drew his jaw ever downward. Now, as she took him in, the laps on either side of his face made him look like the marionette’s cousin. His eyes were large, a peculiar crystalline shade of blue, and pouched in folds of skin. He was smiling, a weary sort of smile. The sort a marionette couldn’t accomplish on its own. He wasn’t made of wood, after all.
    She realized her hand had flown up to cover her overtaxed heart. She lowered it abruptly, embarrassed and more than a little irritated. She was beginning to resent the havoc this odd museum was wreaking on her nerves.
    The man’s eyes shone with amusement. “My apologies, madam. I didn’t mean to frighten you. I thought perhaps you were addressing me when you apologized for intruding, since no one else is about.”
    An easy enough mistake, since she had been talking to no one in particular, just like a looby. In truth, she likely would not have seen the man at all if he hadn’t spoken or moved. And this unnerved her, too. As though crossing the portals of the Montmorency Museum put one at risk of becoming an exhibit.
    Waiting for her reply, the man applied himself to what appeared to be puppet maintenance. He tested the puppet’s arm joint as tenderly as he would touch a cherished human, not a lump of wood deliberately carved to be ugly.
    Rosalind’s heart slowed as she watched the soothing ministrations.
    “Oh, no, please accept my apologies,” she finally managed. Her voice was a bit thready. “I’m not usually such a ninny. It’s just that it’s so very still here and I…I thought I was alone. I was musing aloud.”
    She quite deliberately did not mention the ghost. Or the hallucination. Whatever the man in puffy drawers might have been. He nodded, as though this made perfect sense. “’Tis a quiet place, the Montmorency. One might be tempted to muse aloud.”
    Good heavens. An understatement.
    “Are you a caretaker here at the museum, then, sir?”
    He straightened the marionette’s trousers over its skinny wooden legs with a tug. “Aye, but of the puppets, mainly,