Hello Stranger

  Ransom tilted his head, studying her. “The men of your profession can have a family. Why can’t you?”

  “Because—no, I won’t be drawn into a diversionary argument. I want to talk with you.”

  “We are talking.”

  A mixture of impatience and desire had made her reckless. “Not here. Somewhere private. Do you have a rented room? A flat?”

  “I can’t take you where I live.”

  “Why not? Is it dangerous there?”

  Ransom took an unaccountably long time to reply. “For you, it is.”

  Every inch of Garrett’s skin heated in the darkness. She could still feel the places on her neck where he’d kissed, as if his lips had left invisible scorch marks. “That doesn’t worry me.”

  “It should.”

  Garrett was silent. The air felt tight and thin, as if the oxygen had been pressed out of it. Tonight had turned out to be one of the happiest nights of her life, a gift that had somehow fallen into her hands. She had never bothered much over the question of her own happiness, having been far too busy working toward her goals.

  She had just become a cliché, a lovelorn woman of spinsterish age falling for a handsome and mysterious stranger. But in time, Ethan Ransom’s dark and dangerous allure would probably vanish, and he would seem entirely ordinary to her. A man no different from any other man.

  As she looked up into his shadowed face, however, she thought, He would never seem ordinary to me, even if he were ordinary.

  And she heard herself asking, “Would you escort me home, please?”

  Chapter 7

  No matter the time of day or night, a ride in a hansom cab was a breakneck dash that made conversation impossible. The vehicles typically careened and swayed with violent disregard for the laws of traffic or physics, rounding corners so recklessly one could feel the wheels lifting from the street.

  However, Garrett Gibson, well versed in the hazards of hansom cabs, was unperturbed. She sat braced in the corner of the seat, stoically observing the passing scenery.

  Ethan stole covert glances at her, unable to interpret her mood. She’d turned quiet after he’d refused to answer her question about the night of the Guildhall reception. He guessed that she was beginning to grasp how unsavory a character he was, and had come to her senses. Good. From now on, she would want him to stay away from her.

  If there was one thing this night had made clear, it was exactly how great a danger Garrett posed for him. He wasn’t himself around her . . . or perhaps the problem was that he was himself. Either way, she was making him unfit for his job at the time he most needed to be dispassionate.

  “The secret to staying alive,” another of Jenkyn’s men, William Gamble, had once said to him, “is not giving a damn.”

  It was true. If you started to care, it changed the reactive choices you made, even about small things such as dodging to the left or the right. In his line of work, a man’s desire to preserve his own life was usually the thing that doomed him. So far, it had never been a problem for Ethan to remain more or less philosophical about his future: when your number was up, it was up.

  But lately that necessary dispassion had begun to unravel. He’d caught himself wanting things he knew better than to want. Tonight he’d behaved like a besotted lunatic, flirting and lusting after Garrett Gibson. Running to her like a well-trained sheepdog as soon as she’d whistled. Accompanying her out in public, and watching pyrotechnics with his hands wandering all over her. He’d lost his bloody mind, taking such chances.

  But how could any man keep his wits around such a woman? Garrett had bewitched him like a love charm on a May-morning. She was at once respectable and subversive, worldly and innocent. Hearing her say “involuntary erection” in that crisp, ladylike voice had been the high point of his year.

  He wanted her so badly, it had put the heart crossways in him. This woman, in his bed, spread beneath him . . . he actually trembled at the thought of it. She would try so hard not to lose her dignity even as he teased it away from her, little by little, kissing the spaces between her toes, the soft creases behind her knees—

  Enough, he told himself grimly. She wasn’t his. She would never be his.

  They approached a row of identical Georgian-style terrace houses. It was an orderly middle-class street with a paved walk and a few weatherbeaten trees. The vehicle came to a rattling, jingling halt in front of a crimson-bricked house with a separate railed basement entrance for servants and deliverymen. One of the upper floors was brilliantly lit, the sound of men’s voices drifting through an open window. Three men . . . no, four.

  Ethan descended from the hansom with the doctor’s bag and cane. He reached up to Garrett. Although she didn’t need assistance, she took his hand and alighted from the vehicle with an agility that even a corset couldn’t constrain.

  “Wait here,” Ethan told the driver, “while I escort the lady to her door.”

  “Cost extra for the waitin’,” the driver warned, and Ethan responded with a short nod.

  Garrett looked up at him with the clear-eyed seriousness that captivated him a thousand times more than any come-hitherish pout or seductive glance. She had the most direct stare of any woman he’d ever met. “Will you come inside with me, Mr. Ransom?”

  The momentum of fate ground to a halt. Ethan knew he should walk away from her. No, he should break into a full-bore run. Instead, he hesitated.

  “You have guests,” he said reluctantly, his gaze flickering to the upper windows.

  “It’s only my father’s weekly draw poker game. He and his friends usually stay upstairs until midnight. My surgery takes up most of the ground floor—we can talk privately there.”

  Ethan hesitated. He’d begun the evening intending to follow this woman at a safe distance, and now he was considering going into her house, with her father and his friends there. How the hell had it come to this?

  “Acushla,” he began gruffly, “I can’t—”

  “I have an operating room, and a small laboratory,” Garrett continued in an offhand tone.

  His curiosity was sparked by the mention of the laboratory. “What do you keep in there?” he couldn’t keep from asking. “Rats and rabbits? Dishes of bacteria?”

  “I’m afraid not.” Her lips quirked. “I use the laboratory for mixing medicines and sterilizing equipment. And viewing microscopic slides.”

  “You have a microscope?”

  “The most advanced medical microscope available,” she said, seeing his interest. “With two eyepieces, German lenses, and an achromatic condenser to correct distortion.” She grinned at his expression. “I’ll show it to you. Have you ever seen a butterfly’s wing magnified a hundred times?”

  The cabbie had been following the conversation attentively. “Lad, are you daft a’thegither?” he asked from his perch. “Don’t stand there like stuffed beef—go inside with the lady!”

  Giving him a narrow-eyed glance, Ethan handed up a few coins and sent the hansom away. He found himself following Garrett to the front of the house. “I won’t stay for long,” he muttered. “And devil take you if you try to introduce me to anyone.”

  “I won’t. Although we won’t be able to avoid my cookmaid.”

  As Garrett fished a key from the pocket of her walking jacket, Ethan ran an assessing glance over the front door. A brass plate emblazoned with the name Dr. G. Gibson had been affixed to one of the upper panels. His gaze slid lower, and he was almost startled by the sight of an iron rim-mounted box lock beside the door handle. He hadn’t seen a design that ancient since he’d apprenticed for the prison locksmith.

  “Wait,” he said before Garrett unlocked the door. Frowning, he handed her the bag and cane, and lowered to his haunches to have a better look. The primitive lock was laughably inadequate for a street door, and had probably been installed when the house had first been built. “This is an old-fashioned warded lock,” he said incredulously.

  “Yes, a good, stout one,” Garrett said, sounding pl
eased.

  “No, there’s nothing good about it! It doesn’t even have tumblers. You might as well not have a lock.” Appalled, Ethan continued to examine the ancient contraption. “Why hasn’t your father done anything about this? He should know better.”

  “We’ve had no problem with it.”

  “Only by the grace of God.” Ethan became more agitated by the second as he realized she went to sleep every night with nothing but a crude rattletrap lock between her and the entire criminal population of London. His heart began to beat fast with anxiety. He’d seen what could happen to women who didn’t have sufficient protection from the predators of the world. And Garrett was a public figure who attracted both admiration and controversy. Someone could enter the house so damned easily, and do whatever they wished with her. He couldn’t bear to think about it.

  Garrett stood there with a skeptical smile, seeming to think he was overreacting.

  In his agony of worry, Ethan couldn’t find the words to make her understand. Still crouching in front of the door, he gestured toward Garrett’s tiny hat, which was little more than a flattened velvet circle decorated with a twist of ribbon and a knot of small feathers. “Give me that.”

  Her eyebrows lifted. “My hat?”

  “Your hatpin.” He waited with his hand extended upward.

  Looking mystified, Garrett extracted the long pin that attached the hat to her coiffure. It was topped with a small brass medallion.

  Taking the pin, Ethan bent the blunted needle tip into a forty-five-degree angle. He inserted it into the lock and twisted deftly. Five seconds later, the warded lock clicked open. After withdrawing the makeshift pick, he rose to his feet and gave it back to her.

  “I believe you unlocked that door more quickly with a hatpin than I could with my key,” Garrett exclaimed, regarding the bent hatpin with a slight frown. “How skilled you are.”

  “That’s not the point. Any clumsy halfwit of a burglar could do what I just did.”

  “Oh.” Her lips pursed thoughtfully. “Perhaps I should invest in a new lock?”

  “Aye. One that was made this century!”

  To his exasperation, Garrett didn’t appear alarmed in the least. Her eyes crinkled at the corners. “You’re very kind to be concerned for my safety. But my father is a former constable.”

  “He’s too old to leap a gate,” Ethan said indignantly.

  “And I can defend myself quite—”

  “Don’t,” he warned in an ominous tone, certain he would explode if she gave him another of her confident little speeches about how well she could look after herself and how indestructible she was, and how she had nothing to fear from anyone because she knew how to twirl a cane. “You need to change the lock right away, and take down that brass plate on the door.”

  “Why?”

  “Your name is on it.”

  “But all doctors have these,” she protested. “If I removed it, my patients couldn’t find me.”

  “Why don’t you just paste an advertisement on your door saying ‘Defenseless Woman with Free Pharmaceutical Supplies’?” Before she could reply, he continued, “Why aren’t there iron window guards on the basement and ground-floor levels?”

  “Because I’m trying to attract patients,” she said, “not scare them away.”

  Ethan rubbed the lower part of his jaw, brooding. “Strangers coming and going,” he muttered, “with nothing to stop them from doing as they please. What if you let a lunatic in here?”

  “Lunatics need health care too,” Garrett said reasonably.

  He gave her a speaking glance. “Do the windows have sash locks, at least?”

  “I think some of them do . . .” she said vaguely. At his quiet curse, she said in a soothing tone, “You really mustn’t worry: it’s not as if we’re keeping the crown jewels in here.”

  “You’re the jewel,” he said gruffly.

  Garrett stared at him with wide, unblinking eyes, while the moment turned awkwardly intimate.

  No one in Ethan’s adult life had ever truly known him, not even Jenkyn. But as he stood there on Garrett Gibson’s doorstep, caught in her searching gaze, he realized he could hide nothing from her. Everything he felt was there for her to read.

  Hell and damnation.

  “Come inside,” Garrett said gently.

  Ethan followed her, worried about what else he might do or say. After closing the door, he stood in the entranceway with his cap in hand and watched, fascinated, as she removed her gloves with little tugs at the fingertips. Her beautiful hands emerged from the dyed kid leather, her fingers slender and elegantly precise, like a watchmaker’s tools.

  The sound of footsteps heralded the approach of someone from the basement level. A mob-capped and white-aproned woman appeared, plump and buxom, with ruddy cheeks and lively brown eyes. “Evenin’, Dr. Gibson,” she said, taking Garrett’s gloves and hat. “You’re home late tonight.” She glanced in Ethan’s direction, and her eyes widened. “Sir,” she said breathlessly, and bobbed a curtsy. “May I take your cap?”

  Ethan responded with a shake of his head. “I’ll be leaving soon.”

  “This man is a patient,” Garrett told the cookmaid, removing the posy of violets from the buttonhole of her walking jacket before handing the garment to her. “I’ve brought him here for a consultation—please see that we’re not disturbed.”

  “Consultation for what?” the maid asked slyly, her gaze traveling from Ethan’s head to his toes, and back up again. “’E don’t look all that peaked to me.”

  Garrett’s brows lowered. “You know better than to comment on a patient’s appearance.”

  Leaning toward her, the cookmaid said in a stage whisper, “I meant to say I ’opes you can do something for this poor, sickly wreck of a man.”

  “That will be all, Eliza,” Garrett said firmly. “You may go.”

  Amused by the cookmaid’s impudence, Ethan studied the floor and fought to suppress a smile.

  After Eliza had gone back downstairs, Garrett said with chagrin, “She’s not usually so impertinent. No, never mind: she is.” She led him to the open room at the right of the entranceway. “This is the waiting area for patients and their families.”

  As she busied herself with closing the raised-panel shutters, Ethan wandered through the spacious room, which was furnished with a long, low settee, a pair of deep upholstered armchairs, and a pair of small tables. There was a fireplace with a white painted mantel, an escritoire desk, and a cheerful painting of a country scene. Everything was immaculate, the woodwork polished and gleaming, the glass windows sparkling. To Ethan, most houses were stifling and uncomfortable, the floors crowded with furniture, the walls lined with fussy wallpaper. But this place was serene and soothing. He went to look closely at the painting, which portrayed a parade of fat white geese strolling past the doorway of a cottage.

  “Someday I’ll be able to afford real art,” Garrett said, coming to stand beside him. “In the meantime, we’ll have to make do with this.”

  Ethan’s attention was drawn to the tiny initials in the corner of the work: G.G. A slow smile broke over his face. “You painted it?”

  “Art class, at boarding school,” she admitted. “I wasn’t bad at sketching, but the only subject I could manage to paint adequately was geese. At one point I tried to expand my repertoire to ducks, but those earned lower marks, so it was back to geese after that.”

  Ethan smiled, imagining her as a studious schoolgirl with long braids. The light of a glass-globe parlor lamp slid across the tidy pinned-up weight of her hair, bringing out gleams of red and gold. He’d never seen anything like her skin, fine and poreless, with a faint glow like a blush-colored garden rose.

  “What gave you the idea to paint geese in the first place?” he asked.

  “There was a goose pond across from the school,” Garrett said, staring absently at the picture. “Sometimes I saw Miss Primrose at the front windows, watching with binoculars. One day I dared to ask her what she found
so interesting about geese, and she told me they had a capacity for attachment and grief that rivaled humans. They mated for life, she said. If a goose was injured, the gander would stay with her even if the rest of the flock was flying south. When one of a mated pair died, the other would lose its appetite and go off to mourn in solitude.” Her slim shoulders hitched in a shrug. “I’ve liked geese ever since then.”

  “So do I,” Ethan said. “Especially roasted with chestnut stuffing.”

  Garrett laughed. “In this household,” she warned, “poultry is not a subject to be treated lightly.” Her eyes crinkled as she crooked her finger at him. “I’ll show you the surgery.”

  They went to the operating room at the back of the house. Astringent smells laced the air: carbolic acid, alcohol, benzene, and other chemicals he couldn’t identify. Garrett lit a series of oxyhydrogen lamps, until a brilliant glow chased shadows from the tiled floors and glass-paneled walls, and bounced from reflectors overhead. An operating table built on a cabinet base occupied the center of the room. In the corner, a metal stand sprouted arms with reflective mirrors affixed to rack movements and ball pivots, the whole of it resembling a mechanical octopus.

  “I use the methods developed by Sir Joseph Lister,” Garrett said, glancing around the room with pride. “I attended a class he taught at the Sorbonne, and assisted in some of his operations. His work is based on Pasteur’s theory that wounds suppurate because of germs that enter the body and multiply. My surgical equipment and supplies are always sterilized, and I dress wounds with antiseptic fluids and gauze. All of it gives my patients a far greater chance of survival.”

  Ethan wondered at her willingness to take on the responsibility of life or death, even knowing the outcome would sometimes be tragic. “How do you manage the pressure?” he asked quietly.

  “One becomes used to it. And there are times when the risk and the nerves help me to perform at a level I didn’t know I could reach.”