up a spoon and a small brown bottle from a tray beside the bed, she asked, “Do you want—?”
“No,” he said, recalling the nightmarish narcotic-induced sleep he’d endured after being wounded at Corunna. “Pain is…tolerable. Don’t like being cloth-headed.”
“As you wish. The doctor also said you might have difficulty breathing, if the injury affected the lung.”
“Hard to tell,” he said with a grimace, “but I can breathe.” Inhaling deeply enough to utter more than a few words at a time, however, was a different matter.
“Praise heaven!” She opened her mouth as if to say something else, then hesitated.
Jack might be in a sorry state, but he wasn’t half-dead enough not to feel a spark of masculine response as she ran the tip of her tongue over those plump lips. “Do you remember…how you became injured?” she said at last.
Why she had tried to kill him? he asked himself. A disturbing vision of her lovely face contorted with hate flickered through his mind and he inhaled sharply, then gasped as another surge of pain seared his chest.
He struggled to regain his concentration. If he could induce her to describe what had happened, maybe he could find out what had prompted her violent response.
“It’s all…rather hazy.”
“It cannot possibly be sufficient, given the injuries you’ve suffered, but I owe you an enormous apology. You had challenged me to a fencing match—you remember that?”
He nodded, prompting her to continue.
“Sometime during the match,” she said, moistening her lips again, “the protector on my blade became dislodged. Being unaware of this, when you chanced to drop your guard and I saw a chance to score a hit, I took it. I never dreamed…!” She stopped again, her eyes and expression mirroring a clear distress. “The fault is entirely mine.”
“Had I done you some injury,” he asked, gritting his teeth against the increasing pain of each inhaled breath, “that you felt moved to attack?”
Her face coloring, she didn’t immediately reply. So she knew her response had been disproportionate. Why? he wondered anew.
“Of course you had done me no injury,” she said after a moment. “I—I merely wished to test my skill against one who was accounted a superb swordsman.”
“Our relative positions now…argue against that,” he observed wryly.
“There is no way I can make restitution for all you have suffered, but I have arranged to oversee your care until you are sufficiently recovered to be transported to your family’s estate, which Lord Darnley assured me you would wish as soon as possible. At the moment, you are lodged in my house on Mount Street. Not a very…respectable arrangement, I realize, but there seemed no other recourse, you being far too ill to be left—”
“Nay, madam, don’t apologize! I should be…in bad case indeed had you returned me to Albany. Only hope I’ve not been…too much of a charge.” He attempted a smile. “Many a gentleman would consider…a sword wound a trifling cost…to lie where I do now.”
“Not if theirs were the chest pierced by the blade,” she retorted, ignoring his attempt at gallantry. “In any event, I shall arrange for your journey as soon as the physician allows. Though I fear,” she added with a sigh, “that shall not be soon enough to prevent the troubling news of your present…situation from reaching your family.”
“My family will thank you,” Jack replied, surprised that Lady Belle seemed aware of the distress his mother might well experience upon hearing her only son was being nursed by the ton’s most celebrated Fashionable Impure. Odd, he thought, that a woman who had embraced a calling like Belle’s would spare a thought over how an association with her would be viewed by respectable people.
“Do you feel up to drinking some broth?”
At her question, he realized he was indeed hungry, though broth didn’t appeal. “Feel like having the steak…I didn’t finish for breakfast.”
“Beefsteak might be a tad ambitious,” she replied with a smile.
Despite the pain, Jack’s breath caught at how the sudden warmth of that expression, seen for the first time up close, magnified the natural beauty of her face. Though she was garbed in a high-necked, plain gray gown, her hair once again pulled severely back, the Quaker austerity of dress and coiffure seemed to emphasize rather than detract from the perfection of her features.
A smiling Botticelli angel, bending over his sickbed.
Extraordinary that a woman of her profession could exude such an aura of innocence. He felt that he might be content to spend the rest of his days simply gazing at her.
No wonder Bellingham had been so besotted.
And you, Carrington, had best keep a tight hold over your senses during the time you spend under her roof.
“Besides, that would have been breakfast yesterday,” she continued while he remained speechless, staring like a lackwit. “’Tis evening now, so you were unconscious nearly a day and a half. Indeed, I was beginning to feel I must call Dr. Thompson back to check you again.”
“That long?” Jack asked, shocked. As he studied her, recovering now from his bedazzlement, he noticed shadows beneath her eyes…and pulled up by the bed, a chair with a shawl draped over its back. “You tended me…all that time?”
“My companion Mae, though she possesses the kindest heart imaginable, turned queasy at the sight of you, the footman was little better, and I feared that my butler, a former prize-fighter, might not be gentle enough. But now that you are awake, I shall send Watson in and rest.”
“Please do! I apologize for being…such a burden.”
“Having been the instrument of your injury, ’twas only right that I do everything possible to assist you. In any case, I should not have been able to sleep until you regained your senses, giving me more confidence in your eventual recovery. Now, the doctor tells me rest and quiet are essential for healing, and I know you—and your family—will wish to have you on your way as quickly as possible.”
With that, she offered him another sip of water, bracing his shoulder as he leaned forward to drink. This time, Jack found his meager strength fading even more quickly—and now that he’d had time to sort out the gradations of pain and pressure in his chest, he discovered that breathing was becoming more difficult, as well.
He couldn’t stifle a groan as she eased him back against his pillows. There was so much more he wanted to ask her, but the words seemed to elude his grasp. “Sleep…might be…wise,” he admitted.
“You’re sure about the laudanum? Sleep, then.”
For the few moments before the vortex of pain and fatigue sucked him down to oblivion, he savored the feel of her fingers, gently stroking his face.
FOR THE NEXT TWO DAYS, Jack dozed and woke and dozed again, except when roused for the doctor’s periodic visits, experiences uncomfortable enough that afterward he several times accepted
