“But you are not? Hysterical?”
She shrugged. “That was the first time. But it was worth it. It kept you from the death room and that was all that mattered. I threatened to work upon you by myself if they did not do so. It wasn’t until I reminded them who my father was and what I could do that they acquiesced. And truly, you have been my main concern over the past three weeks. My other patients are all in the beds next to you.”
The throbbing all over his body had built up in force—painful, pounding pulses that made it hard to concentrate on her words.
He sucked in air, seething out words. “Pain—why pain?”
Her brow instantly furrowed and she leaned forward, fussing with the bandage still wrapped around the top of his head. “Your head? The swelling finally receded around the wound two days ago, although I imagine it still throbs.” Her frown deepened as she craned her neck to look down at his body under the sheets. “Your side survived quite nicely, as the bullet went clean through. So I imagine it is your foot.”
“What happened to my foot?”
“A bullet shattered the bones in your ankle after it tore through your foot.” She visibly tensed, bracing herself. “I made them remove the bullet, and I fear they should have just taken the foot, but they didn’t. It has not been healing well. There is still infection.”
He nodded, his eyes closing as he focused in on the brunt of the pain racking his body.
He was to be lame.
He escaped with his sight, but also a leg he would never be able to stand upon properly again.
And it would do no good to allow even a moment of deceiving himself on the matter.
He looked to her. “I assume I will have difficulty walking?”
“Yes, it is almost certain. But one never knows.” Her eyebrows drew upward. “You appear to be rather accepting of the fact.”
“I knew what could happen to me when I signed onto the crown’s sharpshooter regiment. But this is not death. It is not to the extreme that many I imagine in this hospital will have to deal with.”
The tension in her face shifted in that moment, the apprehension in her green eyes giving way to relief. He imagined she dealt with men far too often that had lost a great deal, and that she often had to be the bearer of the news. Some men handled losing a leg, an arm, or a foot with grace. Most did not. And she would inevitably take the brunt of it. He was not about to add to that burden.
“Where are we?”
“Safe. In a hospital by the sea.” Her gaze skittered about. She’d stopped bracing herself, but didn’t trust there wasn’t an upcoming explosion. “I should get fresh bandages.”
She stood, but Hunter couldn’t let her out of his sight just yet. He reached out and grabbed her wrist. “You fared your…fall well?”
“From the window?”
A cringe creased the edges of his eyes and he nodded.
Her left palm settled flat against the front of her white apron. “Well enough.”
“Your father?”
She looked up and out the window next to his bed as instant tears welled in her eyes. Tears that she didn’t let fall. “He did not survive. A knife went into his right lung.”
His fingers tightened around her wrist. “I’m sorry I could not protect him. And the soldiers you were tending to?”
Her gaze dropped to him. “All but one made it alive from the building. Two others have since died. The other seven are alive and recovering—some already back on English soil.”
“How did we survive? They breached…they breached the door.” His eyes squinted shut, searching through the blackness for the memory. Shoving her out the window was the last image he could conjure of those moments.
He opened his eyes to her.
Her head angled slightly to the side as her green eyes searched his face. “You don’t know?”
He shook his head. “I pushed you out the window. That is my last memory.”
She shuffled a step toward the head of the bed, looking down at him. “By all accounts of the few injured men able enough to witness the scene, you saved them. You saved all of them. You were still moving, still shooting, still fighting after all three shots went into you.” Her voice lowered. “I was not pandering when I said you are a hero, Hunter—Mr. Crawford. And the men you saved, three of them were sons of the peerage—a grandson of a duke, sons of an earl and a baron. The crown is most grateful.”
His eyes closed as he took in the news. Even with her words, all he could remember was the feel of the first bullet tearing into his side and then nothing after that.
He looked up to her, meeting her green eyes. “But your father died.”
Her lips drew inward for a long second, her eyes darkening, and then she exhaled, nodding.
“What is your name?”
For a long moment, he thought she wasn’t about to tell him. His fingers about her wrist loosened, dropping from her skin.
Her eyebrows lifted, and she glanced quickly over her shoulder to the other men in beds before looking to him. “Eliza Wilson.”
“Eliza? I didn’t hear your father call you that.”
“He rarely did.” She leaned down, straightening the fold of the blanket draped along his chest. “I must go and get you tea and broth. You still have much to recover from and I intend to see that you do.”
~~~
Her father had warned her against this. Demanded this of her.
Do not fall in love with a soldier.
It had been simple. The one request, the one rule he had required her to adhere to.
It had been the only condition for her to accompany him onto the continent, into the fringes of the war.
Bridget had clung to that rule without fail. For all the men teetering on the brink of death, looking up at her as though she were an angel. For all the men that had their wits and their charm about them, looking up at her as though she were water in the desert.
Promises of the world were constantly offered. But promises were not reality.
Wounded soldiers needed someone to hold onto while they were in a sick bed, and then one of two things would happen. They would die. Or they would abandon her and go back to their families, their fiancées, their wives, their children—their lives before the war. It wasn’t hard to predict the future. Her father’s rule had been an obvious necessity. Not falling in love had been easy.
Until her father had died. And the one man she had known—down to the bottom of her soul—she needed to save from an agonizing death, had woken up.
Hunter.
The moment she removed his bandages and their eyes locked. That was the moment when the one rule she needed to live by abandoned her. The moment when his dark eyes found her.
That she had spent every day since then with him—six weeks of seeing his dark eyes light up every morning at the sight of her—had not helped matters. By his bedside. Forcing food into him. Changing his dressings. Supporting his side as he took those first few agonizingly painful steps on his mangled foot. Sitting outside in the sunshine with him, the brisk air of the sea whipping strands from her tight chignon into his face.
For all of the pain racking his body, he had, since the first day he awoke, managed to smile over the pain. Managed to put humor into his voice, covering much of what she could see right through.
He wasn’t just a hero that had saved her. He was a man. A man with hopes and dreams and fears and curiosity. A man that could keep up the spirits of the men in the beds next to him with his absurdly wry observations of the drudgery of life and death in an infirmary.
And then the pain in his eyes had lessened, and in its place, a heat had started to radiate from his dark eyes when he looked at her. She saw it, even though she had attempted to ignore it for a solid week. Even though he never insinuated anything untoward.
She saw it.
How his look studied her every movement with intensity as he listened to her. His dark eyes with the silver blue flecks in his left iris revealed everything. Re
vealed how his hands, his mouth, his body wanted her. How he wanted to devour her. That heat he didn’t attempt to disguise.
Then he had kissed her and her world had tilted. Every fiery look, every time his skin brushed hers, all she could think about was the next time they could find a secluded spot—by the ocean, along the back walk—anywhere he could wrap his arms around her and make her heart thunder.
And then two days ago Hunter had told her he loved her.
For two days, she had avoided it. They had been out by the sea, sitting on her favorite rocky outcropping and watching the latest ship from England cut across the choppy waters. The sun had nearly set, and he had told her he loved her, wanted her for all of time. It had been both beautiful and crushing and the only thing she could do was bumble herself away from him at his low words, his intense look slicing into her as she left him.
It was the one rule. The one.
Do not fall in love with a soldier.
But her father was dead. And Hunter was very much alive.
Bridget’s feet stopped at the door and she looked up at the front white stone facade of the abbey that had been converted into a hospital.
She was ready.
Ready to tell him.
She took a deep breath, setting her hand on the door handle.
She was going to march in there, up the stairs and into the recovery ward, pull him into the nook by the stairs, and tell him. Tell him that she had him in her heart just as fiercely as he had her. Tell him everything she had hidden from him.
The door opened in front of her, jamming into her knuckles.
“Miss Wilson—I apologize. I did not injure you?”
Bridget stepped back from the door, looking at Randolph and the black eye he had received yesterday from the wild elbow of a man losing his foot. A young surgeon’s apprentice, Randolph was her age and a half head shorter than her, and he had arrived at the hospital four weeks ago. From Sussex, he had latched onto her after discovering who her father had been.
Randolph already had much book knowledge on the human body, but he was squeamish and far too timid when the saws came out. Something she sympathized with far more than the surgeons and physicians at the hospital did. She remembered well how wretchedly difficult it had been the first time she had helped to hold a man down as her father sawed off his leg. But she had been much younger, thirteen, when her father had decided she could help with patients. She’d had years to harden herself against the screams and the blood. Randolph had not. Though he was quickly learning.
Bridget shook her hand, her knuckles stinging. “No, my hand is fine. How is your eye?”
He shrugged. “I can see out of it today, which is an accomplishment.” He held the door for her.
“Are you on your way out? Were you here all night?” Bridget squeezed past him through the doorway.
“No. There are some more men that should be arriving this morn, and I was sent down to determine if they are near.”
Bridget nodded. “I will see you inside, then.”
Spinning from Randolph, she moved quickly to the stairs to escape him. While she liked the young man, for the conversation she was about to have with Hunter she preferred as much privacy as she could muster in these tight quarters.
Smoothing the front of her long apron along her stomach, she bounded up the steps to the expansive ballroom on the second level that had become the main ward in the abbey.
She saw it immediately.
The empty bed by the window at the far end of the ballroom. The last bed in the long row sat empty, white sheets crisply turned down and waiting for a new patient.
Her gaze flew around the room, searching faces. Hunter was not in any of the forty beds.
Time slowed, and she stood there, searching the faces again and again. Searching the empty bed for Hunter to suddenly appear in it.
Randolph passed by her carrying a bundle of bandages. Her hand whipped out to grab his forearm and stop him.
“Randolph—where is Lieutenant Crawford?”
Randolph spun back to her. “Lieutenant Crawford?” He glanced back over his shoulder to the empty bed at the opposite side of the ballroom. He looked back to her. “He moved out of the ward. I saw him leave.”
“Moved out?” Her forehead scrunched. The next ship back to England wasn’t due for another week. She shook Randolph’s arm. “As in he was sent back to England on a ship?”
His eyes darkened. “No, Miss Wilson. No. There was no ship.”
“Then they moved him to some other location? Where did they move him to?”
Randolph shook his head, a frown taking over the bottom half of his face. “No, Miss Wilson. As in he left. Back to the field, maybe, though he wouldn’t be welcome in any regiment with his foot as it is. Maybe he joined a ship going elsewhere. I don’t know. I only know he left. I passed him as he went.”
“Did he—he leave a note for me? A letter? He must have left something.”
Randolph’s cheeks lifted in a grimace. “No, Miss Wilson. Not that I know of.”
Her fingers slipped from Randolph’s forearm. Slipped and dangled, numb to her side.
Her breath lodged in her throat as her eyes travelled to the empty bed.
He had been fine when she had left him last night. Fine. Smiling. His hand squeezing hers, unwilling to let her go.
In a daze, she moved across the room to his bed and searched the sheets, the table, below the bed, desperate for a note, the smallest scrap of paper that he would have left for her.
Nothing.
But he had been fine. Normal. Adoring her. Teasing her.
Fine.
Had he been hiding it—hiding his escape from her? His plans to abandon her?
Her head shook, near to a shiver.
No.
He was fine.
Or he was gone.
Her gaze focused on the pillow. The pillow that had cradled his head not hours ago.
Do not fall in love.
Her father’s voice echoed, pounding in her head.
They will love you until they don’t need you any longer, Bridget. They will dismiss you without a backward glance.
There was a reason for her father’s rule.
A good reason.
A reason she should have respected.
{ Chapter 3 • To Capture a Warrior }
London
May 1815
Hunter ducked his head down, moving as nonchalantly into the building as his tall frame would allow. He closed the door behind him softly, not that the noise of the brittle hinges could be heard over the coughing moans filling the space.
His chin to his chest, he searched the large space without lifting his head, his eyes drifting across the rows of people in the room that stretched to the full depth of the building. Cranesbill Hospital. Mayhem in the extreme. People jostled about, some well ones tending to the sick or injured next to them. Blood and phlegm splattered to the hay covering the ragged wood floor. Arguments erupted from all corners. People in pain.
He was no stranger to St. Giles. He had spent far too much time in the area after he arrived back from the continent.
But this—this he was unprepared for. A confluence of the sick and squalor, of the wails and stench. The putrescence of the whole area stuffed into a tiny pocket.
And this was just the entrance area of the sick house. Three more levels loomed above him, teeming with the downtrodden.
He had hoped to find Aldair in this main room. But a quick scan of the large room told him he would not be so lucky. Hunter was not particularly enamored with the idea of searching room to room for his friend and fellow guard at the Revelry’s Tempest gaming hall, though that was what needed to happen next.
He stepped further into the room, picking his way through standing bodies jostling for spots on the benches. At the stairwell to his left, two women—the first one tall and hulking—emerged and immediately started walking toward the back of the room, stepping over the limbs and legs stretched
out in between the wooden benches scattered about.
Hunter quickly moved to the stairwell, thinking to move up to the next level unnoticed when the second woman’s voice cut above the din. He stopped.
“All this has happened in the few hours I have been gone? Has no one been working, Marjorie?”
Hunter stopped at the entrance to the stairwell, staring at the back of the woman’s head. A black cap covered her hair, the strings of a long white apron knotted at her neck and waist with the stark white ends hanging down along the back of her black dress.
Her voice was scratchy, as if she were a man that had spent the night at a club with cheroot after cheroot and a healthy decanter of brandy.
Scratchy, but oddly familiar.
So familiar, he veered from the stairwell and followed their path through the sick and injured.
“Yes, but it was unexpected how many arrived this morning.” The tall woman turned to the shorter one as they walked. “There is a cough that is sweeping Lacey Street. You were gone much longer than anticipated, Bridget.”
The women shuffled along the room, the shorter woman with the black cap pausing, bending down to whisper to people, creating order where there was none in her wake.
Hunter kept his distance, but remained close enough to hear them.
“Yes, Bournestein kept me far longer than he should have.” The shorter woman stopped, setting her fingers along the obviously swollen neck of a young boy propped next to his mother. Poking and prodding, her words didn’t stop. “But I needed to convince him of the need to purchase the adjoining building as well so we don’t continue to have to dig out of chaos such as this.”
“Will he do it?”
“He is actually considering the proposal, as far as I can determine. One never knows with Bournestein.” Her hand lifted to swing around her as she stood from the boy and continued to walk to the rear of the room. “Yet I should be able to be gone for days and this place should still be able to run efficiently. If we cannot handle even a morning without me here, how are we to support the extra space the adjoining building will give us?”
Logan’s Legends: A Revelry's Tempest Regency Romance Box Set Page 11