With This Kiss: A First-In Series Romance Collection

by Kerrigan Byrne

  From that day on, it was her image painted on the backs of his eyelids when he closed them at night. Even when the scent of rosewater had faded from his treasure.

  Today, two of the three maids in the household had been too ill to work, and so the harried housekeeper tasked Titus with hauling the kindling into the east wing of the Mayfair Manse to lay and light the fires before the family roused.

  He’d lit the master’s first, then the mistress’s, and had skipped Honoria’s room for the nursery where the seven-year-old twins, Mercy and Felicity slept.

  Felicity hadn’t been sleeping, as she’d been huddled in bed, her golden head bent over a book as she squinted in the early morning gloom. The sweet-natured girl had given him a shy little wave as he tiptoed in and lit her a warm fire.

  Against the mores of propriety, she’d thanked him in a whisper, and blushed when he’d given her a two-fingered salute before shutting the door behind him with a barely audible click. After tending to the hearths of the governess and the second-eldest Goode sister, Prudence, Titus finally found himself at Honoria’s door.

  He peered about the hall guiltily before admonishing himself for being ridiculous.

  He was supposed to be here. It wouldn’t do to squander this stroke of luck and not take any opportunity he could to be near her.

  Alone.

  Balancing the burden of kindling against his side with one arm, he reached for the latch of her doorway, then paused, examining his hands with disgust. He flexed knuckles stained black from shoveling and hauling coal into the burner of the huge stove that heated steam for the first two floors of the estate. Filth from the stables and the gardens embedded beneath his fingernails and settled in the creases and calluses of his palm.

  A familiar mortification welled within his chest as he smoothed the hand over his shirt, hoping to buff some of the dirt off like an apple before trying the latch and peering around the door.

  Titus loved that—unlike the rest of her family—Honoria slept with all her drapes tied open and the window nearest the honeysuckle vines cracked to allow the scent of the gardens to waft inside. It didn’t seem to matter the season or the weather, he’d look up to her window to find it thusly open.

  Sometimes he would sing while he worked outside. If he were lucky, the sound would draw her to the window, or at least he fancied it did, when she gazed out over the gardens.

  Like the sun, he couldn’t look at her for too long.

  And she barely ever glanced at him.

  Titus told himself if she closed the casement against the sound, he’d never utter another note.

  But she hadn’t.

  It was as if she couldn’t bear to be completely shut in. As if she couldn’t bring herself to draw the drapes and close out the world.

  On this morning, the November chill matched the slate grey of the pre-dawn skies visible through her corner windows. Fingers of ice stole through his vest and thin shirt, prompting him to hurry and warm the room for her.

  Shivering inside, he held his breath as he eased the door closed behind him, taking extra care against waking her as she’d been drawn and quiet for a few days and often complained of headaches.

  In the dimness, she was little more than a slim outline beneath a mountain of arabesque silk bedclothes curled with her back to him. Her braid an inky swath against the clean white pillow.

  She occupied the second grandest bedroom, her being the eldest and all, the ceiling tall enough to boast a crystal chandelier that matched the smaller sconces flanking her headboard. More than one wardrobe stood sentinel against the white wainscoting, containing her plethora of garments and gowns, each to be worn at different times of the day or for varied soirees, teas, and other such events unimaginable to someone like him.

  She favored gem-bright hues over pastels and silks over cottons and velvets. With her wealth of ebony hair and eyes so dark it was hard to distinguish pupil from iris, every cut and color flattered her endlessly.

  But Titus knew red was her favorite. She wore it most often in every conceivable shade.

  In the stillness of the morning, he could hear that her breaths were erratic and uneven, as if she were running in a dream, or struggling with some unseen foe.

  On carpets as plush as hers, his feet made no sound as he tiptoed past the foot of a bed so cavernous that it would have swallowed his humble cot in the loft above the mews three times over.

  Was she having a nightmare?

  Would it be a kindness to wake her?

  Perhaps. But he’d expect to be summarily dismissed for even presuming to do such a thing.

  He dawdled over the fire, laying the most perfect blaze ever constructed. Once the flames crackled and popped cheerfully in the hearth, he lingered still, content to simply share the air she breathed.

  “Is it burning?”

  Her hoarse words nearly startled him out of his own skin.

  Titus jumped to his feet, upsetting his kindling basket, and dropping the poker on the stones with a thunderous clatter.

  “The—the fire, Miss? Aye. It’s burning proper now. It’ll warm your bones and no mistake.” Compared to her high-born dialect, his Yorkshire accent sounded like ripe gibberish, even to his own ears.

  “It’s burning me,” she complained tightly, the words terse and graveled as if her throat closed over them.

  “Miss?” His heart pounded as he approached her side of the bed, then sank at what he found.

  Her braid was a tangle, escaped tendrils matted to her slick forehead and temples as if she’d done battle with it all night. Lines of pain crimped her brow and pinched the skin beside her full lips thin and white.

  She wasn’t simply curled against the cold but, more accurately, around herself. As if to protect her torso from pain. Though beads of sweat gathered at her hairline and her upper lip, she shivered intermittently.

  It was her eyes, though, that terrified him. Open, but fixed on nothing, not even noting his approach.

  “Miss?” he whispered. “Can you—Can you hear me?”

  Suddenly her limbs became restless as she arched and flailed weakly, shoving her bedcovers away from her body, revealing that she’d clawed her nightdress off sometime during the night.

  Honoria Goode was pale in the most normal of circumstances, but her lithe nude limbs were nearly indistinguishable from the white sheets, but for the feverish red flush creeping up her torso, over her breasts, and toward her clavicles.

  “It’s burning my skin,” she croaked, levering herself up on shaking arms. “Everywhere. Put it out, boy, please.”

  Boy. Later, the word would pierce him like a lance.

  She made a plaintive sound that sliced his guts open and made to roll off the bed.

  “No, miss. You’re with fever. Lie still. I’ll wake the house.” Without thinking, he reached for her shoulders, meaning to keep her in place.

  She stunned him by collapsing back to the bed in a heap of bliss at his touch. “Yes,” she sighed, clutching at his hands. “So cold. So…better.”

  The winter air was frigid and damp this morning and laying the fires had done next to nothing to slake the bone-deep chill from his fingers and toes.

  Her skin did, indeed, feel as hot as any flame beneath his palms, leeching whatever comforting cold his hands could offer as she warmed him in kind.

  Panic trilled through him, seizing his limbs. As an uneducated boy he knew very little, but he understood the danger she was in all too well. She was burning from the inside out, and if something wasn’t done, she’d become just another ghost to haunt the void in his heart where his loved ones used to live.

  Snatching up her sheets, he carefully swaddled her enough to keep her from doing herself any harm before tearing out of the room.

  He rang every bell, roused every adult from their beds with frantic intensity. The Baron immediately sent him for their doctor, Preston Alcott. Not wanting to waste the time it took for the old stable master to saddle a horse, Titus ran the several blo
cks to the doctor’s, arriving just as his lungs threatened to burst from the frigid coal-stained air.

  Doctor Alcott was still punching his arms into his coat as Titus dragged him down his front stoop in a groggy heap of limbs and shoved him into a hansom. To save time, he relayed all the details of his interaction with Honoria, noting her feverish behavior, appearance, and answering supplemental questions such as what she’d had to eat the night before and where she’d traveled to in the past couple of days.

  “You are a rather observant lad,” the doctor remarked over the rims of his spectacles. It was difficult to distinguish beneath the man’s curly russet beard if he was being complimented or condemned until Alcott said, “Would that my nurses would be half as detailed as you.”

  Even though it wasn’t his place, upon their arrival Titus trailed the Doctor up the grand staircase and lurked in the hallway near an oriental vase almost as tall as he was, doing his best to blend with the shadows.

  Through Honoria’s open door he watched helplessly as Mrs. Mcgillicutty, the housekeeper, ran a cool cloth over Honoria’s face and throat. The Goode’s hovered behind her, as if nursing their firstborn was still so beneath them, they needed a servant to do it.

  Honoria lay on her back, mummified by her sheets, her lids only half-open now.

  Titus thought he might be sick. She’d become so colorless, he might have thought her dead already, but for the slight rapid rise and fall of her chest.

  The doctor shooed them all aside and took only minutes of examination to render the grave verdict. “Baron and Lady Cresthaven, Mrs. Mcgillicutty, have any of you previously suffered from Typhoid Fever?”

  Honoria’s mother, an older copy of her dark-haired daughters, recoiled from her bedside. “Certainly not, Doctor. That is an affliction of the impoverished and squalid.”

  If the Doctor had any opinions on her reaction, he kept it to himself. “If that is the case, then I’m going to have to ask you to leave this room. Indeed, it would be safer if you took your remaining children and staff elsewhere until…”

  “Until Honoria recovers?” the Baron prompted through his wealth of a mustache.

  The doctor gazed down at Honoria with a soft expression bordering on grief.

  Titus wanted to scream. To kick at the priceless vase beside him and glory in the destruction if only to see something as shattered as his heart might be.

  “I knew she shouldn’t have been allowed to attend Lady Carmichaels’ philanthropic event,” the Baroness shrilled. “I’ve always maintained nothing good can come of venturing below Claireview Street.”

  “Is there anyone else in your house feeling ill, Lady Cresthaven?” The doctor asked as he opened his arms in a gesture meant to shuffle them all toward the door.

  “Not that I’m aware of,” she answered as she hurried from her daughter’s side as if swept up in Alcott’s net.

  “Two maids,” Mrs. Mcgillicutty said around her mistress. “They took to their beds ill last night.”

  The doctor heaved a long-suffering sigh as they approached the threshold. “Contrary to popular belief, Typhoid contamination can happen to food and drink of anyone at any time. It is true and regrettable that more of this contamination is rampant in the poorer communities where sanitation is woefully inadequate, but this is a pathogen that does not discriminate based on status.”

  “Quite so,” the Baron agreed in the imperious tone he used when he felt threatened or out of his depth. “We’ll leave for the Savoy immediately. Leticia get your things.”

  “I’ll need someone to draw your daughter a cool bath and help me lift her into it,” the doctor said, his droll intonation never changing. “If you’d inquire through the household about anyone who has been inflicted with Typhoid fever in the past—”

  “I have done, Doctor,” Titus stepped out of the shadows, startling both of the Goodes. “It took my parents and my sister.”

  Before that moment, Titus hadn’t known someone could appear both relieved and grim, but Alcott managed it.

  “Absolutely not!” Letitia Goode, Baroness Cresthaven was not a large woman, but her staff often complained her voice could reach an octave that could shatter glass and offend dogs. “I’m not having my eldest, the jewel of our family, handled by the boy who shovels our coal and horse manure. This is most distressing, Honoria was invited to the Princess’s garden party next week as the Viscount Clairmont’s special guest!”

  Titus lowered his eyes. Not out of respect for the woman, but so she wouldn’t see the flames of his rage licking into his eyes.

  At this the doctor actually stomped his foot against the floor, silencing everyone. “Madam, your daughter barely has a chance of lasting the week and the longer you and your family reside beneath this roof, the more danger your other children are in. Do I make myself clear?”

  “We’re going,” the Baron said, famously pragmatic to the point of ruthless, he took his wife by the shoulders and steered her away.

  Without a backward glance at his first born.

  Doctor Alcott took all of two seconds to dismiss the frantic bustle of the Baron’s household and yanked Titus into Honoria’s bedroom before shutting them in. “Where is the bathroom?”

  Titus pointed to a door through which the bathroom also shared a door with the nursery on the other side.

  “Does the tub have a tap directly to it, or is it necessary to haul water from the kitchens?”

  “It’s a pump tap, sir, but I’ve only just started to boiler and that only pipes hot water to the kitchens and the first floor.

  “That’s sufficient.” The doctor divested himself of his suitcoat and abandoned it to a chair before undoing the links on his cuffs. “Now I need you to fill the bath with cool water, not cold, do you understand? We need to combat that fever, but if the water is freezing it’ll cause her to shiver and raise her temperature.”

  “I’ll go to the kitchens and have them boil a pan just to make sure it inn’t icy.”

  The man reached into his medical bag and extracted an opaque lump. “First, young man, you will take this antiseptic soap and scrub your hands until even the dirt from beneath your fingernails is gone.”

  “Yes, Sir.”

  It took a veritable eternity for the water to boil, but it seemed he needed every moment of that to scrub the perpetual filth from his hands. Once his skin was pink and raw with nary speck, he filled two buckets as full as he could carry with boiling water and hauled it up the stairs.

  The Baron and his wife swept by him on their way down. “We mustn’t let on its Typhoid,” he was saying as his wife plunged her hands into an ermine muff.

  “You’re right, of course,” the Baroness agreed. “What assumptions would people make about our household? Perhaps influenza would be more apropos?”

  “Yes, capital suggestion.”

  Titus firmly squelched the impulse to dump the boiling hot water over the Goode’s collective heads, and raced to the bathroom his arms aching from the load. He instantly threw the lock against the nursery as he heard the high-pitched, fearful questions the young twins barraged their governess with on the other side of the door. He plugged the tubs drain and turned the tap. Cringing at the frigidity of the water, he balanced the temperature as best he could until he could dub the bath cool rather than cold.

  That done, he returned to Honoria’s room in time to see the doctor, clad only in his trousers and shirtsleeves rolled to the elbows, bending over a nude Honoria with his hands upon her stomach spanning above her bellybutton.

  Even in her catatonic state, she produced a whimper of distress that fell silent when the doctor’s hands moved lower, his fingers digging into the flesh above her hip bone on the line where her pale skin met a whorl of ebony hair.

  An instantaneous primal rage surged through him at the sight. With an animalistic sound he’d never made before, Titus lunged around the bed and shoved the doctor away from her, causing him to stumble into the nightstand, upsetting a music box and her favor
ite hairbrush.

  Titus threw the bedclothes back over her, snarling at the doctor as he placed his body as a shield against the much larger man. “You keep your fucking filthy hands from her.”

  Rather than becoming guilty or defensive, the doctor’s shock flared into irritation and then, as he examined Titus, it melted into comprehension. He adjusted his spectacles and retreated a few steps. “Listen to me, lad. I am a man, yes, but in this room, I am only a doctor. To me, this is the body of a dying human. I must examine her.”

  Titus narrowed his eyes in suspicion, wondering if this man took him for a dupe. “You don’t have to touch her, there. Not so close to—”

  Alcott interrupted him crisply. “Though I am convinced of my initial diagnosis, I would do her a disservice if I didn’t rule out all other possibilities. Internally, many maladies can produce these symptoms, and therefore palpating the stomach will often help me make certain she is not in other danger. You have an organ, the appendix, right here.” He indicated low on his torso to the right side almost to his groin. “If it becomes swollen or perforated it will spread fever and infection through the blood. If this were the case with Miss Goode, an immediate operation would be needed, or she’d be dead before noon.”

  Noon? Titus swallowed around a dry lump, peering over his shoulder at her lovely face made waxen by a sheen of sweat.

  “Your protection of her is commendable. But it is my duty to keep this girl alive,” the doctor prodded, venturing closer now. “That obligation takes precedence in my thoughts and my deeds over anything so banal as modesty, as it must in yours now as you help me get her into the bath. Do you think you are capable of that?”

  Titus nodded, even as a fist of dread and pain knotted in his stomach.

  The doctor reached out and patted his shoulder. “Good. Now help me get the sheet beneath her and we’ll use it as a sort of sling.”

  She fought them as they lowered her—sheet and all—into the bath before suddenly settling into it with a sigh of surrender. After a few fraught moments, her breath seemed to come easier. The wrinkles of pain in her forehead smoothed out a little as her onyx lashes relaxed down over her flushed cheeks.