Blackwell, who had killed men for lesser offenses, merely held up his hands in a gesture of good will. “I forgot how fast news travels in these parts. I imagine Morley will be along shortly, but not for the reason you fear.”
“Oh? Enlighten me.” Nearly finished stripping the skin from his hands, Titus moved up his wrist and forearms with the stringent suds.
More footsteps clomped up the few stairs from the street into his surgery, these weighted down by the burden of a stretcher. As he stood at the sink, Titus’s back was to the door, and Blackwell’s bulky shoulders blocked any view he might have had.
“Where do we put her?” a rough voice inquired.
Her?
Titus froze, his hand at his elbow, his breath caught in his throat.
“Operating table at the back,” Higgins directed in her starched Cockney accent.
“Is—is it Pru—Morley’s wife?” he asked, after clearing dread out of his throat.
“No, Prudence is unharmed. She was kidnapped by her own brother-in-law, who used her as a hostage to not only escape the police, but some rather ruthless cocaine smugglers, even by my standards.” Blackwell examined him oddly as Titus rinsed his hands. “The villain shot his own wife before Morley eviscerated him with frankly astonishing rifleman skills.”
Nurse Higgins—the marvelous creature—had finished Ludlow’s stitches in record time and left Mr. Ludlow to bandage his own wound so she could scrub her hands and retrieve the sterilized surgical instruments from the carbolic acid.
Suddenly Titus didn’t want to turn to look. Not because he was bothered by blood…
But because he’d finally processed the information Blackwell had just imparted.
Prudence Morley—originally Prudence Goode—only had one brother-in-law. William Mosby, the Viscount Woodhaven, who’d just shot his own wife before falling victim to Morley’s rifle.
His own wife.
The room tilted as Titus turned to find his worst nightmare on his operating table.
Nora.
From the Vein
Titus’s hands had never been so unsteady during a procedure.
Never had he barked orders so terribly at Higgins as he sheared Nora’s blood-soaked gown from her alarmingly pale, unconscious body. Nor had he growled commands so fiercely at a man as dangerous as Blackwell, to wash his hands and prepare to help.
Never had he prayed to every saint his father had believed in with such dire fervency as when he searched for an exit wound. Nor given such thanks when he found one.
The bullet had gone through her, but the sheer amount of blood pouring from her shoulder meant the situation was increasingly dire.
“Her pulse and breaths are thready,” Higgins informed him, timing them with her watch. “I shouldn’t like to use the anesthesia.”
“Nor I, but this amount of blood tells me an axillary vein may have been nicked, and if I get in there to repair it and she moves in the slightest…”
He couldn’t say it. He couldn’t even consider the prospect that the only woman he ever loved and hated would bleed to death on his own table.
By his own hand.
For the first time in his career, Titus’s choices were truly untenable. Like most doctors, he’d learned to accept early on that his profession was merely a way to delay death, not to defeat it.
But, regardless of what Alcott had taught him at such an early age, she could never be just a dying body.
Because death wasn’t an option.
“I’ll meticulously count every breath, Doctor,” Higgins said in a gentle manner he’d never heard her use before, as she placed the anesthesia mask over Nora’s mouth and nose. “She’ll get through this.”
Nora. Nora. Her name became the rhythm of his heartbeat as he delved into the intricate sinew of her shoulder. He had to irrigate away alarming amounts of blood to find the correct vein, and then to clamp and stitch it.
Fate aligned with his expertise, as every surgeon knew that each body was made up of similar constructions that could also be as vast and varied in their particular assembly as stars in the sky. Miraculous good fortune deemed that the vein was easily found and that the nick was small, or she’d have expired before they could have loaded her in the carriage.
Titus didn’t breathe as he released the clamp, until he saw that he’d repaired the damage.
His relief was such that her name escaped him on a whisper, and he fought to keep the starch in his knees.
Nora.
He wasn’t aware he’d been sweating until Higgins passed a cloth over his forehead and upper lip, firmly planting him into the present.
No, he reminded himself. Not Nora. Not to him.
Lady Honoria Mosby, Viscountess Woodhaven.
Now that the vein had been repaired, he still had to work on the other tissue and sinew surrounding the wound.
A tremor coursed through him as he looked down at her torso, bare but for where a strip of cloth placed by Higgins covered her breasts. God, she’d always been a small and fragile creature, but now her bones seemed like that of a sparrow’s. The years hollowed out her cheeks, and dark shadows smudged beneath her eyes. Her features were still magnificent, though, and razor sharp. Her lashes black fans against porcelain skin made ashen from the loss of blood.
She was still the most beautiful woman he’d ever laid his eyes upon.
Still.
Always.
Which was why he’d resolved long ago to never fucking lay eyes upon her again.
But here they were.
In the stormy chaos of life, Titus prided himself on being a smooth lake of glass. Reflective and serene.
But right now, his thoughts spun like a tornado, flinging debris at him that he couldn’t seem to avoid.
“Distract me, Blackwell,” he ordered as he handed the man the clamp to discard, and selected other instruments.
The Black Heart of Ben More—who had assisted in a few late-night surgeries for lack of a nurse—had returned from the sink where he’d removed his coat, rolled up his shirtsleeves, and scrubbed his own hands. He looked at Titus askance. “I rather assumed you’d need to focus.”
“It’s difficult to explain, but often distraction helps me to concentrate.” Titus bent over her, triple-checking his work on her vein before stitching the other sinew. He wished like hell her color wasn’t so grey and her breath wasn’t so shallow. That he didn’t suddenly feel like that helpless boy of fourteen scrambling to save her precious life for the first time. “Since my other nurse, Miss Michaels, isn’t here to assist nor read to me, that responsibility falls to you.”
“You wish me to…read to you?”
“No, dammit, just—talk to me. I don’t know. Tell me what the devil happened.”
Blackwell looked as if he might argue, but something in Titus’s countenance must have convinced him because he sighed and relented. “It’s a rather sordid tale, but from what I gather, her husband was—if you’ll pardon my technical language, Higgins—a fucking lunatic.”
Higgins, a woman used to every curse word in the Queen’s English, asked, “Why shoot his own wife, the poor lamb?”
“On a bit of a killing spree, her husband was,” Dorian said with a grim sarcasm. “Do you remember the Earl of Sutherland, the one who Prudence was supposed to marry before she supposedly murdered him?”
Titus gave a curt nod. “I remember reading that in the papers…didn’t believe it for a moment.”
“Well, come to find out, Woodhaven killed Sutherland and a handful of other men who were reportedly Stags of St. James.”
Titus wondered at Nurse Higgins’s astonished gasp until she clarified. “You mean… the male prostitutes?” She whispered the last word, appropriately scandalized.
“Just so.” Blackwell nodded.
“Was he…were they lovers of his?”
“Apparently not,” Dorian answered blithely. “It was a revenge killing, you see. Woodhaven systematically murdered anyone who shared his wife�
�s bed.”
Titus dropped his suture clamps with an embarrassingly loud clatter, effectively putting a stop to all conversation. He took a precious breath to compose himself before directing Blackwell where to find another sterile instrument.
He didn’t make mistakes like this. He couldn’t. Not when the stakes were so high.
Nora had taken her husband’s best friend to her bed? She’d paid men—a handful of men—for sex?
How the years had changed her. Or perhaps they hadn’t…
She’d been a stranger to him the night she’d sent him away; perhaps that was when she’d truly been revealed to him.
Clean clamps appeared in his hand, and he immediately went back to work, muttering to Blackwell out of the side of his mouth. “If you ever tire of a life of crime, you’d have an excellent career as a nurse ahead of you.”
Blackwell’s chortle was nearly mirthless. “Well now, I’m almost completely legitimate these days. I’ve an angel of a wife and two cherubic miscreants with my name. One might even call me respectable.”
“If you find me that one, I’ll find you a liar,” Titus jested, grateful to the man for helping to release some of the tension.
Higgins, however, had to satisfy her bottomless curiosity. “If her husband was a murderer, then, what’s this I heard about cocaine?”
“Apparently, Woodhaven was using his father-in-law’s shipping company to smuggle the drug into the city, and some corrupt police officers to deal to the public,” Blackwell answered.
Titus’s brow crimped as he tried to work out the angle of a lunatic. “Why smuggle? It’s not as if cocaine is illegal. Many of my associates use it as medicine.”
From beside him, Blackwell made a derisive sound. “And you don’t?”
Titus shook his head, then steadied himself over a more complicated stitch. “I don’t like the side effects. Nor the addictive properties. There are more effective treatments that have been more thoroughly studied.”
“I approve,” Blackwell announced. “I predict that, like opium, more ill will come of it than good. However, it is addictive, inexpensive, and abundant on the black market. Men are making fortunes.”
“Did Woodhaven?”
Titus had the sense that Dorian shrugged, but he couldn’t look over just now to check.
“I believe he was beginning to, though no one knows how deep his cocaine smuggling reaches, and he’ll never tell, seeing as how they’re scraping his teeth off the wall of the warehouse where Morley’s bullet planted them.”
Titus dared a glance at Nora’s face, glad it was currently covered by the anesthesia mask. “Do they suspect she had anything to do with it?”
Blackwell hesitated. “That I don’t know. Whatever she’s done, she was bloody brave, trading her life for her sister’s at the warehouse.”
Suddenly, it occurred to Titus to ask about the Black Heart of Ben More’s involvement in all this. “Was he smuggling for you?”
Blackwell’s incensed gasp was too overdone to be serious. “He was smuggling for the Fauves, I’ll have you know. Something of a rival, once upon a time.”
“The Fauves?” Titus searched his extremely limited French vocabulary. “Beasts?”
“Wild beasts, technically.” He felt more than watched Blackwell roll his eyes. “Fucking smugglers with delusions of grandeur.”
“Did they ever have children?” Titus didn’t know the question was about to leave his lips until it materialized.
“How should I know? I don’t socialize with Fauves.”
“No, I mean she and Woodhaven.”
“Evidently not,” Blackwell said with no small amount of pity. “With no heir, she effectively has nothing. Perhaps a stipend, if her father is kind.”
He knew that bastard was anything but kind.
Not wanting to hear any more, Titus worked in silence for a while as he looked down at her, wondering what tomorrow would bring in either of their lives.
He could feel Dorian’s eyes on him with a niggling prickle long before the man spoke. “Before she lost consciousness, she acted like she knew you. She—begged us to bring her here. Demanded it.”
God. He didn’t want to know that. He didn’t want to feel the extra beats that information threaded into his heart.
“I—worked in the Goode household as a lad,” he said by way of explanation.
“Did you know her well?” Blackwell ventured.
The question caused an explosion of rage and wrath to tumble through his chest. He wasn’t this man. He didn’t have these feelings. He’d ruthlessly stuffed any sort of sentiment he had for her down into the deepest recesses of that clear, glass lake. Somewhere in the reeds and the shadows that no one could dredge up. That was where she lived. He’d never even looked twice at a dark-haired woman.
In fact, his current lover was a buxom girl with generous breasts, copper-gold hair, and a giving mouth.
Nora—Lady Woodhaven.
She was ancient history. And yet something stirred within him. An echo of intensity he’d suffered on her behalf as a boy. Did he know her well? He’d thought so.
And then she’d proven him wrong.
Blackwell inspected his work with an appreciative sound. “Did she mean something to you?” he prodded.
Titus speared him with a look so sharp, it could have drawn blood.
Blackwell’s brow arched. “Say no more.”
In the Light of Day
Please don’t hate me.
Nora had made the silent appeal so many times in the past couple of days, it’d become a prayer. A chant. Both an invocation and a benediction.
At first, she’d not said it out loud because she was incapable of speech. A miasma of agonies occasionally intercepted by a sweet, dreamy numbness, had taken days from her. She’d swam in a lake of her own shame and sorrow, drowning in the dark of her unconscious, plagued by dreams and memories of blood and cruelty and fear.
She’d surface from the dark to a world of white. White-hot pain lanced through her chest and arm, whilst blinding-white fluttering veils obscured the world from view.
Then, Titus would appear—a miracle haloed by all that purity—frowning down at her from features older and more brutal than she remembered. She would drink in the sight of him like a condemned soul would their last glance of salvation, fingers twitching with the need to smooth that frown from his dignified brow.
She knew her limbs were incapable; to move would only cause her pain, so she’d simply gaze at him and try to remember how her dry, swollen tongue worked.
In these brief moments of semi-lucidity, she would catalogue the changes wrought in this Titus from the one who resided in her precious memory.
His hair had darkened to a rich umber, though that unruly forelock still wanted to rest above his eye. The crests of his cheeks stood out in stark relief from features once angled by youth and now squared by maturity. His eyes, though etched with a few more lines than before, were still the color of brilliant sunlight through a glass of young whiskey. Light enough to glimmer golden against skin kissed by a foreign sun.
His lips moved, and the rumble of his voice would transfix her so utterly, the words fluttered in her mouth like a riot of butterflies disturbed by a predator.
Don’t hate me.
She’d try so hard to say it, until a prick in her arm would drag her away from him. Back to that place where vivid dreams would first seduce her, then lash at her as they turned into nightmares.
Sometimes when she surfaced, other dear faces would hover above her in the white. Prudence, her features like a younger, fuller mirror of her own, the space between her eyebrows a furrow of worry. She spoke of forgiveness and love, and wiped away the tears that leaked from Nora’s eyes into her hair.
Felicity’s emotion would fog her spectacles, so she’d keep her thoughts to herself, deciding instead to read aloud, her gentle voice a soothing melody in the chaos of Nora’s unruly dreams.
Mercy would often take her hand, s
queezing too tightly as she bade her—commanded her—to recover. To win whatever battle she must in order to return to them.
Sometimes a stern-looking woman with a corona of fair, disobedient hair would startle her awake, only to pacify her with unexpected gentility whilst she took care of necessities.
In those moments, Nora would become certain that she’d merely dreamed Titus and her beloved sisters into existence, and she was really trapped in some strange sort of purgatory, awaiting her sentencing to hell.
Just as she began to despair that the floating void would keep her forever, Titus’s voice breached the haze with a new clarity as he held a genial conversation in her periphery.
When Nora surfaced, she was both delighted and dismayed to discover that she was herself. Her vision swam, her body was unnaturally heavy, and her shoulder throbbed like the very devil, but not so urgently as her disquiet heart.
She wasn’t dead. William hadn’t killed her.
Would wonders never cease?
Information permeated her muddled senses incrementally as she took in her surroundings. The white sheets acted as some sort of privacy partition in what she assumed was a hospital. Her nose twitched at scents unfamiliar to any hospital she’d ever visited. Something stringent and clean permeated the distinctive aroma of creosote and coal, horses, petrol, and the brine and grime of the river, all amalgamating into an atmosphere of industry.
Turning her head, she caught her breath as either the early-morning or late-afternoon sun—she couldn’t be certain which—cast perfect shadows of people on the other side of the sheet.
She watched the pantomime with arrested interest.
An astonishingly tall, wide-shouldered man braced his knee against the table where another man lay. With a strong, brutal motion, he gave the patient’s arm a mighty wrench.
Nora heard the shoulder go into the socket before the patient’s bark of pain tugged at her heart.
Courting Trouble Page 7