“We have to do something.” Nora stood, suddenly animated, clutching the bodice of her nightshift to her bosoms with her one strong hand. “Mercy, aren’t you and Felicity volunteers with the Duchess of Trenwyth’s Ladies’ Aid Society?”
“That’s right!” Mercy snapped her fingers. “She oversees that sanctuary for women. I’m certain they’d help.”
Titus nodded. “I know of the Duchess; she was once a nurse at St. Margaret’s.”
Nora turned to him, dark eyes wild. “Do you think Mrs. St. John could be moved without her husband’s knowledge? She could hide, like me, until it’s safe. She could divorce him.”
Titus hesitated, quickly making some calculations. “If she’ll agree to it, it could be done… gently. Though, I’ll have to oversee it as I worry about transport with her head wound.” He scrubbed a hand over his face, trying to wipe away fatigue. “Higgins, who can we spare to send to Trenwyth’s to make arrangements?”
“I can go now!” Mercy’s hand shot up like she was volunteering an answer in a classroom.
“What about your meeting?” he asked.
“Hang the meeting, this is more important. I’ll go straight away and return with the news.”
“Be careful,” Nora admonished as she received a vehement kiss from Mercy, who turned to plant one ardently on Nurse Higgins’s cheek on her dash out the door.
“Precocious child,” Nurse Higgins chuckled, swatting at the air. “I’ll go get rid of Mr. St. John, though I’d like to dump his arse in the alley with the rest of the rubbish.”
“Like hell you will go out there.” Titus dropped his arm like that of a bridge gate to block her. “If you consider him a dangerous or violent man, I’ll get rid of him. You’ll stay here where it’s safe and see to Lady Woodhaven.”
Higgins pushed against him, but he was planted to the ground, immovable as an old oak. “Don’t be daft. He’d know something was amiss if the head surgeon came out to inform him of the visiting rules.”
Nora’s chest heaved with what he assumed was a multitude of emotion. “Men like him do not like to make a fuss in public. He’ll be back tomorrow, trying a more manipulative tactic. He’ll be as charming as you’ve ever seen,” she predicted.
Higgins looked across at Nora, eyes soft in her uncompromising features. “You would know, child, as you had a bastard like that of your own to contend with.”
Nora attempted a smile, as if she couldn’t stand for her pain to be visible, but was unable to disguise it properly. “I’m two and thirty, hardly a child.”
Higgins nodded, accepting that Nora didn’t want her pity. “We’ll save Mrs. St. John. Believe you me.”
“Make certain you take that new orderly with you,” Titus called.
“Very well,” Higgins called back. “If only because you’ll be an insufferable nag if I don’t.”
And then they were alone.
Titus looked around as if he might find someone to save him from her.
From himself.
All he found in the white examination room was an unhelpful skeleton…and the love of his life.
He raked a hand through his hair, scratching at his scalp. What…had just happened?
Nora began to struggle to pull her simple white nightgown up from the elbow of her injured arm with her other hand.
Galvanized, Titus went to help her, brushing her trembling hand aside so he could draw the sleeve over her shoulder in a way that didn’t disturb it.
He stood behind her once again, sliding exactly one million silk buttons into place. All the while, he cursed every modiste and seamstress who decided anybody could sleep in such a silly contraption.
Silently, he lamented every slip of skin that disappeared.
“I would like to do something,” she murmured.
His fingers stalled. “Anything in particular?”
She shifted with a restlessness he could sense growing in his own body. “I’m not used to being useless. I always have a charity for which to raise funds or some event to organize for…”
“For…” he prompted when she let the silence stretch for too long.
“For the Viscount,” she mumbled before touching her chin to her shoulder to look back at him. “I’ve done nothing but read and visit with my sisters while I’ve been recovering, but I feel well enough to be up and about. Suppose I could sit with a few patients, or help some of the women through a hard row. I don’t have anything in the way of medical training, but perhaps I could provide them comfort and understanding, like Mrs. St. John, for example.”
How charming and lovely, that she desired to help. He understood her need to be useful, they were alike in that way. Compatible.
“I wouldn’t be doing a very good job at keeping you safe and hidden if I paraded you around my surgery, now would I?” he asked, attempting to put her at ease without batting her idea out of the sky. “Your safety is paramount, but perhaps I can find you something to occupy your time so you don’t go mad.”
“You’re kind.” She turned to look straight ahead, and he wished he could read her expression. “Chief Inspector Morley will be here tomorrow. He sent a note saying he had news about my case…” She drifted off as he lifted her hair off of her neck and settled it down her back in a curtain of ebony silk. “Perhaps it’s good news, and I’ll no longer be your problem.”
Was that what she was? A problem? A conundrum?
Something he had to figure out before he could sleep.
They stood like that for a moment, and Titus inhaled mightily, pulling the familiar scent into his lungs. She still used rose water, and smelled of a late-summer garden.
He became a hollow creature, only separated from the object of his yearning by the space of a breath.
And the chasm of a decade.
It was a heady torment. One he should want to be rid of.
And yet, the dragon within sought to roast Morley, as well, if he came to take her away.
He fought his curiosity as he secured her arm in the sling, enjoying the feel of her delicate limb as he arranged it against her chest before draping her cream dressing gown over her.
“Did Woodhaven…did he ever do something like that to you?” He shouldn’t have asked that. He couldn’t know the answer.
Because he couldn’t kill the man twice.
Invisible Wounds
Titus had found no evidence of broken bones whilst treating Nora, and he’d looked for it. But there were other bruises, the ones in her expression.
“I don’t want to speak of William,” she said, pulling away.
Of course, she didn’t want to discuss it, especially not with him. He should wish her good night, then. Should let her go.
“I’ll see you back to your room.” It was as if his mouth and brain were currently disconnected. They would be locked in the lift together. And then they’d come to his bedroom…
Christ, he’d never be able to spend another night there without thinking of her. No matter how often he washed the linens, he’d want to roll in them like a mad hound, searching for her scent.
He knew the impulse made him pathetic. He didn’t bloody care.
Usually, he’d allow a lady to be first through a door, but he checked the deserted halls of his surgery before summoning her to follow him once he gleaned that the coast was clear.
They walked in silence down the hall, past the rows of rooms wherein sleeping patients recovered from any myriad of operations from appendectomies to—God forbid—amputations.
Her slippers made no sound on the bare floors he’d ordered scrubbed twice daily. In the cream lace of her high-necked dressing gown, with her wealth of hair half unbound down her back, she resembled a ghost in the wan gaslight. A mere shade of who she’d once been.
She haunted his dreams often enough. His fantasies.
He doubted he’d be able to walk the halls of his own surgery without seeing the specter of her as she was just now. Pale and lovely. Sad yet serene.
She’d
always moved with such innate grace, next to her he felt like a plodding draft horse. His heavy footsteps echoed along the empty hall as he took up entirely too much of it.
When they reached Mrs. St. John’s room, she hesitated at the closed door. After looking in through the window upon the sleeping woman with naked anxiety, Nora turned to him, her expression troubled.
“Doctor Conleith…” she hesitated.
He should take back what he’d said before. Should insist she call him Titus. Everyone else in her family did.
But his name from her mouth… his breath became unsteady at the very thought.
It would be another thread of his own self-control, unraveled by her.
She shifted restlessly. “I feel compelled to thank you for—”
“You have,” he interrupted brusquely. “Repeatedly.”
“Not really,” she contended, her gaze fixing on the bare forearms he’d crossed over his chest. “I know I’ve added my sentiments to my family’s effusive gratitude. But in the weeks I’ve been here, I’ve not had the opportunity to express just how much I—”
“There’s no need.” For some reason, her gratitude rankled him. It was the last thing he wanted from her. They had any number of endless words to say to each other, and on the list he’d crafted in his mind, thank you didn’t even make the first page. “Bullets are something of a specialty of mine, or were…” He drifted away, both verbally and physically as he turned toward the lift at the end of the hall.
He felt rather than heard her follow him. “You learned in Afghanistan?” she queried.
“I did.”
“I always wondered why you went to war. I was told Dr. Alcott sponsored you to attend university.”
It surprised him that she’d asked after him enough to have gleaned the information. The Goodes had not engaged Doctor Alcott for some time. “He did for a while, but he died of a sudden aneurysm. His family was not so keen on keeping up my education, and so I pledged my fledgling skills to Her Majesty’s Army to further my experience in hopes of continuing my instruction.”
“Did you suffer?” The whispered question was laced with such lamentable emotion, the fine hairs of his body vibrated with it.
“Everyone who goes to war suffers.” Irked to find that the lift wasn’t on the ground floor, he pulled the lever to call it down to them.
“Tell me?”
He looked at her askance. “Of my suffering?”
“If you wish. Just… tell me about you. About this.” She gestured to the wide halls of his hospital. “About everything or anything.”
Something hardened inside of him. Chafed and ached like an old scar in an approaching storm. “Why?”
“I’ve spent a decade wondering.”
I’ve always been right here, he wanted to say. She could have found him any time.
He could only read her expression in silhouette; the glow of the gaslights situated between each doorway illuminated a woman as resolute as she was curious.
She hadn’t always been like that. And, it seemed, she’d the courage to fight battles of her own these days.
Don’t make a fool of yourself by doing something so pathetic as begging, Titus. Her last words fell like shards of ice on the heart she’d begun to melt. I can no longer stand the sight of you.
“It was a short and savage war.” His intonation had taken on some of that savagery, even as he endeavored to keep his register low for the sake of the patients. “There’d been a hailstorm of bullets on either side. The battles ground men into meat, and I spent my days like a butcher, white apron and all, covered in blood. I either dug bullets or shards of shrapnel from anywhere you can imagine, or hacked mangled limbs from screaming men.”
“I can’t imagine,” she remarked, her brow pinched with what he dared interpret as regret. “I wonder that it didn’t put you off of the entire business.”
“On the contrary, I returned with a burning need to not only learn but improve our understanding of the surgical arts. I did whatever I had to, to make it through university, even going so far as to use my skills for rather nefarious people.”
“The Black Heart of Ben More, I gather?”
His eyebrows lifted. “You know him?”
She lifted her good shoulder in a shrug. “Oddly enough, he’s a former enemy of Morley’s, and I take it that they’re forming something of a friendship. It is no small wonder to Prudence. She speaks of it, often.”
The lift arrived with a slight squeak. The intricate and decorative metal door folded in upon itself like an accordion as he pushed it aside for her.
Nora stepped past him, the scent of roses and warm female flesh beckoning him to follow.
He kept talking, doing his utmost to avoid any fraught silences between them. “The army didn’t pay enough for me to finish Cambridge, but Dorian Blackwell did. He needed a doctor in his debt to attend to his men without asking questions. I saved his eye back in the day…as well as I could. Now that he’s gone mostly legitimate, I’m inclined to prevail upon his newfound generosity.”
“Oh?” The question seemed to escape on a tremulous breath as he reached past her to depress the lever that would propel the lift up to the fifth floor.
As the blasted thing lurched to a start, she stumbled into him.
Reflexively, his arm went around her, pulling her to his side so she might use his sturdy form as a bulwark.
It had been a mistake, to press her soft curves against his hard angles. To fill his hands with her in the shadows.
If she wasn’t a wounded woman, he might have taken the upturn of her face, the parting of her lips, as an invitation.
“I’m sorry. I’m not used to these contraptions. I’m rather uneasy to not find my feet on solid ground.” She put her hand against his chest as if to push away, but it stayed there.
Right over his heart.
Could she feel it leaping behind the cage of his ribs? Hurling itself against her palm.
As if she hadn’t held it since he was a lad of ten.
As if it couldn’t wait to be broken again.
He released her instantly. What had they been talking about? Oh yes…
Money.
“I’ve sunk a fortune into this place because I couldn’t stand to practice surgery in the hellholes they call hospitals here. I wanted a situation that was not only specialized, but clean, where patients had a greater chance of recovery, and it’s succeeded. The infection rate is down, and the survival rate is so much higher than I even projected.”
He watched the floors fall away with a glowing sort of pride in each one. “In my exuberance, I have endeavored to open many more like this. The surgery in Southwark, for example, where so many industrial accidents need seeing to. But I’ve overstretched, it seems. I’m often too busy performing actual procedures to raise funds. I’ve financed what I can… but it’s rather taken on a life of its own. And there is always more need than there are those trained to fill it. I’d like to sponsor the education of young talent…”
The lift halted at the top floor, so he opened the cage and swept his hand for her to lead the way.
She didn’t move. Merely looked at him with dark eyes shining in the lone dim lantern of the lift. “I’d give you my entire fortune if I had one,” she said with a youthful earnestness that conjured that lively girl he’d once known.
He had to clear his throat before replying. “You are kind.”
She shuffled past him, murmuring something that sounded like, “We both know I am not.”
The corridors of his private residence were unnervingly silent. Not just because the plush carpeting muffled their footsteps, and velvety arabesque wallpaper dampened their acoustics. A strange expectancy emanated from the shadows in between the delicate gold sconces aligning the walls.
Their glow was dimmer than usual, gilding the atmosphere with more shadows than illuminations. Next to him, Nora was like a beacon, her gown a shock of light in the dark opulence, her hair an inky sheen aroun
d features that were the perfect paradox of soft and sharp.
Titus’s heart gave an extra thump as his body responded to the proximity to her and to his bed.
Nothing could happen between them.
“Do you still like to ride?” she queried.
“Hmmm?” He wasn’t certain he’d heard her correctly. Also, the word “ride” from her mouth instinctively tightened his cock against the placket of his trousers.
It had become a meaningful word to them in their youth. One with more salacious connotations, as they often used the excuse of riding to spend amorous time together.
“Do you remember how we used to fly along Rotten Row? I miss that. If I could have anything back, it would be the horses and…those afternoons.”
“I hardly have the time for such things,” he answered in a tone flat enough to draw her curious attention.
“It seems we should both relearn how to enjoy ourselves.”
“I enjoy what I do.”
“I can tell,” she said, reaching out to run her finger along a small display table as they passed it. “But I imagine you should find some recreation, just as I should find something to give my life purpose.”
You could work here with me. The words leapt to his lips and he swallowed them immediately. Too much. Too soon.
Or was it too little, too late?
“Where do you think you’ll go after this is over?” he asked.
She lifted her hand and caught at a strand of her hair, worrying it with deft fingers. “Well, I’m too notorious to stay in London, I think. The papers have spilled every sensational detail of my life, along with my husband’s innumerable crimes. There is a dowager cottage in the country that I might prevail upon, but…I recently spent some time in Italy and grew fond of it. I think of returning often. I like the sunshine there.”
“Italy?” The very word offended him. “What the devil would you do in Italy?”
Approaching the door of his chamber, she stepped aside so he could rest his hand on the latch. “Men mistreat their wives everywhere. Perhaps I can be useful in that way. It could be a way for me to make reparations for whatever damage I’ve done.”
Courting Trouble Page 10