by Aileen Fish
“No, it’s true. I’m an idiot. An ass.”
“I might have overreacted,” Emily offered. “Really it’s quite funny. Why should you know my name?”
“I kissed you. Repeatedly. A gentleman would have learned your name first.”
“I thought we’d already established…” she allowed her voice to fade away while her heart rate increased from the simple joy of talking with him, teasing him. She liked the way he kept up with her jumps from subject to subject, the way he gave back as good as he got, the way he seemed to appreciate her mind.
“Yes, we have,” he agreed. Then, very softly, “I’m sorry, Emily.”
“It’s just that I hate knowing you and your family were laughing at me.”
“That’s not how it was,” he murmured as he turned to face her. “The joke wasn’t on you. It was on me, on the whole lot of us who couldn’t remember the day of the week if the butler didn’t greet us each morning with the information.”
“Good morning, Mr. Avery. And a fine Tuesday it is.” Emily allowed herself to turn toward him, to admire the way his golden curls danced in the breeze, the way the sun warmed his bronze skin and the way his eyes showed the smile before his lips even moved.
“Something rather like,” he agreed, the smile blooming across his face.
“Really, you mustn’t make a habit of kissing unknown women,” she admonished. “Had I really been the stable master’s daughter you would surely have found yourself flat on your backside from the burr under your mount’s saddle.”
“I don’t… I have never…” he stammered, a blush spreading over his cheeks. “There was just something about you. I’d seen you from the carriage window when we arrived, you and Danny Boy soaring over the fields, and then in the stable yard. The next thing I knew I was following you, the rest of it just sort of happened. Kissing you just seemed such a natural thing to do.”
Emily closed her eyes and savored his words. She didn’t think he could possibly have said anything more perfect to her if he had taken a year to think about it.
“Can you forgive me?”
“I already have.”
“Open your eyes, Emily,” he whispered and he was closer now, his warm breath washing over her upturned face.
She opened her eyes to find him smiling down at her. And his smile was different, soft and tender and somehow just a little bit wild.
Then he was leaning down and she knew he intended to kiss her, up on a hill overlooking miles of rolling fields, where anyone could, and likely would, see them. And she just didn’t care, not about the possible scandal, not about the repercussions, not about the way it would likely change her future.
Out of the corner of her eye she saw movement and turned to see a giant buck standing on the edge of the woods, his neck stretched up as he sniffed the air around him.
“There he is,” she cried as she spun away, shoved her foot into the stirrup and hoisted herself up to Clover’s back. She disliked the side saddle but had been hesitant to open herself to further ridicule by riding to the hunt astride in breeches. She spurred her mount forward and down the gentle slope as Nicholas sprinted for his horse.
He caught up with her just as she reached the flat ground at the outskirts of the woods. The buck had already disappeared into the lush darkness. She grabbed her rifle and jumped to the ground in one agile movement. She draped the train of her riding habit into the hook at her waist, showing off tall, black boots to the knee.
“He’ll veer to the west,” she told Nicholas. “Into the very center. Which do you want?”
“I’ll cut across and move him your way,” he answered immediately. “Move in a sharp westerly direction so I don’t lose you. God knows what’s in there.”
Emily leaned up on her toes and pressed a quick kiss upon his lips before disappearing into the shady thicket. She made her way quietly and carefully over fallen logs and around tall trees with thick trunks and younger sprouts that tugged on her hiked skirts. Honestly, you’d think Maggie would thin out these woods. The others she’d seen had definitely been cut back.
Emily had been in the forest for a good forty-five minutes before she finally admitted she’d lost the buck’s trail. No wonder, the ground was marshy in the clearing she’d tracked him to, her boots sinking into two or more inches of mud and decomposing leaves. Slimy moss grew on hidden boulders and fallen trees. After she’d fallen on her bottom twice in the gooey sludge, she gave up the cause.
“Nicholas,” she called out. “I’m going back!”
“Wait for me and I’ll walk you out.” His voice came from a good ways away and Emily sat down on a relatively dry fallen log to wait for him. She brushed her filthy wet hands against her skirts, eyeing the green slime that dripped down the barrel of her rifle.
She heard a rustling in the trees and, surprised he’d gotten to her so quickly, jumped to her feet. She slipped, her ankle sinking into a deep hole filled with blackish muck, and dropped her rifle in order to regain her balance.
The rustling grew louder just as she managed to pull her boot from the hole.
“Perfect timing,” she said with a laugh as she looked up, expecting to find Nicholas walking toward her.
Instead, two huge beasts appeared from the underbrush. Emily’s first thought was they were wolves. But wolves had surely been extinct in Buckinghamshire for hundreds of years. As they approached, their massive heads bent low, their slitted eyes fastened on her, she realized they were dogs. Wild dogs. Great big dogs with long bristly matted gray hair and pointed ears tucked low against their heads. Their lips were curled back, yellow fangs bared. They were long and lean, their ribs showing against their heaving sides. They slithered through the ground cover, crouched low, slowly making their way to her.
Blindly she reached down for her rifle, felt the wet butt against her fingers just as one of the beasts lunged. Emily scrabbled for a hold on the gun, groaned as it slipped through her shaking fingers. In one jerky motion she dove her hand into the dead leaves and mud, grasped her rifle barrel and took off running.
“Nicholas!” she screamed.
She looked back, horrified to see both of the wild dogs tearing across the clearing in pursuit. She whipped her head forward and frantically searched the forest ahead until she saw a sturdy looking branch hanging about seven feet up, parallel to the ground. She might make it, she thought as she heard the panting breaths of the dogs gaining on her. They would be on her in seconds.
The branch was just in front of her, five, maybe six steps away. She realized she would have to drop her rifle. She’d never pull herself up one handed. The branch was higher than she’d thought. She’d have to make her jump count, have to catch the branch as she dove in order to gain the momentum to swing herself up.
She tossed down her rifle and leaped through the air, both hands stretched out before her. Her hands grasped the wood hard, the bark digging into her palms. She loosened her hold enough to allow her hands to slide over the rough bark that bit into her flesh and swung through the air, her feet suspended more than a foot above the ground. Then she was flying forward and up. She saw blue sky peeking through the tops of the trees. She soared higher, her body arching as the last of her swinging momentum gave way. She hung suspended in the air for the merest moment, her hands burning, her shoulders screaming in agony. In the moment before her body began its inevitable descent, she twisted, kicked her legs in the air and hooked her right ankle over the branch inches from where it met the thick trunk. She felt a terrible wrenching in her right shoulder, heard a hollow pop, felt the bone dislocate from the socket.
Ignoring the pain, she wrapped her left arm fully around the branch, grabbed her right upper arm and hugged the tree just as a shot rang out from below. She looked down to see one of the beasts writhing on the ground and the other racing under her perch. Another shot reverberated through the air, echoing around in the thick woods, almost drowning out the keening cry as the second dog went down.
Emily rested her cheek against
the rough bark and closed her eyes. Pinpricks of light danced across her closed lids, nausea roiled in her stomach, pain exploded from her shoulder, roaring outward down her arm and across her chest. She concentrated on breathing, on staying lucid. If she fainted, and she thought she might, she would tumble a good seven or eight feet down.
“Emily!” Nicholas roared as he raced toward the tree.
She opened one eye, saw him reel to a stop below her, his arms lifted as if he might drag her down from the branch.
“No,” she begged, her voice little more than a whisper. Her vision was dimming, going oddly blurry around the edges.
Nicholas was standing below her, his hands still in the air. He was saying something to her. She saw his lips moving but couldn’t hear the words over the roaring in her head.
“Catch me,” she whispered as she blinked down into fierce blue eyes.
Then she closed her eyes, relaxed her grip on her injured arm and released her hold on the branch. She let her weight carry her over until she was rolling, falling, tumbling through nothing for what seemed forever.
Nick watched in horror as Emily fainted eight feet above the ground on a thick branch in a dangerously overgrown forest. As if in slow motion, she rolled off the branch and fell. Right into his waiting arms.
He caught her, one arm locked on her back, the other tight around her thighs, and staggered back. His legs buckled and he fell onto his knees, Emily clutched tight against his chest.
She cried out, a long, high, keening sound reminiscent of the dying scream the second wild dog had emitted as his bullet had caught him in the throat. The agony in her cry brought tears to his eyes.
He pulled her close against him, buried his face in her neck. He felt her breath, broken and wheezing against his skin.
She groaned, long and low, and Nick realized he was holding her too hard, too close. She was in pain. Carefully, he lowered her to the ground, spread her motionless limbs, and ran his hands gently and carefully over her. He couldn’t find any breaks, any injury at all other than her torn and bleeding hands, until his fingers probed her left shoulder and she moaned, her eyelids flickering. She tried to shrug his fingers away and cried out with the slight movement.
Nick realized her shoulder was dislocated. He could either pick her up and carry her out of here, causing her untold pain, or he could leave her here while he rode to the house for help. Or he could pop her shoulder back into place.
There was no choice. He took a minute to reload his rifle, setting in within easy reaching distance, before ripping a length of Emily’s petticoats into a makeshift sling.
He leaned over her, his hands steady as he unbuttoned the fitted jacket of her riding habit and peeled the sides back. Her corset beneath was a frilly concoction of ruffles and silk laces, her shift gossamer thin cotton.
Nick sucked in a shocked breath as Emily’s torso was all but bared to him. Her breasts were lovely, full and round, the luscious pink tips peeking up over the ruffled edge of her corset. But what arrested him, what held him immobile beside her, his breath hitching in his chest, was the scar, about half an inch thick, that ran from her injured shoulder, over the swell of her breast, before dipping down into her cleavage where it ended in a perfect jagged circle.
“Jesus,” he whispered.
The scar was fairly fresh, perhaps a few months old, the skin pink and puckered. He ran his finger from where it began at her shoulder, along the top of her breast, to the circle about the size of his thumb.
Emily turned her head toward him and he snatched his hand back, suddenly aware of the impropriety of his touch. She didn’t awaken and for that he sent up a silent prayer. It would be best for them both if she remained insensible for what was to come.
With firm hands, Nick investigated her shoulder, hoping he could get it right the first time. Taking a deep breath, letting it out slowly, he grasped her upper arm in one hand and her shoulder in the other, wrenched them slightly apart and twisted them together.
“Noooooo,” Emily cried, her eyes popping open. She thrashed about on the ground, her corset laces unraveling and tangling in his fingers as he attempted to hold her down without further injuring her.
“Emily, lie still!” he barked.
Her eyes rolled back in her head as she fainted again, allowing him to complete his terrible ministrations.
Carefully, Nick buttoned her jacket up over her chemise and flapping stays, bent her arm across her chest and secured it with the sling. He wrapped his coat around her and lifted her, her uninjured shoulder tucked against his chest, his arms wrapped around her back and her knees. She blinked up at him before closing her eyes again.
He was nearly out of the woods when he heard voices.
“Hullo!” he hollered and Emily’s eyes opened again. She blinked a few times before pinning him with a bright, ferocious gaze.
“Don’t let them,” she whispered.
Nick stopped and leaned down so that his ear was against her lips.
“Don’t let them give me laudanum,” she said, her voice low and raspy.
“All right,” he agreed as he lifted his head and started forward again.
“Promise me.”
He met her eyes again, saw desperation in their depths.
“I promise,” he whispered.
He alighted from the dark woods to see Charles Calvert riding down the hill where Nick had found Emily little more than an hour before. Thank God, he’d found her. If she had gone in after that buck alone… He couldn’t, wouldn’t, allow himself to think about what might have happened to her.
“Em!” Her father reined his horse to a stop and dropped to the ground.
Nick stood swaying before the man, his legs, arms, and back ready to give out. She was a tiny little thing, but they’d been deep in the forest.
Charles reached for her, saw the sling on her arm and halted the movement. He removed his coat and spread it out on the ground. “Lay her down.”
With her father’s help, he knelt and carefully placed her on the coat.
“Sit,” Charles ordered, giving Nick’s shoulder a gentle shove, forcing him onto his backside on the grass. “I’ll go for a wagon.” Then he was off again.
Nick looked at Emily, saw her shivering, and lay down beside her. He wrapped his arm around her waist, his leg over her thighs and she let out a soft sigh and went still.
Chapter Twelve
Emily awoke to a dull throbbing pain in her shoulder. She lifted her hand to investigate and cried out as the pain spiked, shooting down her arm like fire.
“Shhh,” Tilly crooned beside her. “You’ve had an accident.”
At her soft words, Emily remembered the two wild dogs chasing her across the clearing in the woods, remembered her desperate lunge onto the tree branch, remembered falling into Nicholas’s waiting arms.
“They didn’t give me laudanum,” she whispered. Her mind was clear, unencumbered by the blessed numbness that even now, months later, she craved. Oh, not always, not every day. But sometimes, especially late at night when she faced the mess she’d made of her life, she longed for the oblivion the poison promised.
The day before, after she’d learned of Nicholas’s capriciousness, when she’d retreated to her room in humiliation, she’d longed for an empty mind. That was what she craved. She knew some addicts craved the initial feelings of euphoria, the belief it instilled that one could do anything, say anything, be anything. No, she’d always waited patiently for that temporary elation to pass into nothingness. Pure absence of feeling, that was what she craved.
Tilly left the room and minutes later Da and Aunt Margaret entered.
“Em, you must stop scaring me this way,” her father grumbled as he sat beside her on the bed. “Land sakes, I’ve aged ten years in the last ten months.”
Emily laughed, winced as even that slight motion jarred her shoulder.
“How do you feel, dearest?” Margaret asked.
“Beaten and broken,” she answered.
“I could shoot you and Nicholas both for going into those woods,” she admonished.
“It was awfully overgrown,” Emily said.
“I warned the others to stay away, but apparently you and Nicholas were absent from the front steps when I was giving out instructions,” her aunt replied. “Those woods have not been cleared in years. Good Lord, perhaps a decade.”
“Where were you and that boy when you should have been listening to the rules of the hunt?” Charles demanded.
“Off holding hands in a corner somewhere, most likely,” Margaret offered with a laugh.
“Aunt Margaret,” Emily objected. “You mustn’t get ideas about Mr. Avery and me.”
“Mustn’t I?” she asked archly. “You were alone with the man in the forest. He’s seen your bosom, for heaven’s sake.”
“When did he see Em’s bosom?” her father roared.
Emily closed her eyes and let them continue the foolish discussion on their own.
“Honestly, Charlie, you can’t see three feet in front of your face without someone telling you to look,” Margaret replied. “How do you think he tended Emily’s shoulder? Through her garments?”
“Surely he didn’t need to strip her to pop the shoulder back in place!”
“I undressed the girl and believe you me, her stays were flapping in the wind.”
“Oh, no…no, no, no,” Emily whispered.
“At least one of you has the sense to see what this means,” Margaret replied to Emily’s words.
Emily opened her eyes to see Margaret, hands on her hips, grinning at her father. Da was standing stock still, his mouth hanging open as he stared back at his sister.
“He’s seen my scar,” Emily said.
“That’s the least of your worries,” Margaret exclaimed happily.
“He’ll ask questions,” Emily cried in frustration.
“Nicholas Avery is a gentleman. He will not ask about what he saw. Not until after the wedding, that is.”
“There isn’t going to be a wedding,” Emily growled as she shifted, trying to sit up. She was not going to have this discussion lying flat on her back. “Please, Da, help me to sit up.”