Rules of Engagement

by Christina Dodd

  Kerrich couldn’t let this standoff continue.

  “For God’s sake, Cherise!” Colbrook exploded. “What the hell are you talking about? We’re rich. You don’t need money!”

  Lady Colbrook put her fingers to her forehead in exasperation. “Colbrook, you are so pedestrian. I didn’t do it for the money. I did it because I could.”

  With deliberate carelessness, Kerrich stepped aside to allow Lewis a clear shot at Lady Colbrook.

  “What are you jabbering about?” Lord Swearn asked. “Women don’t commit crimes because they can.”

  Lady Colbrook viewed him with a sneer. “You mean, your dear Lilly doesn’t do that, don’t you? But Lilly has seven children. I have two, and I’ve raised them and married them off. Nerissa married a marquess and Daniel married an heiress, so you can’t say I didn’t do well by them. But I ask you, what am I supposed to do now? Sit and needlepoint until I wither and die? I think not, Lord Swearn.” Her gaze dropped to his arm where Lady Albon’s hand rested. “And Lilly knows about your affair and is pleased for the respite, although she wonders what Lord Albon will do when he finds himself raising a child who looks like you!”

  Lady Albon leaped away from Swearn while Swearn sputtered, “Well…not really…didn’t do it…damned woman…”

  Lewis’s hand tightened on the trigger. As the pistol thundered, Kerrich shoved Lady Colbrook aside. Then he flung himself at Lewis, butting him in the chest and grabbing him around the waist. Kerrich had him. He would have knocked Lewis flat if not for Tomlin. Dear, bumbling Tomlin, who always tried to help and always ruined everything. Tomlin jumped into the fray. With all his weight behind him, he rammed into Kerrich. Kerrich lost his grip on Lewis. Lewis escaped, scrambling up and sprinting the length of the drawing room toward the wide entrance.

  People screamed and scattered as he came at them, still holding the smoking, single-shot pistol.

  Kerrich yelled, “Grab the bounder!” but panic swept the crowd in every direction.

  Lewis dashed into the corridor.

  Kerrich followed, his feet pounding on the hardwood floor, his breath coming fast.

  The two of them darted from side to side as people dove to avoid them.

  Half-turning, Lewis flung the pistol at Kerrich.

  Kerrich ducked and kept running. Running toward the stairway. As Lewis rounded the curve, Kerrich lost sight of his cousin for a few precious seconds. He skidded around the corner.

  Lewis was hesitating at the top of the stairs—while the queen’s guard mounted the steps.

  Pamela and Beth led the uniformed men. The governess and the child. They were almost upon Lewis.

  Kerrich’s blood ran cold. He shouted a warning

  Pamela and Beth looked up. The guards looked up. Pamela pointed.

  No one could have stopped Beth. She was just so fast. The child darted up the remaining stairs and hit Lewis at the knees, knocking him forward. He fell down the stairs almost at the guards’ feet.

  Kerrich sped toward his cousin, trying to reach him before—

  —before Lewis drew the other pistol from his pocket.

  “No!” Kerrich roared.

  “Brat!” Lewis aimed at Beth.

  Pamela stepped in the way.

  Even as the guards leaped on him, Lewis shot.

  He hit her. Dear God, he had shot Pamela. She collapsed where she stood, then tumbled down the steps.

  She couldn’t be dead. This wasn’t right! He should have taken the bullet! Kerrich beat Beth to Pamela’s side, but only just. Her cries of “Miss Lockhart!” mixed with his voice repeating, “Pamela. Pamela.” Gently, he turned her face up. She was alive. Good. But blood bubbled from her shoulder and spread into a rapidly growing pool that stained the shattered silk. “Get a doctor,” he shouted. “A doctor!”

  “Yes. I can do that. I’ll get a doctor.” Beth raced down the stairs.

  Kerrich pointed at a hovering footman. “Escort her.” He didn’t think Pamela was conscious when he picked her up, but she screamed with the pain. Behind him, he could hear the struggle with Lewis, but he didn’t care. He had to get help.

  Someone grabbed his arm. He looked into Queen Victoria’s face. “Find me a bed,” he ordered. “Find me a bed now.”

  “Follow me,” she said, and she led him to a state bedchamber.

  “Herr Muller has already sent for my physician,” Victoria said as she threw back the blankets. “Don’t worry, Kerrich. Miss Lockhart will survive.”

  “Of course she will. I will accept nothing less.” He laid Pamela on the sheets. Her lids opened and her eyes were glazed with pain. Her face was white, sweat beaded her upper lip. Blood bathed her torso, and Kerrich swore, using words Victoria had probably never heard. “Fetch me a towel. Quickly!”

  He didn’t wait for it. Grabbing a tasseled pillow, he pressed it on the wound.

  The door opened and shut. People were talking in the corridor outside. Victoria disappeared.

  Grandpapa sank down on a chair beside the bed, looking every day of his age. “Put a rug on her,” he ordered. “Keep her warm.”

  Where had everyone come from? Where did they go? But it didn’t really matter. Only Pamela mattered. She’d been shot with his own gun! Hand trembling, Kerrich covered Pamela with a blanket. “I need scissors.”

  Suddenly Albert was at his side, handing him a pair. “Will you cut the clothing away?”

  Kerrich tossed the pillow aside. Together the two men sliced through the neck of the gown and peeled it back. As they pulled the cloth, the wound bled more. Pamela moaned. Albert handed Kerrich a pad made from a towel. Kerrich pressed it on the wound.

  The door opened and closed again, and Beth appeared. “I’ve brought the best doctor in London!”

  Kerrich glared at the man taking off his shabby coat and rolling up his sleeves. “Quickly, man. Save her.”

  “Aye, ye’re fortunate, m’lord. If ye had a fancy physician, the lady’d have no luck at all.” He said “at all” as if the two words were one, and Kerrich realized he was Irish. “But I’m Paddy McEachern, an’ I’ve been diggin’ bullets out of every man, woman and child in Ireland for years. Now I’m workin’ the docks here in London. I know what I’m doin’.” His claims were as exuberant as a blast of Irish whisky, and as he spoke he leaned over Pamela. Raising her eyelid, he observed her, and when the other eye flashed open, the doctor said, “Ah, she’s awake. That’s good.”

  “Lord Kerrich, the queen’s physician is on his way,” Albert said.

  Lifting the pad, the doctor grimaced at the sight of the wound, then leaned his head close as if he were listening. Raising his head again, he said, “Could be worse. Could be better. I won’t know until I go diggin’ for the bullet.”

  “Why could it be better?” Lord Reynard asked.

  Dr. McEachern’s attention flickered toward the old man in the chair, then returned to Pamela. “The reason it could be better is because if the wound were closer to her arm, I would know the bullet hadn’t nicked her lungs. Probably didn’t,” he added quickly. “Can’t hear her wheezing at all. But I won’t lie to you. If her lungs have been touched, she hasn’t much of a chance.”

  Kerrich’s own lungs froze in the clutch of agony. “Blast you, just fix her.”

  Dr. McEachern drew a long black cloth cylinder out of his bag, and nodded at Albert. “That gentleman’s not fer believin’ me credentials.” He looked at Kerrich. “But this is your wife, I think. Will ye let me do the task? I promise ye’ll have as fine a job as any can do in London an’ beyond.” Unrolling the cloth, he laid it out across the bed.

  Kerrich found himself unable to stare anywhere but at the row of bright sharp instruments tucked into pockets in the black silk.

  Dimly, he heard Beth say, “I won’t go, Lord Reynard. I’m staying with her.”

  But Beth’s words didn’t mean anything, because Pamela could be dying.

  “Will ye let me operate on her?” Dr. McEachern spoke to Kerrich as he drew forth a lo
ng, thin, shiny scalpel. “It’s up to you, sir.”

  Kerrich didn’t have a choice. The queen’s physician wasn’t here and Kerrich doubted he had experience with gunshot wounds, anyway. In a hoarse voice, Kerrich ordered, “Operate.”

  Dr. McEachern turned brisk. “She’s conscious, so I’ll need people to hold her. Sir, will you?”

  Obviously, he didn’t know Albert’s identity, and Albert didn’t enlighten him. He just came around to the side of the bed beside the doctor and grasped Pamela’s arm. Kerrich climbed on the other side of the bed and held her.

  “She’s going to fight,” Dr. McEachern warned as he prepared to make the first incision.

  He should have said she was going to scream. Because she did, loud and long and shrill, and she didn’t let up until Dr. McEachern held the bullet in his forceps.

  Then, into the blessed silence, Dr. McEachern said, “Good news, m’lord. I can safely say her lungs weren’t touched.”

  Chapter 29

  “Lord Kerrich wanted to take you to his house to recover, but I told him that would not be proper. When he offered Lord Reynard as a chaperone, I was forced to point out that, although Lord Reynard is elderly, he is also a male person and unsuitable as a duenna for a young, unmarried lady.” Queen Victoria sat beside Pamela’s wide, sumptuous bed in Buckingham Palace, stitching a needlepoint chair cover, just as she had done at noon for precisely one-half hour every day since Pamela had been shot.

  That had been over a fortnight ago, but Pamela still found smiling a trial and talking an effort. Everything wearied her, perhaps because, although there had been no infection and the wound had healed in a marvelously efficient manner, her heart ached all the time.

  “I must thank you again for allowing me to remain here.” Pamela sat up and tried to shift the tumble of pillows into some comfortable position. “I do have a bedchamber at the Distinguished Academy of Governesses, although not nearly as grand as this one.” This bedchamber had gold brocade draperies and a counterpane, rich maroon wallpaper, and cheerful paintings on every wall. “Every day when Miss Setterington visits she asks me when I’ll be well enough to return.”

  “There is no rush.” Queen Victoria stood and plumped the pillows directly behind Pamela’s head, then helped her recline again. “You’re still dreadfully wan, and that bruise on your face is turning a most ghastly shade of yellow.”

  Pamela touched her own cheek. The stairs had left their mark on more than just her face. She resembled a calico cat with brown and yellow marks up and down her entire body. For one moment, she suffered as she wondered if that was why Kerrich so seldom visited, but she knew that wasn’t true. Any man who kissed the formidable and disguised Miss Lockhart wouldn’t be so shallow as to see bruises, or even a scar left by a gunshot, as barriers to desire.

  And that was the problem, wasn’t it? When he did take time out of his busy life to visit Pamela, the queen chaperoned them, or Hannah did, or one of Her Majesty’s ladies-in-waiting, and while he stood beside her bed, he treated Pamela with the utmost respect and admiration.

  Pamela hated his respect. She spat on his admiration. She could scarcely bear his polite, well-meaning conversation. If he wished to speak with her honestly, as he had done before, no one’s presence could have hobbled his comments. Pamela understood what he was telling her without words.

  The fire had burned out. He no longer desired her.

  Queen Victoria’s voice intruded on Pamela’s own personal purgatory, and with a start Pamela realized Her Majesty had reseated herself and had been speaking for quite a while.

  “So I told Lord Kerrich that Lady Colbrook tricked the story out of me months ago. I had no idea she was so clever, although later events certainly proved she was. I assume she spread the tale of Lord Kerrich’s…um…bareness outside the window that very night to try to cause a diversion from her own activities.” Queen Victoria was shaking her head in amazement. “He is still angry about that.”

  “Yes, but he would be, wouldn’t he?” Pamela’s gaze rested on the vase of roses beside her bed. Every day the old roses were replenished with fresh ones, and every day she inhaled their scent and remembered Kerrich’s passion, then inhaled again and wondered if the scent of roses would ever again bring her delight. But she never asked that they be removed.

  “He was willing to do anything to keep that tale quiet, even adopt that adorable girl.” Victoria grinned wickedly as she stitched. “I’ve never forgotten that night at Kensington Palace. We were most amused. He was the funniest thing I’d ever seen, hanging there in all his glory, and I told him if you hadn’t insisted that discretion was the better part of kindness, I would have tattled on him immediately.”

  “Was he properly appreciative?”

  Queen Victoria glanced at her, her eyes full of mirth. “He didn’t appear to be, although it might have gone better if I hadn’t laughed.”

  “All men take it ill when a woman finds them an object of mirth.”

  “Yes, but I’ve made it up to him.” The queen dismissed his disgruntlement with a wave of her needle. “I told Albert Kerrich was a good man. After seeing him with you and Elizabeth, Albert believes me now.”

  “Kerrich has been everything that is kind.” And respectful and admiring. Not at all like the Kerrich she had come to love.

  Love. That was the awful part. She loved him, and he didn’t even desire her.

  The wretch!

  If only she hadn’t been shot. Then she could stand up to him and tell him what she thought of a man who abandoned a child—oh, for a good cause, to be sure—but he had left Beth to go to meet the queen with only Pamela and Lord Reynard as support. She’d tell him what she thought of men who substituted respect and admiration for flaming desire. And most of all, she’d tell him…well, she’d tell him she was sorry she’d screeched at him. That she wished everything hadn’t ended so badly. That his reputation for seduction was in no way inflated. That their affair could never have worked because…because she had trusted him no more than he had trusted her. They’d made so many mistakes. They’d told so many half-truths. And she just wanted to ask him if he had cared at all.

  Queen Victoria stood, rubbed her back with her hands, and in an irritable tone said, “I just can’t sit. It’s not comfortable.”

  In the last weeks, the royal pregnancy had developed to the point that it could not be hidden. Pamela couldn’t keep her gaze off the queen as Her Majesty wandered to the window and stared out across the London skyline. “I understand,” Pamela said, but what she felt when she gazed on Queen Victoria was not understanding. It was uncertainty. Her own monthly courses hadn’t arrived, but surely that was because of the trauma her body had suffered.

  The queen turned and faced her. “I know what you’re thinking.”

  Heaven forfend.

  “You’re thinking I should do more to punish Lady Colbrook.”

  “I wasn’t thinking that at all, Your Majesty. I haven’t been told what happened to Lady Colbrook.”

  “Oh.” The queen fidgeted with the fringe of her silk shawl. “Lady Colbrook is under house arrest, and we have advised her husband, who should be the head of their household, that a long trip abroad would be appropriate.”

  Aghast, Pamela stared. “After all that she did…devising the plan to counterfeit banknotes, organizing her crew, recruiting Mr. Athersmith…and that’s all?”

  “Yes, and do you know why?” Victoria didn’t wait for an answer. “Apparently she bragged that the men in the government policing forces would never admit a woman had so tricked them, and she was right.”

  “You jest.”

  “She deliberately created a diversion in the Bank of England by losing control of her horse and requiring that she be carried into the lobby and carrying on so that people crowded around and Mr. Athersmith almost succeeding in stealing those supplies.” The queen shook her head. “They didn’t even realize she had done it on purpose! They still prefer to blame everything on Mr. Athersmith becaus
e he’s a man, and because he’s dead.”

  Pamela plucked at the sheet. In great indignation, Beth had told her that Mr. Athersmith had wrestled his way free from the guards and somersaulted onto the marble floor below the staircase. He hadn’t survived the fall, and that disappointed Beth, for she wanted him alive and suffering as Pamela suffered. Pamela could only think of that pleasant-looking, earnest man who loved a young lady, yet whose appearance, personality and value always paled into insignificance beside the radiance that was his cousin. “A man’s pride is a very odd creature,” Pamela said, “and it drives him to peculiar behavior.”

  “I think that is good of you to be so understanding of any man after…after the difficulties you’ve had since your father…”

  Pamela covered her eyes with one hand. The good hand. The other arm was still in a sling, because any time she moved it, it ached and pulled so dreadfully she was in tears. This was a good gunshot wound, the best, Dr. McEachern said, and the queen’s own physician gravely agreed. She had been lucky.

  So what had it been like for her father, shot and left to die? What kind of agonies had he experienced as he writhed alone?

  Pamela hated that Kerrich was right. She had never mourned her father, and now it was catching up with her. Now that she was weak and wretched, her father walked her dreams.

  “I’m sorry,” Victoria said. “I should never have mentioned that dreadful time. I just wanted to offer my condolences on the deaths of both your parents.”

  “Thank you, Your Majesty.” Pamela picked up the silver pocket watch she kept on her pillow and looked at it.

  Queen Victoria took that as a hint, and gathered up her belongings. “You’re tired.”

  Hastily, Pamela flicked a tear away. “Perhaps. Just a little.”

  “My physician says you’ll feel better soon. Why don’t you take a nap?”