She stood quickly, using the wall beside her for support, not wanting to draw out the inevitable pain with slow movements. She stumbled back to her bed and slid beneath the cold covers, shivering. With each convulsion of her body she fought off the desire to once again make a break for the chamber pot. But the movement had taken too much of a toll on her, sapping her of her limited energy. She needed to focus on resting for now. Even though rest was the last thing she wanted to do. What she wanted to do was get up and out of bed, to walk, to move.
She was feeling considerably less sore than she had yesterday, but perhaps that was merely the effects of the alcohol still coursing through her veins. Either way, she wished she had the strength of mind, and stomach, to do more than curl up and wait for death to wash over her. But alas, she did not.
*****
Morning had broken hours ago.
Broken. It was the perfect descriptor for the fragile pieces his world was held together with.
He’d watched as the rays of sunlight burst over the horizon, fracturing the dark sky. It was a powerful image of a war that seemed would never end, and a defeat that came too quickly. There were too many who would never see the new sky, who would never witness another sunrise.
He’d almost been one of those people.
He could hardly bear it. Then again, Desmond could hardly bear anything, much less the skin that he stitched endlessly in an attempt keep himself together. It didn’t matter how much time passed, some wounds never healed. He needed a routine of movement, an inconsistent consistency in his life that permitted him to keep breathing instead of crumbling.
Nothing about his life was routine at present. For now, his life was no longer his own; he had a lady to care for, and falling apart wasn’t an option. Not that it ever was. Women were expected to simper, their fragility a fact of life, while he was given no choice but to be as strong as his shoulders were wide. But how could he be strong and hold it together whilst his entire life felt like it was falling apart?
It felt as though he were a book whose pages were being torn out from the center. The most gruesome chapters were being ripped out and he was being forced to read them, to relive all those terrible moments he would just as soon forget.
Last night he had nearly forgotten. It was the closest he’d ever come to forgetting, actually. Sitting there, in the dim light of a single candle, he was forced to look at, and finally see, the young lady under his protection. He couldn’t help but admire her beauty, and her strength, even as her mind became blanketed by each glass he offered her.
And then she opened her mouth, her fears of dying alone trickling like poison off her tongue. She was as alone in this world as he was and he could ignore the fact no longer. Just as he could no longer ignore the blonde tendrils of hair that wrapped around her like a halo, or those light eyes, or her perfectly smooth skin.
He didn’t want to warm to her, didn’t want to like her. He didn’t want to keep her company or provide her with comfort. But neither could he turn away. She was a beacon in the darkness, but was she a light calling him home or warning him of danger?
Desmond couldn’t be sure.
As he’d leaned in, his mind focusing on her alone, he couldn’t be sure of anything other than the dusty color of her pouted lips.
One large hand dragged down his face, pulling at the hardened flesh in an attempt to put her from his mind.
What had he been thinking?
He had stayed up half the night trying to find the answer to that question, and the only answer he could find was that he had gone and lost his mind.
She was practically a child. How could he consider kissing her? He shouldn’t be thinking about her at all. All he should be concerned with was finding her family and restoring her to them.
He blinked, bringing back into focus the paper stretched out in his hands, resuming his perusal of the days-old news for mention of a missing lady. Try as he might, he could hardly make heads or tails of the words sprawled across the pages.
Three more days of this.
Three more days of being stuck in this place.
Three more days of feeling like he was being torn apart.
Three more days of flashes and nightmares and a woman with no name.
Except, it would be longer than three days. Considerably so. It would, after all, take at least a day or two, for his notice to reach London, for it to be put in the paper, and then, of course, there was the whole matter of her family receiving the paper, reading the notice, and making the arrangements to collect her. Who knew how long all that would take?
Damn. What had he got himself into?
Desmond held in a growl, lowering the paper that was now wrinkled along the edges where his grip had been too firm.
His grip was always too firm. His body was too large. His hair too long. His emotions too volatile. It had been so long since anything about him was just simply right, he could hardly remember the feeling. He wasn’t graceful or debonair, traits other gentlemen seemed to come by naturally. Instead, he was a stone, every experience making him harder.
He supposed he should check on the lady upstairs, but one more cup of tea could do no harm.
He’d just summoned an attendant when his attention was drawn out the window he sat beside. The sight there had Desmond jumping out of his chair, his calves digging into it and turning it over completely.
His eyes made contact with the subject that had elicited his terrified response, and Desmond felt as though he had been shot in the chest. His life was draining slowly away, his vision was tunneling, his ears were ringing. Staring into those eyes, he felt death was certain.
Desmond dug a coin out of his pocket, leaving it on the table, as he stumbled backwards out of the dining room, the paper still gripped in one hand. His eyes never once shifted away from the window until he was out of the room, the window gone from sight. When he reached the stairs, he turned and scurried up them, heading straight for the lady’s room. He received no answer to his sharp knock upon her door, as he did not wait for it anyway. Instead, he opened the door as his knuckles rapped against the wood, and slipped inside, checking that the hall was empty before easing the door shut, a slight snap punctuating the moment when the latch met the jam.
He found her to be asleep. As in completely and totally unaware of his presence, despite the fact that it was nearly noon.
The sun was shining through the windows, the promise of a beautiful day, landing gloriously on her, turning her blonde tendrils of hair into golden rays of sun spreading out all around her head. She looked like an angel lying there next to the window.
Desmond moved quickly on silent feet to the other window, peeking around the frame to discreetly observe the courtyard. After drawing the shades shut, he crossed the threshold to his own room, repeating the process.
The familiar man in grey attending to the horses hitched to a carriage was gone, but Desmond still couldn’t breathe.
What was that?
He didn’t understand.
What was going on with him?
In the next room, scratches were dug into the floor, like a memory carved into wood from when he dragged her bed across the room. And like the wood, memories were easy to create, to carve, but incredibly difficult to recover once they were burned.
He crossed to the foot of his bed and dug through the trunk that sat there, until he pulled out a small metal box containing every possession he had protected for eight years. For two years, this box was all he had. This box was his life when he was in captivity in France. And now it had been buried and forgotten in a trunk for six. How quickly tides changed and the past was pushed aside.
Desmond pulled off the lid and carefully rifled through the few belongings it held, until he pulled out a portrait. It was no bigger than the palm of his hand, but the painter had been meticulous, capturing every detail possible. He stared at the young woman on the paper, fingerprints of dried blood smudged across her.
He’d made a promise
eight years ago. A promise he’d been unable to keep at the time, and a promise all but forgotten since. But he was back on English soil now, and he had to find her. He’d been meaning to do just that, he told himself. But he hadn’t. And now he was being punished for it.
He wasn’t one to believe in ghosts, but he knew demons were very much real. He’d certainly met enough of them in the past near decade. He needed to find the woman in the portrait and put an end to the nightmare he was living.
Desmond leaned against the wall, his strength leaving him, and slid down to the floor, his large knees drawn up to his broad chest, the portrait still clasped in his hand. He was unable to move, unable to think about anything beyond breathing.
Hours passed, but he was numb to them. The light slowly drained from the sky, casting his room into shadows which comforted him. It was expected for bad things to happen under the cloak of darkness, the cover of night. It was the atrocities that happened by the light of day that were unbearable. Desmond could face anything by the light of the moon, when the world parted into black and white.
He steadied his breathing as he finally pulled his thoughts back to life. His life. This life. To the life in the next room.
He wished he had her gift. The gift of forgetting.
There was so much that Desmond saw. So much that he didn’t want to see anymore. Seeing was painful. Remembering was painful. All of it was just… pain. And he didn’t want it any longer.
He closed his eyes. They were burning, just like his lungs, the taste and smell of sulfur heavy in his memory. He swallowed as the ringing in his ears compounded.
He scraped his hands through his hair, trying to pull out the memories, trying to pull the pain out of his brain.
Knock. Knock. Knock.
Desmond’s head snapped to the door from which the sound had resonated.
He felt his heart stop, and then kick to a frenzying start.
Chapter 11
“We have to go. Now.”
There was no preamble, no hello, no explanation.
One moment she was resting peacefully, blissfully free of the headache from which she had suffered all day.
The next moment her door was being flung open, slamming into the wall as if it weighed no more than the forgotten paper in her hand.
“My lord?”
She couldn’t exactly help the tone of her voice. She had just woken from a heavy sleep to find the subject of her dreams having had barged into her room. The last she had seen him he had been practically tripping over himself to escape her presence after their almost kiss. Then he’d completely avoided her for an entire day. Sure, she had slept half the day, as was clear by the darkness beyond the drapes, but that was beside the point. She wasn’t sure how she was supposed to feel or think. How she was supposed to sound. And until she had the answers, she couldn’t trust herself to be around him.
It wasn’t that she was worried about what she would do—merely that she didn’t like the mental torture, the conflicting emotions that overcame her senses when he was near. It was bad enough that she had lost her memories—the last thing she needed was to lose her sense, as well. She needed to keep some semblance of sanity about her and that started by picking an emotion and sticking to it.
But she didn’t know how to feel. His presence was so unexpected, his entrance so abrupt, his manner so distraught, his person so obviously disheveled, and then on his tongue the statement that they had to leave. Now.
It was shocking, and it was worrisome.
Something was amiss. For Lord Thornton to show so much emotion, the inn must surely be afire. She could tell by the barely contained tremor in his voice that it was imperative that they leave. But that didn’t mean she didn’t deserve an explanation.
“And just where are we going, pray tell?” she asked archly.
“My home. Hamilton Hall. It’s in Waiting. In Cumbria.” His sentences were stilted, fragments of thoughts that made sense but she didn’t understand.
She stared at his back as he walked toward the window.
What?
“Why?” she asked, her tone twisting with her brows.
He turned back mid stride. “Because I said so,” he whispered harshly.
Her eyes narrowed as he turned away, turned his back on her as though she weren’t worthy of his attention, as if the concern she hadn’t set voice to wasn’t imperative. She puckered her lips in disapproval.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” she seethed, anger sharpening her tone as she changed the direction of the conversation.
“Tell you what?” Lord Thornton asked, pulling back the drapes to peek out into the courtyard below.
“That you’re a hero,” she spat.
He yanked the curtains back into place, turning on his heels to face her. “I’m not,” he answered, his lips barely moving with the taut words.
She lifted up the paper she’d found discarded on her floor when she’d awoken from her earlier nap. “It says here that you are. Unless, of course, I’m mistaking you with another Lord Thornton.” She raised her brows, as though the gesture would provide insight or answer. It did neither.
Lord Thornton stalked towards her, his amber eyes full of rage as they leveled her. Seething he said, “I’m not a hero.”
She wanted to question him further, to dig to the bottom of what exactly was going on in this moment, why they suddenly had to leave when, for the past four days, he had been adamant that she must stay in bed. But the sweat covering his body and the green pallor of his skin had her following his command as her misplaced anger ebbed.
He’d survived for just over two years as a prisoner of war before he finally managed to be released. He was a survivor, if there ever was one. And if there was anyone she could trust to keep her safe, she knew it was him.
She relented and wasted not another moment’s hesitation before she set herself into motion. She stood and hobbled to grab her small satchel off the bureau, keeping her lips pressed firmly into a line to keep the limited contents of her traitorous stomach within.
“What are you doing?” he barked at her.
“Packing,” she bit back, her limit stretched between the pain of her body, the hungover state of her mind, her upset stomach, the confusion surrounding the moment, and her ready and willing reaction to follow his lead.
“You must sit at once,” he commanded.
“I will do no such thing,” she said haughtily, reaching for her dresses folded over the back of the chair and stuffing them into her bag. “I’m fine,” she added, practically rolling her eyes.
Yesterday had been a different story. Yesterday she could barely conceive of putting any weight down on her leg. She was still sore and there was an uncomfortable pinching in her hip. But overnight the stiffness and pain throughout her body had receded to an ache, especially when compared to her throbbing head.
It wasn’t to say that she felt well, but she certainly didn’t feel quite so much as though she had been hit by a carriage.
But while the pain and discomfort had certainly become less vivid, the precise opposite was happening to the myriad of bruises that covered her body. She looked like a painting gone awry, dark colors spreading beneath her pale skin. Like spilled ink on parchment, the bruises blossomed.
“No, you are not,” Lord Thornton maintained. “Doctor Hart said you must rest.”
“And you just insisted that we must leave.”
She trusted Lord Thornton, though she had no idea why. It certainly wasn’t in her best interest to blindly follow a man so clearly overcome. But she had come to know him, in a way, and she knew that if he said they needed to leave, then they needed to leave, whether she needed her rest or not.
Lord Thornton turned his back on her, yanking his hands through his hair, tousling it even more as she finished packing her bag. Fortunately, she didn’t have a great many items in her possession, so it wasn’t as though it took more than a few moments to pack her small bundle.
She limped her
way to the closed door leading to the hall and waited beside it. There was a hole in the nearby wall from where the handle of their adjoining door had connected with the plaster, however, the hinges themselves were luckily still in working order.
“My lord?” she queried, her tone gentle so as not to startle him.
He started anyway, nearly jumping out of his skin as he turned around to face her.
“What are you doing?” he flung at her again, though this time with considerably less force.
She tilted her head and replied, “I could ask the same of you.”
She didn’t expect an answer, and she didn’t receive one.
Lord Thornton opened the door to his adjoining room, returning a moment later with his own belongings—a small trunk he held by the handle in one hand.
“Why are we leaving?” she asked again.
“Because we have to,” Lord Thornton answered briskly. He opened the door leading into the hall barely six inches, barely enough for him to peek through. Closing the door, he whispered, “We’ll be less noticeable if I do not carry you. Do you think you can manage to get down the stairs unassisted?”
“Yes,” she answered promptly, though she wasn’t at all certain as to how far she could actually walk. Nor was she certain why he was whispering.
“Good. Follow me, and do try to be quiet.”
“Quiet,” she repeated as they entered the hall. “For whatever reason?” She could barely walk and now he—what?—wanted her to hold her breath? He was such a loathsome man.
Lord Thornton stopped just long enough to turn a stern eye on her, a finger held up to his firm lips. Then turned away.
She glared at the back of his head, imagining the craters her stare was forming there, as she limped along behind him down the narrow hall.
“These cannot be the main stairs,” she hissed into his ear when he stepped down a step below her. A steep step.
“They’re not. Now, quiet.”
She wanted to huff her indignation and insist he tell her at once what was going on. But she didn’t. It was difficult enough just lowering herself down each step.
Wherefore Art Thou. Page 8
