by Stacy Reid
Nothing was clear to her at this moment. It was all an irrational cry in her heart, but with unshakable certainty, she felt that with touches and kisses and whatever it was that men and women did to make babies, she could show him all could be well. “Impudence has many wicked forms, you know,” she breathed and took his lips in an open-mouthed kiss.
Kitty poured all the feelings in her soul for him into the embrace, licking and biting on his bottom lip and then soothing the sting. She was so lost in him already. With a moan, his lips parted, the hands gripping her hips slipped around to her buttocks and grasped her. It was her turn to sigh, to shiver, and to slide her tongue against his. The hands gripping her buttocks clenched harder, tugging her close and rocking her onto the hardness beneath her.
Kitty cried into his kiss, feeling all sense of control spiraling, caught in a storm of reckless passion and desperation she could not touch or explain. She was helpless against the sweeping sensations working through her body. She allowed her fingers to coast over the sleek, powerful muscles of his chest.
There was movement. He’d lifted her, and now she was beneath him, spread wide for his ravishment. There was furious rustling as he shaped her sodden gown and petticoats to his will, pushing them to her waist. Yet they never stopped kissing. The air felt charged, throbbing with erotic sounds and scents. They broke apart, panting, and she stared into the beauty of his blue eyes.
Love, affection, respect.
“With you I do not know who I am. I feel so much for you, my Katherine, and I do not want to hide it,” he said, holding her gaze with infinite tenderness and that flaming adoration.
She saw it so clearly, and with trembling hands, she touched his lips. He reached between them, his knuckles brushing against her wet sex.
Kitty’s moan echoed in the conservatory.
And he did it again, rubbing his knuckles over the aching folds of her sex. Kitty had never dreamed any touch there could feel that wonderful. His fingers glided up to her nub and rubbed. She screamed, hips jerking at the terrible lash of ecstasy. A large bluntness pressed against her entrance, and he pushed. The pressure felt enormous and decidedly unpleasant. Her breath gasped from her at the burning sensation, then the feeling vanished.
Alexander rolled from her, falling to the cold floor of the conservatory, his expression twisted with agony. For one bleak, horrifying moment, she froze. She had never seen such pain, and the very sight of it on his beloved face nearly undid her. He gasped as another twinge of agony shot through him. Kitty pushed to her knees and knelt beside him. Fear iced through her as his body jerked and spasmed with violent force. She held him, afraid to release him, for his head would knock against the hard stone floor.
She grabbed a cushion from the chaise longue and pressed it beneath his head. But his convulsion dislodged it again. He stilled, a groan rumbling from his chest, sheens of sweat on his body.
“My back,” he groaned harshly. “Something is wrong.”
Kitty was cold and shaking with a frightened knot twisting in the pit of her stomach. “I’ll go for help,” she said, gently easing away and hurriedly fixing her wet clothes to some semblance of decency.
Then she ran from the conservatory.
Chapter Twenty
“Get that goddamn leech off me,” Alexander snarled, his eyes snapping open, an unbearable fire tormenting his lower back. He grabbed the slimy creatures sucking at his chest and flung them away from him. The pain pummeling his body was a ravaging force and reminded him of the agony in the early days of his healing.
“Your Grace!” Dr. Monroe cried, quickly pulling away the rest of the slimy, blood-sucking creatures from his chest. “I believe there is an infection in the blood, and they are needed to assist your recovery! You are feverish and not yourself at the moment.”
A hiss slipped from Alexander as pain crowded his thoughts. Sweat coated his skin, and an odd weakness quivered through him. Despising any form of fragility, he pushed to his elbows and shoved the sheets from his body. The billowing dark blue curtains hanging from the four-poster bed served only to increase the heat. With a grunt, he made to move from the bed, and a cold knot of fear iced through his veins. “Why am I not feeling my legs?”
Dr. Grant came forward, his eyes serious and worried. He pushed his spectacles up his nose before answering. “The spasms this time were bad, Your Grace. We fear the constant movement over the last few weeks did more damage than good. The inflammation seems extreme, and…and…”
“And what? Come, man, do not quibble,” he snapped.
It was Dr. Monroe who stepped forward. “There is a possibility you may never walk again.”
A flash of horror pierced his soul before he buried it under layers and layers of ice, suppressing all emotions. The darkness that had slowly hovered slipped around him, and in its embrace, he found the cold comfort of silence.
For several moments, the only sound in the room was the crackling fireplace and his harsh breathing, before even that faded away as he exerted his will over the raw emotions that could tear him apart if he allowed them to. They watched him, anticipating his reaction perhaps, but he had nothing to give. “I have been told that before,” he said flatly. “Provide another prognosis at once.”
“Your Grace…your many fractures healing would have always taken years. Inflammation is a recurring problem, and there are theories that when the ligaments and muscles are overly inflamed, it can lead to an infection and irreversible damage to the bones and structures, which have struggled to heal themselves over the years. We… I will summon Dr. Perrott from Edinburgh right away. But I am not hopeful a life out of the bath chair is possible.”
“Do not say that,” a fierce voice whispered from halfway across the room; then the door was gently closed.
A ripple of awareness pierced through him. Katherine. He’d not heard her entrance.
Footsteps echoed, and she appeared in his line of vision, striking in her loveliness. He tried to swing his foot from the bed to stand, but his body did not respond, and it took every ounce of willpower he had built over the years not to bellow his rage, frustration…and fear.
She glared at the doctor, a righteous yet frightened lady given the paleness of her face and the redness of her eyes.
She had been crying. For him.
“Surely you are aware of the manner of man Alexander is,” she said. “He will walk again. If your words will not be positive, you will leave this chamber!” Her voice cracked, but she lifted her chin in that familiar defiant way of hers.
The doctors stared at her as if she were an unusual creature.
“I beg your pardon,” Dr. Monroe said with a stiff upper lip. “And who might you be?”
“Leave me,” Alexander commanded, staring at his doctors. “I wish to speak with the lady for a few minutes.”
“Your Grace, you are fevered, and we must—”
A wave of anger burned through him. “I will not repeat my request for privacy with Miss Danvers!”
They complied immediately, leaving him alone with Katherine, who watched their departure with an air of anxiety. She whirled to face him. “We will fight this, and I believe with all my heart in your full recovery,” she said, her eyes alight with fear and pity. “Please allow me to summon back the doctors to tend—”
The pity sent fury surging though his heart, and the awareness he would have to permanently let her go sliced through him like a poison-tipped blade. “We?” he said with such lethal softness, she flinched.
She searched his face and firmed her trembling lips. Her chin lifted once more, and her beautiful eyes flashed their defiance. His brave, foolish Katherine then leaned in and brushed the softest comforting kiss along his jaw, scattering tender kisses up and down its rigid curve. “Yes, my darling, we.”
Her assurance was a hot lance through his heart. He disentangled himself from her soothing embrace
and reclined against the headboard. “There is no we. My problems, whatever they might be, are my own.”
“Do not be a stubborn, boorish—”
“You bore me, Miss Danvers,” he said, softly but with cutting precision. “As agreed, the instant my interest wanes, our agreement has ended. Whatever happened in the conservatory was an aberration that is unlikely to ever happen again, for I would never allow it.”
He cleared his throat and gripped the bedsheets, bracing against the pain he would cause them both. “Now I will ask you to leave my chambers and prepare to return to London. The rent on the town house there is paid up for a year, and the carriages and horses are yours. I will leave it to you to decide when to inform society the farce of our engagement has ended. But understand me clearly, for I shall not repeat myself. Whatever madness pushed me to blackmail you to stay here has ended.”
A raw breath hitched in her throat, and the vulnerability that lined her face shredded through his soul. She held his gaze, her eyes huge and heart-stoppingly delicate, and they filled with tears.
“Come now, what nonsense is this? Tears, Miss Danvers? We hardly know each other.”
The words felt like glass scraping at the inside of his throat.
And he knew if she cried…dear God, if she cried, he would pull her into his arms and consign her to share his damnable fate.
She pressed two fingers to her badly trembling lips. The dark depths of her eyes were reflecting so many emotions, they took his breath. “Alexander…you do not mean what you say. I—”
“I am perfectly lucid, Miss Danvers. This show of emotion is entirely unnecessary and unwelcome,” he said in deliberate accents of withering scorn. His voice sounded rough, foreign to his ears.
Katherine stared at him wordlessly. The look of rejection in her eyes was unbearable to witness. That pain unmoored him, made him want to bow his back and scream. But his burdens were never anyone else’s to bear, just his alone. That had been his will for more than ten years, and it would continue so.
He wanted to lay the world at her feet; he wanted to know her dreams so they could also be his, and to cage such a wonderful spirit as hers would be a grave sin that he couldn’t condone because he loved her, utterly and completely.
Sweet Christ. The awareness was like a honeyed blade, painfully cutting but wonderfully sweet. The agony that stabbed at his chest felt as if a physical knife had pierced him. “You are no longer my captive… Now go!”
She dipped into a mocking curtsy. “Of course. As…as you wish, Your Grace.”
Her lips trembled, but a fierce and unwavering pride shone from eyes washed with tears. She turned away from him and moved brusquely toward the door. But he saw the stiffness in her frame. He almost called her back, begged her to share the darkness that would once again come for him. Alexander could always feel it crashing against his senses, taking the pinprick of light that had been inside him these past few weeks. The door opened soundlessly, and she slipped through like a waif without looking back.
I love you, Katherine. God, I love you.
He bit into his lip until he tasted blood, as he fought the need to shout for her to come back, please. A profound welling of desolation swamped his senses. He allowed it to drown him, taking away the light Katherine had placed in his heart in the form of hope.
…
Alexander felt weak and depleted, but blessedly the ravaging heat had lessened, and only a slight throb remained in his lower back. A cool finger brushed against his forehead. “The fever has broken,” Penny said softly. A gentle kiss against his cheek elicited a vexed snort from him, and it felt good to hear her laugh.
“Rest. Do not be your stubborn self and move from this bed,” she encouraged, and then her presence vanished.
He closed his eyes, taking stock of the various pains and aches within his body.
“He might not walk again.”
“We shall perhaps need to operate on him.”
“He might need opium for the pain. The diluted bit in laudanum will not do.”
The whispers of his doctors echoed while he had thrashed as fever rattled around his head. Alexander grabbed the sheets covering his lower limbs and tossed them aside. He stared at his feet, trying to take stock of the varied sensations running through his body.
An unexplained sense of urgency did not have him tarrying long on that matter. With a groan, Alexander pushed onto his elbows and up, bracing his back against the headboard, and then scanned the room. He tried to remember all that had happened, recalling only the terrible pain that had burned its fiery path along his back, the spasming, and Katherine’s cries of alarm.
Katherine.
He sensed a presence in the room but knew it was not her. If it had been Katherine, every part of him would have surged to life. “How long have you been here?”
“More than an hour,” his cousin murmured. Indecipherable emotions twisted in his voice and scraped at Alexander.
“I need no expression of pity or remonstrance. I’ve had enough for the last ten years.” His voice cracked like a whip through the room.
For several moments, Eugene made no answer. Then he replied, “I have never pitied you, Alexander. A stronger man I’ve not had the privilege to know. My only desire is to inform you that you are never alone.”
Alexander glanced around the room, a shadow of discomfort lurking in his mind. Unexpectedly, his heart ached, and a feeling akin to fear settled in his bones. “Where is Miss Danvers?”
A shadow detached itself from the wall, and Eugene stepped from the window where he’d been overlooking the lawns of the northern side of the estate, then made his way over to the bed.
He made no reply, and unease wafted through Alexander. “Where is she?” he demanded.
“A couple of hours ago, she left this room with such haste, it was as if the devil chased her. There were many tears on her face. And in her eyes, I have never witnessed such heartbreak.”
You now bore me… Go.
The memory washed over him in an unrelenting wave of unexpected pain. He ruthlessly suppressed the tangled emotions, trying to accept that it was for the best. “I see,” he murmured, dropping back against the headboard and lifting his head to stare at the painted ceiling of his chamber.
The cold insouciance that had normally cloaked his emotions seemed impossible to find. His heart pounded a desperate, furious rhythm, and he held the sheets in a tight fist which gripped, struggling against the feelings hammering at his heart. Silence. Loneliness. The empty spaces where he could always find solace were filled with jangled, complex sensations he did not understand for having never endured them before.
“I have only one question, then I shall take myself to the library, where I will drink and read while trying to pretend you have not foolishly given up on your only chance of happiness.”
Eugene sounded angry, and Alexander lowered his head and considered him through hooded eyes. “Ask your question and then leave me be!”
“Do you love her?”
More than I thought possible.
Yet he could not bear to say it aloud lest the loss became unbearable. “I like her,” he said gruffly, scrubbing a hand over his face. “I hold her in considerable affection.”
“I like her,” Eugene snapped. “I do not stare at her like a hungry wolf desperate for a taste.”
Alexander tried to sit up farther to relieve the uncomfortable ache in his back. He dragged himself weakly toward the mound of pillows and cushions in the center of the overly large bed. With a savage curse, he tumbled back onto the bed, hating how he felt so weakened. It had taken so much to be self-sufficient, and to be reduced so piteously again filled him with a fury unlike any other he had known.
Yet there was no piercing sense of loss or pain at his misfortune.
Alexander could not afford to repeat the dark days of his past.
The echoing despair tried to creep up on him. He closed his eyes. Fought against it. Never that, he vowed. He would never be that man again. Even if it meant he had lost the use of his legs forever.
But there was an awful pain eating at his chest. All that was reserved for Katherine.
“I’ve answered you, Eugene; now leave me be.”
His cousin scowled. “It has been a couple of hours since you callously ordered her away from your life. The last time I checked, the carriage was being prepared for the four-day journey to London.”
Those words propelled Alexander from the bed with a strength he’d not thought he possessed. He grabbed his stick resting by the headboard and tried to stand, but his legs would not cooperate with his desperate intentions. A fire rippled along his back, and a hoarse groan escaped Alexander. Sweet mercy. Sweat popped along his forehead, and for a moment he wondered if the fever had returned.
He stepped forward and toppled. Eugene lunged, caught him, and assisted him into his wheeled chair.
“I must find her, Eugene.” What he would say, he had no notion. Alexander couldn’t explain the sensations sweeping through him, knowing only he must go to her. They could not part with such hurt between them. “I cannot let her leave with bitterness between us. We must remain friends at least.” That way he would still have a part of her always.
“What did you do to place such heartbreak in her eyes?”
Alexander turned the wheel of his chair toward the door. “She is a flame I will not out,” he said, unable to render any more explanation.
Eugene seemed to understand, for the man sighed after closing his eyes briefly. “You are very disheveled. Let me summon your valet and—”
“No. Take me to her.” Without waiting for his cousin’s assistance, he spun the wheel of his bath chair and pushed himself toward the door and out into the hallway. At the top of the stairs, he grabbed the railing and, with a grunt, hauled himself to his feet. He took one step, then another, and another before he crumpled.
