LITMIR.BIZ

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probably wouldn’t remain secret much longer.

      Captain Carrington would just have to deal with the problem later, Belle thought with a sigh. One could only hope that his mother had the strength of mind Lord Darnley claimed—and that he didn’t have a fiancée waiting somewhere with a tendency to be missish.

      Grimacing at the sticky residue of blood on her hands, Belle wiped them on her ruined trousers. “Gentlemen, with your leave, I will go make myself presentable. Ask Armaldi’s staff to have my coach made ready. I’ll return shortly to help you transport Captain Carrington. Thank you again for your prompt assistance.”

      Darnley and Ludlowe bowed. “Jack is one of my oldest friends. I would do anything for him,” Darnley affirmed.

      Including never forgiving someone who’d done him an injury, Belle thought as she walked out.

      Pensively Belle paced back to the small room Armaldi allotted her as a dressing chamber, thankful that an errand had prevented Mae from accompanying her this morning. As she rang for a maid to assist her, another sigh escaped as she considered what her excitable companion would have to say once she learned of this morning’s work.

      A few moments later, suitably dressed and outwardly composed, Belle returned to help Armaldi and the captain’s friends carefully convey his still-unconscious body into Belle’s waiting carriage. Settling herself beside him, she ordered the coachman to drive them slowly home.

      Though she tried to close her mind to the possible consequences of having the captain under her roof, as she gazed at Carrington’s pale expressionless face, Belle knew the queasiness in her gut was only partly due to the shock of the morning’s events and the stench of blood lingering in her nostrils.

      CHAPTER SEVEN

      AWAKING GROGGILY to the sensation of his chest aflame, as he struggled to consciousness Jack tried to summon the words to rebuke whichever trooper had been clumsy enough to knock a flaming brand out of the campfire and nearly incinerate his officer.

      As he instinctively turned from the heat, a blast of pain engulfed him, so searing that it drove every vestige of sleepiness from his head. His eyes flew open, the half-formed words tumbling out in an unintelligible gasp.

      “Awake at last!” said a cool, soft voice. “I was beginning to fear you would never come back to yourself.”

      Narrowing his focus against the agony radiating downward from his shoulder, Jack halted his gaze at a candlelit face haloed against the room’s darkness. A face of such perfect, classical beauty he was momentarily distracted from his pain. Then memory flooded back.

      Lady Belle. His challenge. The protector on her blade coming loose.

      Lady Belle trying to kill him.

      As he gritted his teeth and cautiously shifted to see her better, he noted that she had very nearly succeeded.

      “You must be thirsty. At least, the doctor said you would be when you finally reached consciousness.”

      He was thirsty, he discovered. His tongue seeming too thick for speech, he nodded. As Belle put a glass to his lips, he leaned forward and drank greedily, ignoring the immediate protest from his shoulder. Before he’d barely slaked his thirst, dizziness assailed him and he sagged back against his pillows, his eyes fluttering shut.

      Damn and blast, he thought in disgust. He had about as much strength as a newborn kitten.

      “Dr. Thompson said I could give you laudanum for pain, once you were fully conscious. You…are conscious?”

      He opened his eyes, as much to prove it to himself as to reassure her. “Yes.”

      Picking up a spoon and a small brown bottle from a tray beside the bed, she asked, “Do you want—?”

      “No,” he said, recalling the nightmarish narcotic-induced sleep he’d endured after being wounded at Corunna. “Pain is…tolerable. Don’t like being cloth-headed.”

      “As you wish. The doctor also said you might have difficulty breathing, if the injury affected the lung.”

      “Hard to tell,” he said with a grimace, “but I can breathe.” Inhaling deeply enough to utter more than a few words at a time, however, was a different matter.

      “Praise heaven!” She opened her mouth as if to say something else, then hesitated.

      Jack might be in a sorry state, but he wasn’t half-dead enough not to feel a spark of masculine response as she ran the tip of her tongue over those plump lips. “Do you remember…how you became injured?” she said at last.

      Why she had tried to kill him? he asked himself. A disturbing vision of her lovely face contorted with hate flickered through his mind and he inhaled sharply, then gasped as another surge of pain seared his chest.

      He struggled to regain his concentration. If he could induce her to describe what had happened, maybe he could find out what had prompted her violent response.

      “It’s all…rather hazy.”

      “It cannot possibly be sufficient, given the injuries you’ve suffered, but I owe you an enormous apology. You had challenged me to a fencing match—you remember that?”

      He nodded, prompting her to continue.

      “Sometime during the match,” she said, moistening her lips again, “the protector on my blade became dislodged. Being unaware of this, when you chanced to drop your guard and I saw a chance to score a hit, I took it. I never dreamed…!” She stopped again, her eyes and expression mirroring a clear distress. “The fault is entirely mine.”

      “Had I done you some injury,” he asked, gritting his teeth against the increasing pain of each inhaled breath, “that you felt moved to attack?”

      Her face coloring, she didn’t immediately reply. So she knew her response had been disproportionate. Why? he wondered anew.

      “Of course you had done me no injury,” she said after a moment. “I—I merely wished to test my skill against one who was accounted a superb swordsman.”

      “Our relative positions now…argue against that,” he observed wryly.

      “There is no way I can make restitution for all you have suffered, but I have arranged to oversee your care until you are sufficiently recovered to be transported to your family’s estate, which Lord Darnley assured me you would wish as soon as possible. At the moment, you are lodged in my house on Mount Street. Not a very…respectable arrangement, I realize, but there seemed no other recourse, you being far too ill to be left—”

      “Nay, madam, don’t apologize! I should be…in bad case indeed had you returned me to Albany. Only hope I’ve not been…too much of a charge.” He attempted a smile. “Many a gentleman would consider…a sword wound a trifling cost…to lie where I do now.”

      “Not if theirs were the chest pierced by the blade,” she retorted, ignoring his attempt at gallantry. “In any event, I shall arrange for your journey as soon as the physician allows. Though I fear,” she added with a sigh, “that shall not be soon enough to prevent the troubling news of your present…situation from reaching your family.”

      “My family will thank you,” Jack replied, surprised that Lady Belle seemed aware of the distress his mother might well experience upon hearing her only son was being nursed by the ton’s most celebrated Fashionable Impure. Odd, he thought, that a woman who had embraced a calling like Belle’s would spare a thought over how an association with her would be viewed by respectable people.

      “Do you feel up to drinking some broth?”

      At her question, he realized he was indeed hungry, though broth didn’t appeal. “Feel like having the steak…I didn’t finish for breakfast.”

      “Beefsteak might be a tad ambitious,” she replied with a smile.

      Despite the pain,

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