A memory surfaced. Fuzzy. Foggy.
No . . . it was more a sense than actual memory.
A feeling that he had been here before.
That this same sequence had already happened—his anger over her beauty while swallowing water down his parched throat.
Again, that bizarre image of a princess and a dragon surfaced.
Why was he thinking of fairy tales?
He hated this lingering opium haze.
He finished the water, frowning at Lady Charlotte with her face of elegant hollows and graceful curves.
She moved away from him, water glass still in hand, and spoke to someone outside the room, requesting food.
He looked left to right, trying to see a clock, his watch,somethingthat would at least tell him the time. But the room was too dark and shadowy to discern much clearly.
It only underscored, once more, exactly how helpless and dependent he was. He could not move. He couldn’t lift his damnheadwithout assistance.
He was utterly at the mercy of these strangers.
What was he to do?!
Lady Charlotte returned to his beside. “Can I offer you more water—”
“Must this room be so blasted dark?” His frustration rendered his tone snippy. But he seemed incapable of stemming it.
The laudanum appeared to have wandered off with his manners.
Lady Charlotte’s smile slowly melted off her face. “We felt the shutters and curtains would keep out the chill.”
“We? Is that a royal ‘we,’ then?” Alex had rarely felt quite such a bastard. But once loosed, his tongue took on a life of its own.
Her eyebrows flew upward. “Dr. Whitaker—”
“Do ye think if ye confine me to a metaphorical coffin that eventually I will take tae one in truth?” Alex couldn’t stop the frustration spilling out his mouth. “Finish what Lord Frank started?”
It all felt phantasmal, as if his mouth and words were disconnected from the reality of his self. As if another man were castigating Lady Charlotte, and Alex merely the observer of a play.
Lady Charlotte’s nostrils flared and her lips pinched shut. She set the glass down on the bedside table with aclinkand rounded the poster bed, pulled back the heavy window curtains, and unlatched the shutters.
Frosty winter sunlight and a draft of cold air flooded the room.
“Is that better?” she asked, tone noticeably cooler now.
Regret laced through him, but Alex couldn’t find the mental strength to stem the tide of his snippy words.
“Yes.” He swallowed. “What is the date?”
“The twenty-second of January.”
Blast! He had lost nearly a week!
He swallowed back the panic crawling up his throat.
“And the time?” he asked.
