Rayne snorted. “I am not a delicate man,querida. Tell me everything.”
She bit her lip, considering her options. She could either unburden herself entirely, at the risk of humiliating Monty, or she could offer an abridged version.
The earl did not like her hesitation. “Everything,” he pressed.
Catriona sighed. “Monty left his bed, strictly against the doctor’s orders. In the process, he ruined his splint and upset the bone.”
Her brother’s indecipherable hollering punctuated her truncated explanation.
“Cristo,” muttered Rayne. “Is that Montrose?”
“I am afraid so,” she admitted hesitantly.
“Is the sawbones already here doing his work?” the earl wanted to know. “Cannot the man do his duty and spoon some laudanum down Montrose’s throat?”
She frowned. “Dr. Croydon has yet to arrive, on account of being detained elsewhere. Monty is…distressed because he has been tied to his bed.”
“Tied to his…” Rayne’s brows furrowed. “An explanation, if you please, madam.”
Oh, dear.Where to begin? How much to reveal?
“In the midst of the night, Monty was seeking whisky.”
“I knew it,” Rayne bit out, the rage emanating from him at his initial entrance, returning.
“He was out of his head, perhaps from the pain, perhaps from the laudanum,” Catriona continued. “But whatever the reason, he upset his splint, and he was walking on the leg, which he is not meant to do without a crutch of some sort.”
“None of that explains why Montrose has been lashed to his bed like a Bedlamite,” the earl pointed out.
Correctly.
“We feared he may make a second attempt,” she admitted. “He was not…particularly lucid at the time of the initial incident, and as some of the servants were injured in the effort to return him to his bed, we all deemed it best to remove the temptation. At least until Dr. Croydon arrives.”
“And what of Torrington?” Rayne demanded next.
“He has not yet woken,” she said sadly. “I have sent for his sister, Hattie, and his mother. I expect they will wish to move him home, whenever it is practicable.”
She could only pray the viscount would, indeed, wake. That the damage he had suffered when he had been thrown from his phaeton was not irreversible.
“What of you?” Rayne asked, disturbing her tumultuous musings as he closed the last of the distance between them, then caught her chin in his thumb and forefinger, tilting her face back so he could study her. “You are very pale this morning, my lady, and the darkness beneath your eyes suggests you did not have a proper sleep.”
She swallowed, trying not to lose herself in the warm depths of his gaze. Trying to ignore the length of his black lashes, too long for a man’s, the aristocratic sweep of his nose, the prominence of his cheekbones.
Trying to forget how handsome he was and how effectively he tied her wits and stomach in knots whenever their paths crossed.
“I am fine,” she managed to say, though the words, when they emerged at last, were undeniably breathless. “Thank you for your concern.”
“Someone ought to be concerned for your welfare,” he bit out. “Where in Hades is your mother?”
“Attending Monty,” she answered.
His thumb moved, running along her jaw in a tender caress. “Who is attending you, my lady? Making certain you are eating? Making sureyouare well? Hmm?”
“No one,” she managed shakily. “I can see to myself.”
Surely Rayne was not concerned for her. Was he?
“Of course you can,querida.” His voice had thickened. The sweetness of his baritone licked through her, at once soothing and yet also inciting a flame. “You have had to do so, because everyone else is too busy chasing after Montrose. How many times has he done something as reckless as what he did last night?”
