“Tongues may wag, but what is gossip, when compared with your wellbeing and that of your daughter?”
Oh, why did he have to make sense?
And why did her head have to ache so?
She must have winced, because he was once more reaching for her head. “Let me see if you are bleeding, if you please.”
She would have refused him, but his fingers were already there, curled around the base of her skull, gently investigating. The lightest of touches. She may have felt nothing at all except for when he flitted over the source of her agony.
The breath hissed from her lungs.
“Forgive me,” he said. “That is a bloody terrible lump you are sporting. When I find the man responsible for this, I am going to give him one to match. Mayhap two.”
He was being utterly serious. She would not want to be the one facing him. Such anger…for her? Her mind was too muddled to understand it tonight. Or to wonder.
She reached a tentative hand to the back of her head and found the protrusion of the ugly knot hidden beneath her hair. “It does hurt.”
“I would wager it does. The servants had just found you unconscious when I arrived. You were decidedly confused for a few minutes.” His frown, ever-present this evening, was firmly in place. “You need to see a physician.”
“The physician can wait.”
Her butler appeared at the threshold then. “Chief Inspector Stone has arrived, Your Grace.”
Northwich rose. “Call for Mrs. Shaw’s physician, if you please. Regardless of the lateness of the hour, she needs to be examined.”
Her butler nodded. “Of course, Your Grace.”
Pippa wanted to protest. Wanted to remind him whose household this was. But her head was spinning once more, and the pain was acute. She held her tongue and allowed the Duke of Northwich to take control of her servants and her life.
But only for the evening.
She was too weary to fight him.
Chapter 8
Sleeping on the floor was deuced uncomfortable for a man of his size.
Roland woke before dawn to many regrets, not the least of which was that he had spent the evening in the same bedchamber as Pippa—at long last—only to have to keep company with the dust and the spiders on her floor. Another was that his cock was impolite enough to be standing completely erect at the most inconvenient of places and times.
And the last was that he had even had to sleep here at all.
It would have been just as well if Pippa had never been attacked. If her library had not been torn asunder. If the villains with whom her husband had associated had not suddenly decided to settle their score with her.
But then, if he were using that fanciful logic, he would say it would have been just as well had Pippa never married George Shaw at all. Indeed, it would have been far better for everyone involved, and most certainly for his stupid, reckless, utterly traitorous heart, if she had married him as she had once promised she would do.
However, that was, he thought as he stared in grim concentration at the plasterwork on the ceiling, willing his cockstand to abate, nonsensical thinking. If life had transpired as it ought to have done, none of the bad bits would have happened, would they have? And as Mama had been fond of saying, without the bad bits, there could be no appreciation for the good. If anyone should have known the difference, it would have been his mother. She had known far more of the bad than the good in her too-short life.
Roland could not make amends to Mama for what she had suffered, nor could he bring her back. But hecoulddo his part to make certain Pippa and her daughter were safe. And after the conversation he’d had with Chief Inspector Stone the night before, he damn well meant to do everything in his power to make certain the harm which had befallen her would never happen again. She had been deuced fortunate she had not suffered more than a lump on the head. The physician who had arrived had declared her concussed.
There.
Thinking about the danger had an excellent, diminishing effect on a certain unruly portion of his anatomy. His gut twisted as he thought about what could have happened. Worse, what could happen the next time, should the bastards return to finish what they had started. While the physician had been tending to Pippa, Roland had ventured to the library with Stone.
The chamber had been torn apart.
Whether the villains had found what they were seeking or not was anyone’s guess at this juncture. As were their identities. Stone had some ideas. But ideas were not enough to reassure Roland.
He rose to a sitting position, suppressing a groan at the tightness in the muscles of his lower back and the ache in his neck. Pippa’s steady breaths reassured him as he stretched. He could still scarcely credit that she had allowed him to spend the night at her home. And that she had allowed him to sleep on the floor of her chamber.
