Lord in heaven.
She had beenshot.
“Shot,” Anglesey repeated, grimmer than she had ever heard him. “I suspect by a hunter.”
“Am I dead?” she wondered aloud.
“No, but whoever is responsible for this shall be,” he growled, looking around them again as if he suspected an unseen villain to emerge from the undergrowth before turning his gaze upon her.
Blue, so blue, those eyes, she thought. And fringed with long, golden lashes. It seemed unfair for a man to have such lush lashes. Particularly this man, for she must not like him. Did not like him. Or trust him.
“Oh,” she managed to say, finding herself increasingly distracted. Her mind felt as if it were fashioned of porridge, thick and sloppy. A stew of disorder and confusion.
She giggled again, and she was not sure why. She was a tangled hodgepodge of sensations. Her skin was cold. Was it raining more, or was that the blood? A shiver overtook her.
“We have to get you back to the main house,cariad,” he said, his voice so tender that it pulled her from the depths of her thoughts. “Can you walk?”
“Of course I can,” she said, taking a step forward and collapsing into his broad, lovely chest.
His arms came around her, holding her tight, keeping her from falling. He was so familiar, so beloved. If only he had not betrayed her.
“My horse is tethered not far from here,” Anglesey was saying. “I’ll carry you to her.”
Before she could protest, he had scooped her effortlessly into his arms.
“I can walk,” she protested.
“Not in this state, you cannot,cariad.”
Cariad.
It was a new name.
One he had never called her before, a Welsh term of endearment. But of course. He was Anglesey, and though his family seat was here in Staffordshire now, centuries ago, it would have been on the Isle of Anglesey. As they traveled over the grass, his long legs eating up the distance to his horse as if Izzy weighed no more than a cloud, she clung to his shoulders and allowed her wild, disjointed thoughts free rein. Why, if she did not know better, she would say he cared. But then, it was likely not every day that a woman was shot before him.
She hoped.
And as the pain in her arm steadily made itself known, wound throbbing with punishing, pulsing reminders, she found herself grateful he had interrupted her solitary walk. If he had not come upon her, what would she have done?
“Why did you call me that?” she asked, struggling to maintain her grip on her lucidity.
“Hold the handkerchief to your arm if you can,” he instructed tersely, his jaw tense, his gaze planted firmly on their destination. “You are bleeding rather profusely. If you can apply pressure, it will help to stem the flow.”
That was the tickling sensation, the ooze of blood slipping from her body. Her position in his arms would render it the easier path, would it not? Yes, of course it would.
“Where is the handkerchief?” she asked, wondering how she was meant to find the elusive scrap.
Her vision was becoming dim around the edges, the roaring in her ears intensifying. It was as if her grasp upon reality were slipping away.
“In your hand,” he said.
Oh.
So it was. Blood-stained and forever ruined, she feared, as she unfurled her clenched fist to reveal the fabric. The red of her blood obliterated his initials. Z. B.
“Hold the handkerchief to your wound now, Izzy. Do it.”
How stern and commanding he was. The tingling she had felt in her knees hit the rest of her, and so she did his bidding, gently holding the already ruined handkerchief to where she had been shot. How cold she was. Terribly so. A shiver wracked her body.
