Shame—and that accursed name.
“Can you not open your eyes?” The voice was closer now, as though the angel was leaning over him. She laid a hand against his cheek.
He breathed in her sweetness, a scent that reminded him of tea cakes in the drawing room when he was a boy, almonds and cream and sugar, overlaid with a dark spice he could not place.
“Ashbourn?”
“Nathaniel,” he rasped, reaching up to grasp at her slender yet sturdy wrist. “My name is Nathaniel.”
“Oh Lord. All right. Nathaniel. Are you awake?”
He slitted his eyes open, since she seemed to want him to. Bad idea. He could tell the room wasn’t bright, yet what light there was struck at the ache in his head and blurred his vision.
But he saw her.
She wavered above him, indistinct, until he managed to blink away the sweat and bring her into focus.
Bess.
The evening came back to him like the hammer blow of George ‘The Builder’ Johnson’s fists. Nathaniel had gone into the fight distracted, unfocused, and the man he fought had done exactly as Nathaniel hoped—Johnson had pummeled him until Nathaniel was forced to live only in his body, in that moment, in the pain and sweat and violence of the fight.
Nathaniel had won in the end. But Johnson made him pay for it in blood.
“I’m all right,” he ground out, clutching his side with one hand and using the other to shakily lever himself up to a sitting position. Everything hurt. “Run along to bed.”
“Oh, certainly, and just leave you here—you’re bleeding! Give me a moment, I will send someone to Dr. Perry.”
“No need. Merely a scratch.” It was. If Nathaniel were to be honest, he was more concerned that the room still swam slightly before his eyes, as though he was underwater. It was taking more effort than he liked to admit keeping his eyes open.
“I saw a scratch like that the last time I watched a pig slaughtered for bacon. You’re dripping all over Monsieur Anatole’s clean floor; he will be beside himself.”
“Can’t have that.” He surprised himself by smiling faintly. “Very well, then. If you would be so kind.”
“You were quick enough to send a boy you’d never seen in your life before to Dr. Perry’s surgery, yet won’t go yourself. I wish you’d be sensible, but if you won’t?—
“I won’t.”
Her pink lips pursed like a rosebud. Annoyed angel. “Well, that’s that, then. Look, you’re far too big for me to lift, despite what the songs say about sturdy country lasses. But perhaps you’d be more comfortable if?—”
Her tart commentary was at odds with the gentleness of her hands as she helped him drag his sorry corpse across the flagstones to lean against the wall. Nathaniel swallowed down the way the change in position made every livid bruise and sore spot on his body flame to life. “Much better. Thank you.”
She eyed him narrowly before jumping to her feet to rummage through the drawers and cabinets of the sideboard in the corner. “Only a duke would be so polite while bleeding to death. Why are there no clean rags in this entire kitchen?”
Nathaniel risked a look at the gash in his side. Shallow but long, it seeped a bit of blood and sent a fiery lash of pain through him with every inhalation, but it was hardly life threatening.
Letting his head fall back against the wall with a wince, he meant to reassure Bess that he was in no real danger but the next moment, he was blinking back to awareness with her practically in his lap, pushing up his torn shirt to get to the cut.
And he couldn’t even enjoy it, because she was in the process of tearing a strip from the hem of her own petticoat and binding it securely about his lower ribs.
With calm competence, she pulled it tight enough to make sweat start at his temples and a harsh curse explode from his lungs. But after she tied it off, his next breath came easier and the pain began to level out to something manageable.
He could think again. Which wasn’t the relief he might have hoped, since Bess’s nearness wrenched him straight back to the distraction he’d gone to The Nemesis to combat.
As though she could tell his head had cleared, Bess sat back and fixed him with a solemn frown. “What happened tonight? How were you hurt?”
He grimaced. The truth was impossible, but he found outright dishonesty abhorrent. He temporized with, “The streets of London at night are no place for inattention. I will be on my guard in future.”
“I was warned about footpads and brigands before coming here but I had no idea they’d be so bold as to attack a gentleman on a public thoroughfare! You’re looking better, I suppose, though I still think we ought to send for Dr. Perry. If he can handle a gunshot wound, I’m sure he’d be equal to the task of binding a knife wound from a cutpurse.”
