“Ah, little lamb,” breathed Madame Leda, slipping a steadying arm about Bess’s shoulders. “Remember, you needn’t go with him if you don’t like to. Only what makes you feel good.”
What made her feel good. Bess’s next breath felt more like a sob. How could it feel good to watch something like that?
The moment when Red Jack had landed that hit on the very place Nathaniel was wounded, where he’d seeped out his blood onto her hands, opening the wound once more—Bess wanted to throw up.
Even now, she wanted to stride over to the ring and kick Red Jack in the ribs where he sat panting on the floor. She wanted?—
“Take me to him,” she demanded, voice shaking but clear. “To…The Berserker.”
Madame Leda’s perfectly drawn brows arched above the low line of her mask. “Listen, lamb…”
“He’s bleeding,” Bess ground out, unable to stand the thought of it. She drew herself up and met the proprietress’s concerned gaze head on. “Show me where he is. He chose me, didn’t he? So let me go to him.”
Reluctant respect, tinged with amusement, shone in Madame Leda’s dark brown eyes. “Well, well! Perhaps less of a lamb than I thought. Come along, then.”
It was true, Bess thought, with a touch of wonder. She felt more like a lioness in this moment than a lamb.
“We’ll need hot water,” she said, gathering her composure as they wended their way through the chattering crowd. “And a length of fresh, clean linen, if you have it.”
She couldn’t afford to ruin two petticoats in as many days.
“I’ll send it up,” Madame Leda promised, her hips swaying gently as she climbed the stairs ahead of Bess. “But no one will enter the room. Complete privacy and discretion are assured here.”
The light comment reminded Bess of what Madame Leda, what every single person downstairs in the tavern, assumed she and “The Berserker” would be doing in that private room.
Probably it was what he assumed they’d be doing, too. With a nameless woman he’d never met but had seen—and wanted.
She shivered, though not with cold. The thrill that ran through her when she remembered the moment he’d singled her out, chosen her from the assembled throng of people—it was hot enough to sizzle like water droplets dancing across an iron pan.
“Thank you,” she managed as they came to a stop in front of a door painted a deep shade of red.
The Berserker. The Duke of Ashbourn.
Nathaniel.
He waited behind that door.
Madame Leda paused with her fist raised to rap against the door. She cast a look at Bess over her shoulder. “Last chance to back out. You can walk out of here now with no one the wiser. Shake the dust of this place off your heels and never think of him again.”
Bess paused. It would undoubtedly be the wisest course. Yet she shook her head. “Far too late for that, I’m afraid.”
And, stepping up beside Madame Leda, Bess knocked on the door herself. Without waiting for an answer, she pushed it open and went inside.
As the door swung quietly shut behind her, Bess blinked in the dimness of the room. Most of the light came from the moon, shining through a small square window set high in the wall. A wisp of smoke curled up from the candelabra atop a round table in the center of the room, as though it had only just been extinguished.
There was one candle still lighting the room, a small one on a nightstand casting its golden glow over a large, canopied bed that dominated one wall of the small room.
Bess’s breath caught in her chest, but even as she glanced in that direction, a dark shape loomed from the shadows, arm lifted as though to snuff out that candle too.
Without thought, Bess said, “Don’t, please! I want to see you.”
The form hesitated, clearly reluctant, but he left the candle burning and turned to face her. Though he kept to the shadows at the edge of the room.
“I mean, I need to see you,” Bess amended hastily, taking a wary step closer. “To see to your wound.”
“There’s no need. It’s fine,” he said, low and rough.
Well, thought Bess philosophically, at least now I know it wasn’t personal when he tried to send me back to bed last night instead of letting me help him.
