Thorne’s chest squeezed like a vise, but he nodded and dropped over the side of the window.Finding his footing on the trellis, he started the climb back down to the garden, alert to every twittering bird call and rustling tree branch.
But it must have rained again in the night after they’d fallen asleep, because the trellis was wet and slippery.
Thorne’s booted foot skittered out of its toehold.He scrabbled for a desperate moment and got his balance back, heart thundering.
His fingers loosed their grip in instinctual relief…just as his other boot slipped, and the weight of his body ripped him from the trellis and sent him crashing to the ground.
A sharp, sickening crack of pain lanced through the back of his head.The last thing he saw before darkness took him was Lucy’s pale, terrified face peering down from her bedroom window.
Then Thorne was gone.
* * *
Lucy tore open her bedchamber door in a flat panic, startling poor Daisy, who was waiting with her coal scuttle.
He fell, was all she could think, over and over with blank lack of comprehension, because how could it have happened?
One moment, The Gentle Rogue was accepting her stumbling thanks for a lovely evening, in which he had given her a taste of what it was like to share her body with someone with whom she felt a connection.
The next, he was lying motionless on the wet grass below her window.
Lucy’s bare feet pounded down the staircase.She nearly bowled over poor Mr.Goring, on his way upstairs for his morning meeting with her brother.
“Call Dr.Perry, please, Mr.Goring,” she huffed out, barreling onward.“There’s been an accident.”
“What?Miss Lucy—” the butler sputtered, taken aback, but Lucy couldn’t spare a moment to explain.
She had to get to him.
Lucy rounded the corner of the staircase and hurtled down the hallway toward the drawing room that opened out onto the back garden.She nearly crashed straight through the French doors in her desperation to get outside.
The spring morning carried a chill that bit at her bare feet and legs as she threw herself across the sodden grass, slipping in the mud to land in a terrified heap at The Gentle Rogue’s side.
The Gentle Rogue.Who was lying so still and so pale, Lucy thought for a horrified moment that he was dead.
But then his chest rose in a shallow breath, and she bent her head over him with a sob of relief.
Not dead, that was good.But knocked unconscious, which was bad.With tentative fingers, Lucy felt along his neck and shoulders and up the back of his head as far as she could reach.
Her fingers came back red with his blood.
Breath sawing in and out of her lungs, Lucy wiped her fingers clean on the grass and leaned over him.
“Dr.Perry is coming,” she said helplessly.“You’re going to wake up and be absolutely fine, I know it.Oh,pleasewake up.”
She touched his cheek, which was reassuringly warm, and startled as her hand brushed the edge of his black mask.
Oh, dear God.He was still masked.
And Dr.Perry was coming to examine him.And before that, surely Mr.Goring would be rousing the household and coming out here himself to see what was the matter.
Even now, she heard shouting from inside Ashbourn House.
At any moment, someone would come out and see the most infamous highwayman of the day lying senseless and undefended in the garden.
She had to do something.She had to protect him—but how?
There was only one thing to do.Running footsteps sounded in the drawing room behind her.
