Lucy reached down and, as swiftly and gently as she could, she untied The Gentle Rogue’s mask and the black pirate scarf, pulled them away from his face and bundled them up into a tight ball.
“Miss Lucy,” shouted someone behind her, and she whirled to face Charlie while shoving the blood-soaked bundle into the pocket of her dressing gown.
“Here,” she said, waving him over, before glancing back at the man stretched out at her feet.
And the bottom dropped out of Lucy’s world.
It was Thornecliff.
The Duke of Thornecliff lay prone, handsome face as still as if it were cast in stone.There was blood in his beautiful, mussed golden hair, a smudge of it on his jaw where she’d grazed him while getting the mask off.
The Gentle Rogue’s mask, which he’d been wearing, becauseThornecliff was The Gentle Rogue.
She didn’t know what to do.She didn’t know how to act.Nothing was what she thought and the world pitched wildly under her and Charlie reached her just as her knees crumpled like paper.
“Ho there, breathe, miss,” Charlie said, dismayed.
Lucy staggered a bit but kept her feet.She was proud of that.
“It’s not me,” she managed to say, pointing at the man she’d taken into her body the night before, ohGod.“It’s him.He hit his head.”
The arch of Charlie’s thick, black brow clearly stated he knew there was a bit more to the story, but he elected to bypass it for the moment.Grateful, Lucy stood back enough to let Charlie kneel by Thornecliff and look him over critically.
“Sir?”he said loudly.“Can you hear me?”
Wake up, Lucy thought hysterically.Wake up, so I can shout at you!
But he didn’t.
Charlie turned worried eyes up to Lucy.“Should we move him inside?It can’t be doing him any good to be lying out here in the cold and damp.”
Lucy wrung her hands together.“I don’t know!I wish Dr.Perry would arrive.”
A commotion at the garden doors caught Lucy’s attention.Oh God, her brother and Bess.Lucy’s fingertips began to tingle and she gulped in a breath to stop herself from keeling over in a faint.
I’m going to have to explain what Thornecliff is doing here, she realized mere moments before Nathaniel strode into the garden and demanded, “Why the hell is the Duke of Thornecliff on my lawn at the crack of dawn?”
Bess bustled past him, a worried frown creasing her forehead.“Oh, Nathaniel, he’s hurt!There’s blood!”
“Lucy, what is going on here?”Her brother turned that stern glare on her, and Lucy immediately did the only thing she could think of to delay the conversation that was bearing down on her like a runaway carriage.
She burst into tears.
Nathaniel’s eyes went wide and pained.He couldn’t stand it when the women he cared for cried, which Lucy knew very well.And used only very, very sparingly.And which was honestly so sweet, it only made her cry all the harder as everything caught up with her at once.
Her brother wrapped an awkward arm around her shoulders with a panicked murmur of “There, there.”
Bess gave Lucy a narrow glance—she was also aware of her husband’s marshmallow tendencies when confronted with weeping—but as she studied Lucy, an expression of true sympathy softened her pretty face.“Oh, my dear Lucy,” she breathed, and Lucy turned her face into her brother’s shoulder and let out a wail she was really not proud of.
And everything turned to chaos.
Nathaniel barked contradictory orders at the footmen who rushed to help Charlie attempt to lift all fourteen stone of Thornecliff’s solid muscle, while Bess directed them into the drawing room and called for the maids to bring hot water and clean rags and to stoke up the fire before they all caught their deaths of a chill, and Lucy stood looking on with her shoulders shaking and her insides liquid with fear and confusion and anger and she knew not what else, because he wasn’t.Waking.Up.
Dr.Perry arrived and examined Thornecliff, whose head seemed to have stopped bleeding but now sported an impressive lump the size of a goose egg.
“And he hasn’t regained consciousness at any point since the injury?”Dr.Perry peered over the tops of his half-moon spectacles at Nathaniel, who immediately turned to Lucy.
“I don’t think so.”She went round the chaise longue upon which the footman had deposited Thornecliff’s unresponsive body and sat down on his other side.
