Page 13 of Fergus

He was even more convinced of that when he became aware she was swaying slightly on her feet and her fingers were tightly gripping the edge of the door.

Fergus didn’t waste any more time asking questions but instead took charge of the situation by pushing the door open further. He immediately grasped one of Thea’s arms when she swayed even more now that she no longer had the door to lean on. That was his primary reason, but it also allowed him to step into the suite before closing and locking the door behind him.

His quick and assessing glance around the sitting room was instinctive. It also yielded nothing that he could class as a threat.

As far as he could tell, Thea was alone.

His gaze returned to her. Her face wasn’t just pale; there was a gray tinge to her skin, and her expression was pained. Although Fergus couldn’t see anything that might?—

“Is that blood?” He reached up with the hand that wasn’t holding on to her to dip his fingertips into the trail of red running down the side of her neck. The viscous stickiness of the liquid told him that it was definitely blood. “Did you hit your head?” He turned her gently to see a sizable lump and cut behind her left ear. The latter was obviously responsible for the bloody trail down her neck. “What the hell happened here?” he demanded as he turned her back to face him.

* * *

Whathappened?

Thea had no idea. One minute, she had been standing in the doorway of the bedroom of her suite and heard a noise behind her, followed by a sharp and reverberating pain, and the next thing she knew, she had woken up lying on the floor.

It had taken her several long seconds of lying there to regain her equilibrium enough to be able to gather her wits and remember that sequence of events.

A glance at her wristwatch had told her she had probably only been unconscious for a few minutes. But the throbbing at the side of her skull and the blood that stained her fingers after she had touched the area where it hurt the most told her that someone must have hit her on the side of the head.

That whoever they were had to have still been in her suite when she came back into it, possibly hiding behind the door?

That thought alone had been enough to make her cringe at the realization that something so much worse could have happened to her than just being knocked out.

The weapon used to hit her was lying on the floor beside her. It was an Art Deco brass ornament of a woman, and it usually sat on the side table just inside the main door of the suite. There was even a speck of blood on the woman’s hand, evidence that was what had cut into Thea’s skin.

She’d managed to sit up but had still been struggling to get back on her feet when Fergus started banging on the door leading into the hotel corridor. It had taken her a few seconds to steady herself and walk over to answer that loud knocking. Long enough she could tell by the rising anger in Fergus’s accompanying voice that his frustration with her was deepening.

One glance at his furious expression, once she had opened the door a couple of inches, and she’d known her assessment had been correct.

“Explanations can wait,” Fergus dismissed. “We need to deal with your injury first. Then you can tell me what happened.”

“What are you doing?” Thea demanded as he swung her up into his arms and carried her through to the bathroom before sitting her gently on top of the marble vanity unit.

“I’m going to clean the wound.” Fergus proceeded to do exactly that after he had dampened a face cloth with cold water. “The cut doesn’t need stitches, but I still think you need to see a doctor. I can call down to reception or get my own doctor to come here and examine you?—”

“No!” Thea cut in forcefully. “I don’t want or need a doctor, yours or any other.”

Thea didn’t want to make a fuss. She never had. Probably as a result of her mother’s anger ten years ago, once Thea was recovered enough from her emergency appendectomy to withstand being berated for having ruined all of her mother’s plans for a future with Fergus Wynter.

“I’m fine,” Thea insisted as she slowly eased down from the vanity unit onto the marble floor. She forced herself to keep her balance, not willing to show any sign of weakness. Although she had a feeling the pallor of her cheeks might give her away.

Fergus’s scowl said it did. “You could have a concussion.”

“I don’t need a doctor,” she repeated fiercely before turning back into the bedroom.

What she needed to see, toknow, was if she had just been imagining things earlier.

“What are you doing?” Fergus scowled darkly as he followed her through to the bedroom.

The familiar pillow—or maybe just the pillowcase put onto a pillow here? Not that it mattered which it was—that had been stolen from her apartment in London was still exactly where she had last seen it: sitting in the middle of the king-sized bed in her hotel suite in Paris.

She knew she hadn’t brought it with her, and it definitely hadn’t been there before she went out earlier.

“Steady,” Fergus soothed when Thea reached out to grip the door frame to once again stop herself from swaying. “What is it?” He glanced around the room.

Thea knew he would see nothing unusual. That the room was tidy, as she had noted earlier, and the bed was made. There were very few personal items to disturb that tidiness, an e-reader on the bedside table and her reading glasses, because Thea had brought very little with her for this four-day stay.

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