Page 5 of The Marquess Wins a Wife
“It ain’t proper, Miss Lizzie, for ye to be here.”
An incredulous laugh trickled from her throat. “He’s no danger to me in his present condition, Willie.”
No, Luke thought. But he sure as hell planned to be once he healed.
Ifhe healed.
∞∞∞
Stitching a man wasn’t anything like stitching a shirt, Lizzie reflected, pale and trembling as she heaved over the chamber pot. She had hoped it would be. She had managed to comport herself well enough while she had gently tweezed the bits of linen and wool from his wounds. She had managed to turn her mind from the blood and the ruined meat of his shoulder.
But when she had had to draw a needle through his flesh, her mind had balked. And so had her stomach; wretchedly, violently. She could pluck a chicken and carve it up for dinner, but pushing needle and thread through the skin and muscle of a man had been more than she could bear.
Still, somehow she had managed it. Slowly, uncertainly, and painstakingly. Thank Godthat he had been unconscious for it. The laudanum with which she had laced his gin had done its job ably, and he hadn’t so much as flinched while she had stitched him up.
Probably it had been for nothing, anyway. He was bound to take infection. His skin, pale with loss of blood, had been clammy. Sweat had climbed up the back of his neck, saturating the dark hair there at the nape. The beginnings of a fever, no doubt.
Now they could only keep him cool and comfortable, and hope—
Hope forwhat, precisely? That he recovered enough to send her straight to hell, swinging at the end of a rope? Because he hadmeantthem, those threats that he had issued to her. And how could he not? She had abducted him,shothim, and now—now he lingered in a precarious feverish haze, and she could not be certain of his recovery.
And still, she did not want his death upon her conscience. She scrubbed at her face with her hands, drawing in a shuddering breath.
She’d spoken to him, quite needlessly, of responsibilities.Now, he had becomehers.
Chapter Three
Three days. Three days, and still he burned with fever. Lizzie adjusted herself where she knelt at the side of the bed, blinking in the grey light of dawn as she stared at him; the marquess she had murdered—or as good as. Her fingers hovered over his lips, which were dry and cracked…and yet, somehow, still he breathed. Notwell. Not at all well. But there was the weak puff of air against her fingertips attesting to his persistent, if tenuous, hold on life.
So she hadn’t murdered him.Yet.
She wanted so badly to crawl back into the pallet she had assembled at the side of the bed, to rest her eyes for just a few moments. She’d caught at sleep in bits and snatches, nodding off briefly in her chair or on the pallet for moments, perhaps even minutes at a time since he’d been brought to this room—but then she was awake again at every sound, every groan pulled from his unconscious body as he wrestled with the fever and infection that raged within him.
She shouldn’t care. He was going to hang her. But what was one more responsibility, when added to the others that had been laid upon her shoulders? And so she kept her lonely vigil, and sponged his brow when he grew too hot, and tucked the bedclothes about him when he shivered with bone-clattering chills, and bore with steadfast determination the threats and the curses he called down upon her head in his increasingly rare lucid moments.
When his jaw was not clenched tightly against it, she fed him spoonfuls of beef tea and porridge, or even a glass of water when he could manage it, liberally dosed with the laudanum that kept him still and calm and perhaps not intoomuch pain.
No one should have to suffer alone. Not even the marquess who was determined to hang her.
“Lizzie.”
Imogen’s voice, the blunt intrusion of it shearing straight through the shroud of exhaustion that hung thickly over her. She had come into the room, yawning with a sinuous stretch. Likely she’d just woken, as usual—though Lizzie would have been up for hours anyway at this point. “It’s time for breakfast.”
“You’ll have to make it yourself, Imogen.”
“Myself?” Imogen blinked, the last of her sleepiness disappearing in the wake of her burgeoning disbelief. “But I can’tcook.”
“It’s not difficult. Have Willie show you where the eggs are kept.” The past two days she had abandoned her position long enough to toast some bread and fry some eggs, but today—today she simply could not. If she stood, she would fall. And the marquess was worse even than he had been. Today, of all days, she could not leave him.
Imogen gave a startled little laugh. “Come now, Lizzie, it’s just a few minutes. Georgie and Jo are already waiting at the table.”
Their youngest siblings, the twins. Guilt began to curdle in Lizzie’s stomach. But swiftly it hardened into a kernel of anger instead, anger that Imogen’s delicate condition had placed them into this wretched mess to begin with. “I have fed the lot of us,” she said tersely, “every day for the last eight years. You can do itonce, Imogen.”
An incensed gasp. “Well!” And then there was the sharp report of retreating footsteps and the slam of the door.
Lizzie closed her eyes, leaning forward upon her folded arms, and releasing that hard knob of anger with a sigh. What would become of them, when she was gone? What would become of Imogen, pregnant, unmarried, and helpless? What would become George and Joanna, justchildren, far too young to bear the consequences of what Lizzie had done?
And when she opened her eyes again—hewas staring straight at her.
