Page 6 of The Marquess Wins a Wife
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There was something he meant to say. He was sure of it, but whatever the words were, they were lodged in the very back of his throat. His throat was dry and aching. He would have done murder for a sip of water, for a glass of brandy.
He formed the syllables with his lips, but could not be certain he had spoken them aloud. And yet, somehow, there was the blessed relief of an arm slipped beneath his neck and then the clickof a glass against his teeth. He had the sense that this had happened many times before now, that there was a woman who had sat at his bedside and poured cool trickles of water down his throat.
The pain resurfaced as that arm withdrew, as he was laid down once more upon sheets that were soaked with his sweat. But the faint scent of vanilla lingered in his nose, warm and soft and soothing.
“I’m sorry.” It was low, gentle sound that tickled his ear as the woman drew away once more.
No. He didn’t want her to go—she was the only thing that separated reality from his fever dreams; tormented illusions wrought from the past that danced around him like the flames of Hell.Shewas real.Shewas the one who sponged his head and changed his sheets and tucked the blankets around him when he’d kicked them off.
He had the vague sense that he was supposed to be angry with her, that she had committed some grievous sin against him. That he was the sort of man who wasimportant, and to whom people were supposed to pay the proper deference. He searched for it, that righteous seething anger to which he was certain he was entitled.
Instead he found fear, confusion, pain—that he would die here, alone, ill, his brain baking with fever, without even a friend to comfort him.
Shewas not his friend. And still she tended to him. Still she let those soft little fingers slide through the tangle of his hair, and gently picked the knots free so that they wouldn’t pull. She murmured comforting nonsense in that sweet, low voice, and he had carried it over with him into restless dreams.
She alone anchored him to the world of the living, when there was something intrinsic inside of him, not too very deep down, that wanted to leave it completely. In his delirium he could not be certain if that made her angel or demon.
And still he groped for her hand with every bit of effort he could muster, sliding his fingers across the cool surface of the sheets, searching. He found her at last—not the fingers he had expected, but the silky tumble of her hair drifting across the sheets. He felt the mattress jerk when she startled beneath the touch of his hand, realized that she had been at her knees beside the bed, resting her head.
“What is it?” she asked, in that whisper-soft voice that flowed over his ears like music. “What do you need?”
There, beneath the spill of her hair, he found the curl of her fingers and managed to wedge two of his into the tight clasp of them. Moored—a ship, once drifting, anchored once more.
I only need you. These words he knew he had not spoken; he had exhausted the last of his energy fighting past the vast expanse of the bed for her hand. But hefeltthem, just as he felt the strengthening grip of her fingers as he fell once more into sleep.
∞∞∞
He quieted when Lizzie held his hand. Better even than he did with the laudanum, which sometimes seemed to push him over into an almost deathly sleep. For the last two days, she had livedby the side of the bed, because she couldn’t retract her fingers from the clasp of his without provoking a fit of confusion and fury.
He searchedfor her, in the rare moments she had to leave him to attend to her own needs, or else to prepare a quick meal for Willie, Imogen, and the children. Hethrashed, and a time or two he’d even overextended himself and his stitches had pulled and bled.
Tonight she had at last given up the ghost and curled up on the bed beside him. It had been her only chance of attaining even a few moments of sleep, given that the last two nights she had had to sleep in the chair, and had woken in the morning with the sensation of pins and needles in the arm she had held outstretched to him that had not abated for nearly an hour.
His fever still raged, and there were moments—terrifying ones—where she was certain he walked that thin line between life and death. Or perhaps he danced upon it, given the devilry she suspected him of—a rake to the last; jauntily,recklessly, treading the tightrope, heedless of where he might land. And in those moments when she was certain he would fall at last, when his chest hitched and his next breath was frighteningly slow to come—she squeezed his hand in hers.
As if she had pulled him back from the very brink, his breath would sigh out, and his body would relax. And Lizzie would close her eyes and give thanks that she had one more breath, one more moment without his death upon her conscience.
A reckoning would come, one way or another. Either he would die—orshewould.
But it was impossible to say, in the fatigue that consumed her, which was the more desirable outcome. Still, she allowed herself the tiniest bit of hope—that a man who desired her presence so desperately that he clenched her fingers in his in even the darkest moments of his illness might be moved tosomesort of mercy.
That he might be somewhatlessthe cad that she had expected. That perhaps there was some measure of goodness in him, that he was not quite so dissipated and dissolute as she had expected a man of his station and status to be. She fell into a restive sleep, her hand in his, in the earliest hours between dark and dawn, with that fervent prayer at the back of her mind.
But when dawn pressed in through the windows and he began to stir beside her, she jerked awake and saw at once that she was mistaken. The grand question—life or death—that had plagued her from the moment the pistol’s report had sounded in her ears at last had been answered.
The hand clenched around her wrist was cool, not in the least clammy. The heat that had burned his body had fled—his fever had broken. And he gazed at her, tired and weak, and yet undeniably furious.
And he hissed, “You.”
Chapter Four
The Talbot chit wrenched herself away from him with a squawk more becoming of game fowl than of a woman, and blast it all, but Luke hadn’t the strength to hold her. It was an effort only to lift his head and watch as she scrambled backward so quickly that she fell straight off the mattress and onto the floor with a startlingly loudthump.
He would have laughed, if he hadn’t ached like the Devil himself had set to sticking him with a pitchfork in preparation for his eventual arrival. Instead he could only muster a groan as every muscle in his body protested even the smallest movement. Most especially those in his arm.
Because the little witch hadshothim.
