Chapter Three
Adrian observed the figures that flitted around his bed through half-closed eyelids.
He wanted to tell whoever they were to go to the devil and let him sleep for an hour or so.
But it had been insult enough to his dignity to suffer Heath and Drake Boscastle examining his head and peering into his eyeballs while he lay uselessly on the floor.
He’d also wanted to inform the pigheaded fools that he could have walked to the carriage on his own if the walls had stopped spinning for a moment and some jokester had refrained from yanking the carpet out from under his feet every time he attempted to take a step.
He would have been content to remain cradled against Emma Boscastle’s enticing bosom until he found the energy to chase after the dunghill who had insulted her. And the other idiot who’d brained him into the bargain.
He picked out her graceful figure standing at the window of Heath Boscastle’s town house.
From what he could see of her, and his vision was deucedly blurred, she appeared to be unharmed, not a red-gold hair on her slender neck disturbed, which was more than he could say for his pride.
He had meant to come to her rescue, not the other way around. He lifted his head to speak. A piercing pain shot through the base of his skull into his back teeth.
She glanced around at him unexpectedly.
“Hell,” he said. “Hurts like hell.”
“He’s stirring, Heath,” she whispered to a shadowed form at her right. “Fetch the physician from downstairs.”
A minute or so later a brusque white-bearded Scot stood at Adrian’s bedside. “He might be perfectly well in the morning,” he announced with little conviction.
“Well, thank heavens,” Emma said from the opposite side of the bed.
“Then again,” the physician added, “he might not.”
“How does one know?” she asked in consternation.
“One doesn’t,” the Scottish doctor replied with cheerful morbidity. “That’s the challenge of medicine.”
She ventured closer to the bed. Adrian would have recognized her by her subtle fragrance alone, sweet and alluring like roses after a rain.
The challenge from his point of view was not medicine.
It was hiding his fascination with the woman standing at his side.
His head might hurt. The rest of his unfortunate male body seemed to work well enough.
“I believe he’s coming around,” the doctor said. “Can you give us your name?” he asked, biting off each word with a distinctive burr as if he were addressing a child.
Adrian folded his arms across his chest and sat up, his head pounding. “King Tutankhamen.”
“He’s fine,” Heath said with a droll smile.
“He does not look entirely fine to me.” Emma glanced down at Adrian. He stared back at her keenly.
“And indeed he might not be,” the physician warned with a grave air. “If he has sustained a skull fracture, he might never be himself again.”
“Who will I be?” Adrian asked in a wry under-tone.
“A skull fracture is no laughing matter, my lord. There might be bleeding in the brain, and consequences of a lasting nature.”
Emma frowned in concern. “What are we to do?”
“Allow him to rest,” the physician said. “Give him his medicine if he’ll take it. He looks to be a contrary one.”
“Just give me your cursed nostrum,” Adrian said in annoyance. “And I shall go back to my own hotel—” He made a face as the maidservant behind Emma brought a spoon of foaming brown liquid to his lips.
“You’ll not go anywhere after that,” Emma said in satisfaction.
“If he does not rest,” the physician continued, addressing Heath and Emma now, “he shall have to be restrained. Excessive conversation should be curtailed.”
“Then why the hell doesn’t everyone stop talking?” Adrian asked, subsiding back against the pillows.
“Darken the room. Keep his head wet. I shall prescribe strychnia.”
“Strychnia?” Emma asked, stealing another look at Adrian’s face. He stared back at her. “What for?”
“It’s a tonic,” the physician answered. “It also prevents constipation. I suggest keeping him mildly sedated in case he becomes violent.”
Adrian snorted. “In case? Keep cosseting me like an invalid aunt, and it’s certain.”
Emma’s gaze flickered to his. Their eyes held until he glanced down at her mouth. Her lips opened.
The physician leaned over and gingerly probed the back of Adrian’s skull. “Does that hurt?”
“Of course it hurts, you damn fool.”
“Can you describe your injury to me?”
“Yes. It’s a painium in the cranium, and I want you to keep your twiggy little fingers off my blasted head.”
“He’s becoming agitated,” the physician said in a grim voice.
Adrian glanced at Emma. “She can touch my head, but no one else.” She could touch him anywhere she pleased, in fact, but he wasn’t so dicked in the nob he’d say it aloud.
The physician blew out a sigh of concern. “Shock, it seems; he’ll need smelling salts and strong Scottish whiskey.”
Adrian grinned inwardly. Shock, his arse.
He had a headache, nothing more. He allowed his eyes, crossed though they were, to drift over Emma Boscastle’s sylphlike frame.
He couldn’t remember the last time anyone had worried over him, but he took pleasure in the feeling.
“I’ll take the whiskey,” he said tiredly.
“I also recommend a mustard poultice applied to the soles of his feet and his belly.”
“Ballocks,” Adrian murmured, stealing another look at Emma before his eyes drifted shut.
“We can put a poultice on them, too,” the physician said in a dry voice, “but it won’t do your head a damned bit of good.”
The seamless life of respectability that Emma had hoped to maintain had suddenly started to unravel. By now the scuttlebutt of what had happened today at Miss Marshall’s wedding would be repeated in all the polite as well as impolite circles in London. The bon ton did love to talk.
A physical assault. A duke’s heir felled by a footman with a Chippendale hall chair. She understood how it would be interpreted. She accepted her responsibility for having made a poor association in Sir William, and as for what had transpired, she would rise above it.
Still, as the foundress of an academy for the moral edification of young ladies, she had proven herself to be a poor example, indeed. It did not matter that she was entirely innocent of any misdoing. A proper gentlewoman would not have been caught in such a provocative situation to begin with.
Hadn’t she known the moment she laid eyes on Lord Wolverton’s charismatic personage that he exuded a disrespectable air? It once again proved that instinct should be obeyed.
And yet she could hardly have left the valiant rascal lying on the carpet. Thank goodness no one had witnessed him stealing that kiss or, heaven forbid, nuzzling his strong jaw against her breasts.
To think she had held Sir William in such high esteem and believed him to be a gentleman. Defender of the downtrodden, indeed. He and his trinkets and tailored striped trousers. It had been an entirely humbling day and Emma would be thankful to see it end.
“Whatever am I supposed to tell the girls?” her cousin and trusted assistant Miss Charlotte Boscastle asked outside the private bedchamber designated for Lord Wolverton’s recuperation.
In recent weeks, the upper-floor room had been used as an evening office or sickroom when one of the academy’s students took ill.
Ofttimes Charlotte escaped there for the quiet to write.
Emma paused to catch her breath. She’d scarcely been able to think the whole time she had stood at Lord Wolverton’s bedside. How a man could sustain such a devastating blow and yet manage to disconcert those around him was past explanation.
Even now she flushed at the thought of his impudent hazel eyes as he studied her from his bed. Clearing her throat, she realized that her cousin was awaiting a reply. The girl was too beautiful for her own good and observant to a fault.
Furthermore, she was a Boscastle, a flaxen-haired, blue-eyed member of the family, and as such, totally trustworthy and worthy of worrying about.
“Tell the girls as little as possible of this incident, Charlotte.”
“Easy for you to say,” Charlotte retorted. “The young imps have been practically crawling up the curtains for a peek at the duke’s heir. I for one feel like murdering the lot of them.”
“How vulgar,” Emma murmured. “Perhaps I’ll ask Heath to have bolts installed on all doors that give access to Lord Wolverton’s room.”
“That would be better than him awakening with a dozen schoolgirls at the foot of his bed,” Charlotte agreed.
Emma sighed. What a trial upon her soul, to gently usher these willful unweds into the arms of some respectable husband.
In this, Emma harbored no illusions. While she might wish otherwise, her academy existed for no better purpose than the blatant procurement of a good marriage for her students.
Ah, well. Upon such a foundation lay the future of England.
She ushered Charlotte toward the staircase. “Have a stern talk with the girls before evening prayers.”
“Good idea.” Charlotte paused. “You do not think Lord Wolverton would—well, wander off himself?”
“Wander off?” Emma asked, her voice rising at what her cousin was suggesting. A wolf wandering off.
“And fall down the stairs,” Charlotte added hastily. Still, her solicitous look only underscored that she was not concerned about his lordship taking a tumble in the dark. A tumble in some young woman’s bed was what she’d meant.
“A nocturnal foray is highly unlikely in his condition,” Emma said. “He has been given a sedative and will have to be observed throughout the night for signs that his symptoms do not worsen.”
“What exactly are his symptoms?” Charlotte asked.
Immoderate masculinity. Abundant charm. A wicked tongue and temper.
“His lordship has suffered a severe laceration of the scalp and is complaining of blurred vision and hammering headache.”
“The poor man could still die,” Charlotte said in sympathy, then added, “although it strains the imagination to think of one so virile being felled by a chair.”