Gunshot.
Before Ruel could call out a warning, a projectile raked across his left arm at a downward angle. His flesh split wide. The round continued on undeflected. It tore into Anne Webster’s thigh, taking with it a piece of her gown, and came out the other side. It ripped a hole near the hem of Miss Prudence Watson’s dress before plowing into the dirt at her feet.
Miss Watson screamed. Anne crumpled to the road.
“Down!” Ruel jerked Miss Watson’s arm. She shrieked in hysteria, rolled into a ball, and covered her head with her arms. “The hedge,” he grunted. “Get to it.”
Ruel drew his coat pistol from an inside pocket as he swept Anne up in his arms and ran with her toward the shelter of the thick hedgerow. A puff of smoke, smelling of black powder, drifted across the open road. Still screaming, Miss Watson unwound herself and scrambled for cover.
“Silence,” Ruel commanded her. Holding the loaded pistol with one hand, he jerked it from half to full cock and shouted up the hillside. “Show yourself, villain!”
Anne moaned and touched his shoulder where a circle of bright crimson was forming. Oblivious to his wound, Ruel peered through the dense hedge.
“Blast it all; he has gone. Coward.” He turned to the women and noted Anne’s blood-soaked dress. At the sight of her ashen face, a wave of fear curled through his stomach. A red stain covered the torn hole in her gown, spreading quickly and dripping onto the ground. Biting off a curse, he turned to Miss Watson.
“What about you?” he demanded. “Are you hit?” When he took her shoulder and shook her, the paralyzed young lady let out a cry. “Are you injured, madam?”
“No!” she sobbed. “I am all right.”
“Then help me.” He shrugged out of his coat, vaguely aware that his shoulder throbbed as though a bee had stung it, and tossed the garment to Miss Watson. “Make a pillow of this. We must stop the bleeding.”
He reached for his cravat, realized he had only the bit of flimsy lace, and swore. He grabbed Anne’s dress and ripped the hem away with his hands. “Miss Webster, do not flinch. And do not look as if you mean to swoon either. I know you are not the sort.”
Anne’s eyes fluttered open as he bent over her. He worked at wrapping the length of cloth around her leg.
“Gone clean through,” he muttered. “Who could have done this? A highwayman would have come out onto the road after my wallet. Surely Barkham would have challenged me to a duel if he still held a grudge. It has been three years since the incident with his wife. . . . Wimberley cannot still be nursing his anger about that purse I won off him. . . . Of course, there is Droughtmoor. He might still—”
“It was the gamekeeper,” Miss Watson croaked. “I saw his brown coat.”
“William Green? What have I done to him?”
“Not you. It is her.” Miss Watson took Anne’s hand and squeezed it. “He wants to marry her. He has asked twice, but she will not have him. I believe he is the man who fired at us.”
“Absurd. To kill a woman because she will not marry? Ridiculous.”
“She spurned him, my lord.”
“But Green is nothing more than a gamekeeper. A peasant. He cannot believe he deserves such a woman as this.”
“She is only Anne Webster, sir. Surely you know she is my lady’s maid.”
Ruel looked down at the woman whose shadowed eyelids had drifted shut. Her face, so animated before, was motionless, her breathing shallow. Only a maid?
“Stay here with her,” he ordered Miss Watson, whose large eyes brimmed with tears. “I shall go for my chaise. It awaits me at the church, and I shall send it here at once for both of you. Then I shall go into town and find the doctor. We should return to Slocombe within the hour.”
When he started to get up, Miss Watson caught his arm. “No, my lord, please do not go. You are wounded yourself. Your arm . . . ”
He glanced at the tattered flesh of his shoulder and frowned. “Dash it all. This is a devilish circumstance.”
“Please guard your tongue, Lord Blackthorne, I beg you,” Miss Watson whispered. “Anne is a minister’s daughter.”
Studying the injured woman for a moment, he decided he had no choice. “I must go for the chaise. If she loses more blood—”
“No—that cannot be! I shall go myself. The gamekeeper has no reason to shoot at me. I shall send the chaise to you and fetch the doctor from the village.” Miss Watson scrambled to her feet, clapped one hand over her bonnet, and darted away.
“Miss!” He called after her, but she was already flying around a bend in the road, her tattered, blood-spattered skirts dancing at her ankles.
He supposed it had something to do with the way she had woven a royal tale of imagination for the little beggar girl in the kitchen. Or perhaps it was the manner in which she had boldly demanded the return of her lace panel. Maybe it was nothing more than the range of emotions that had flickered across her face during his farcical marriage proposal—indignation, amusement, anger, shy pleasure.
Ruel lifted Anne’s shoulders and rested her head against his arm. Whatever the reason that drew him to this woman, she captivated him. He stared in dismay at her pale face. The thick hedge cast blue shadows beneath her cheekbones and over her neck. Though a tiny pulsebeat flickered in her throat and her breath came regularly, she had lost too much blood. Even now, it soaked through the binding on her thigh and seeped onto her bare leg. He rubbed his fingers together, aware that they, too, were stained with her bright blood.
A strange sensation crept over Ruel as he looked at the woman. He had always viewed his own existence with the cynicism of the rake that he was. Both Ruel and Alexander had been born late in their mother’s life. Though the duke clearly loved his elder son, Ruel’s mother preferred the younger brother. “That dark, vile little thing,” she called Ruel as she chose either to abuse or to ignore him. Yet the duchess doted on Alexander: “My golden gift from God.”
Ruel had learned not to care. All women, he had decided while still quite young, were useless except as entertainment. Claire, sixteen years his senior and the eldest of the five lovely Chouteau sisters, had done her best to encourage tenderness in the little boy by playing with him, teaching him songs, bringing him toys from London. But Claire had married the Viscount Eagon the year after Alex was born, so he saw her rarely. His other sisters—busy with fashion and beaux and the goings-on of Society—could hardly be bothered with him.
Ruel touched the tip of his knuckle to Anne Webster’s cheek. He had always thought of women rather the way a huntsman views his prey. They were to be admired for their appearance, pursued, and, one hoped, conquered. As many as possible, as often as possible.
A man could be respected for a variety of things—his intellect, his wit, his shooting skill, even his wealth and position in Society. Women focused their whole existence on balls, gowns, and romantic intrigues. They spent their time on such fripperies as playing the pianoforte, stitching fire screens, beading purses. Thus, Ruel had nothing but a passing carnal interest in the female gender.
He had little use for religion either, thinking it a grand collection of gibberish intended to give the weak-minded hope. He agreed with his friend George Gordon, Lord Byron, on the subject. The poet had commented to him one day, “We are miserable enough in this life, without the absurdity of speculating upon another.”
Women. Religion. Balls. Fashion. Grand dinners. The royal court. All of them a great waste of time. Ruel had found his education boring, most of his peers simpering, and his prospects for the future deadly dull. Travel, adventure, and gambling—whether at cards or in speculative exploits—were the only things that interested him.
He cared little for life, his own or that of others. He had wounded two men in duels, several more during a fracas in America, another at the gaming table. He disregarded his own existence, and he had almost lost his life more than once. In fact, he realized as he looked down at the young lady who lay in his lap, a sizable number of men would be happy to see him dead.
Why did the thought of losing this woman send an aching emptiness through his chest? She was only Anne Webster . . . only a maid . . .
He tried to straighten the bonnet that had slipped askew during the shooting. A ribbon of her hair had fallen out and lay across her shoulder. He picked it up and draped it over the back of his hand. As light as silk, it gleamed with golden highlights in the late-morning sunshine. Chocolate laced with cinnamon, he had called the color. No wonder Anne Webster disdained him.
The bonnet refused to go right, so Ruel pulled it off and let her hair spill across his thigh. He traced one finger over each of her eyebrows, marveling at the way they echoed the upward-tilted shape of her almond eyes. She was a housemaid, a minister’s daughter, a laceworker. She ought not to have those lips. So full, though pale now, they all but begged to be kissed.
Had any man ever kissed Miss Anne Webster? He thought not. The tone in her voice warned men away. The tilt to her chin instructed them to keep hands off. Even the design of her simple cotton gown spoke of her maidenhood. Where most women enjoyed the current fashion of necklines cut as low as possible and waists cut as high as possible, Anne wore a modest bodice covered by a discreet cotton shawl. She was as untouched and new as that crocus growing beside the hedge.
Swallowing at the hard lump that had somehow lodged in his throat, Ruel stared down at her leg. Slender, firm, and white, it was a sharp contrast to the deeply tanned skin of his own hands. He had seen women’s legs, lots of them. But Anne Webster’s leg was not meant for his eyes. He tugged at her skirt, yet it was too torn and bloodied to cover her.
“Blast it all.” He shut his eyes, searching for answers. In the blackness he saw nothing. Emptiness. Void.
When he lifted his head again, he saw that she was staring at him. Her eyes were a deep shade of brown, the lashes long and black around them. She took a breath, and her face contorted in pain.
“My leg hurts.”
“Do not move it.”
She bit back tears. “Where is Miss Watson? She is not well.”
“Well enough to run for my chaise and the doctor.”
“Never mind a doctor,” she murmured. “I am prepared to die.”
“You are not going to die.”
“I believe I shall, sir.”
“No.” He leaned over her and took her face in both his hands. “No, Anne Webster, you will not. You will get into the chaise and go to Slocombe. You will recover and make lace panels and read your Bible and stand up to the nobility once again. Yes?”
She looked into his gray eyes. “Who are you?” she whispered. “Not . . . not the marquess. He has eyes of cold, hard iron. Yours are soft, kind.”
“You may call me Ruel.”
“I must tell you . . . Ruel . . . were I to paint your eyes, I should make them the color of a dove’s wings.”
He clenched his jaw, fighting the emotion that welled in his chest. “Thank you, madam.”
“I could make your eyes in lace, I think. I am good with patterns . . . and your hair is all curls . . . like mist on the window. . . . You look very like the marquess, but much more gentle. I must tell you, Ruel . . . I think the marquess was wounded. I saw blood on his shoulder . . . like that on yours.”
“I shall look after him, I assure you.”
“You are good.” Her eyes drifted shut. “Ruel, the marquess asked to be my protector.”
“Yes, he did.” His voice was ragged.
“I prefer you.”
“Thank you, Anne. Thank you very much.”
The doctor predicted Anne Webster would die during the night. She had lost a great quantity of blood. If not that night, she would surely perish within the week. The lead ball had driven bits of dress fabric into her leg, he theorized to Mrs. Davies, the housekeeper. Gangrene was certain to set in. He gave the housekeeper a small bottle of laudanum to dose Anne for the pain, instructed that the vicar be called in the hour of the young lady’s death, and hurried up to the rooms of the Marquess of Blackthorne.
There, the doctor blotted, cleaned, and stitched the wound in the shoulder of his very wealthy and very important patient. He then bled the marquess, gave his valet a variety of powders along with a quantity of laudanum, and prescribed bed rest until the injury healed—a month at the least. The marquess was not to use his shoulder in any way during that time, but was to be fed, bathed, dressed, and pampered.
Beatrice Chouteau, the Duchess of Marston, swooned the moment she was told of the dreadful event, and the doctor rushed from the marquess to her bedside. She recovered quickly enough but was confined to her rooms with a headache. She concurred with the intelligence that the gamekeeper was the prime suspect in the shooting incident. Slocombe House rules prohibited female servants from having suitors, she reminded her lady’s maids, and such appalling violence was exactly the reason. Romantic liaisons between members of the lower classes always led to trouble.
While the doctor was tending his elder son and wife, the duke stormed up and down the corridors of Slocombe House, rapping his cane on the floor and issuing commands. Footmen flew at his beck and call. He ordered the roadway from Tiverton to Slocombe searched. He demanded that all possible witnesses to the dire event be summoned. He sent for the family’s physician from London. He authorized the immediate arrest of William Green. The gamekeeper, to no one’s surprise, was not to be found. The duke dispatched a party of footmen to find and detain the villain.