Yours Until Dawn (9 page)

Samantha folded her arms over her chest. “Fetch it yourself.”

Gabriel arched one golden brow, stretching his scar taut. “Pardon me?”

“If you want a towel, then fetch it yourself. I’m weary of waiting on you hand and foot. You may be blind, but you still have two perfectly good arms and legs.”

Proving her point, he threw back the blankets and sprang to his feet, towering over her. The bell thumped to the floor with a discordant jangle, rolling halfway across the room.

Samantha had forgotten how imposing he could be when he wasn’t lolling among the sheets. Especially when shirtless and wearing only a faded pair of doeskin knee breeches. Although his nearness made her breath quicken and her skin tingle with warning, she refused to retreat so much as a single step.

“Need I remind you, Miss Wickersham, that if you don’t care for the working conditions here, you have only to tender your resignation?”

“Very well, my lord,” she said, an icy calm washing over her. “I believe I’ll do just that. I resign.”

An expression of almost comical surprise crossed his face. “What do you mean, you resign?”

“I mean that I intend to collect my wages and my things and vacate your home before nightfall. If you’d like, I’ll ask Beckwith to put another advertisement in the newspaper before I go. I would suggest he offer an even more extravagant wage this time, although no amount of money would be worth putting up with your ridiculous demands for more than an hour.” Turning on her heel, she started for the door.

“Miss Wickersham, get back here this instant! That’s an order!”

“I quit,” she tossed back over her shoulder, savage glee coursing through her veins. “I’m not obliged to take your orders anymore!” Ignoring his sputtering, Samantha marched out the door, slamming it behind her with grim satisfaction.

Gabriel stood beside the bed, the slam of the door still echoing in his ears. Everything had happened so quickly that he was still struggling to absorb it. The men who had once served under his command would have never dared to question his orders, yet his stubborn slip of a nurse had brazenly defied him.

He’d won, he reminded himself grimly. Again. She had given him exactly what he had wanted—her resignation. He should be crowing with triumph.

“
Miss Wickersham!
” he bellowed, starting after her.

The hours he’d spent languishing in the bed had wreaked havoc on both his hard-won balance and his sense of direction. He’d barely taken three steps before his ankle hooked the leg of the piertable. Both he and the table began to teeter. Something slid off of its polished surface, striking the floor in an explosion of shattering glass.

It was too late to stop his forward momentum. Gabriel fell heavily, feeling a dull sting in the vicinity of his throat as he did. He lay there for a moment, fighting to catch his breath. But when he finally struggled to rise, a crippling wave of dizziness drove him back to the floor.

His hand landed in a warm, wet puddle. For a minute, he thought it was water from the shattered pitcher and goblet. But when he rubbed his fingertips together, they came away sticky.

“I’ll be damned,” he muttered, realizing it was his own blood.

Damned it seemed he would be, for the blood was gathering beneath him in a rapidly spreading pool.

For one dark flash of time, he was back on the heaving deck of the
Victory,
his nostrils awash in the coppery stench of blood, not all of it his own. A terrible rushing filled his ears, like the rushing of a hungry sea eager to swallow him whole.

Gabriel stretched out one arm, seeking something he could grasp to keep himself from sliding into that yawning abyss. His groping fingers closed over a familiar shape—the wooden handle of his bell. He dragged the bell toward him, but the effort left his weighted limb too weak to lift it.

He dropped his head, bemused by both the irony and the indignity of it all. He had survived Trafalgar only to bleed to death on his own bed-chamber floor, undone by a piece of furniture and an overbearing, acid-tongued nurse. He wondered if the icy-hearted Miss Wickersham would weep at his burial. Even as he felt his life’s blood seeping away, the thought almost made him smile.

“Miss Wickersham?” he called out weakly. He devoted the last of his strength to wringing one last feeble tinkle out of the bell. His voice sank to a hoarse whisper. “Samantha?”

Then both the tinkling of the bell and the rushing in his ears faded to a silence as black and all-consuming as the everpresent darkness.

My dear Miss March,

You call me both wicked and impertinent, yet I would wager those are exactly the qualities you find most irresistible in a man…

“I
nsufferable man,” Samantha muttered to herself as she shoved a sateen-lined skirt into her trunk without even bothering to fold it. She balled up a threadbare petticoat and jammed it after the skirt. “I can’t imagine why I was fool enough to believe I could help him.”

As she stormed across her modest bedchamber, snatching up hairpins and shoes, stockings and books, she heard an all too familiar crash from the floor above her. The ceiling shuddered, raining tiny bits of plaster down on her head.

Samantha didn’t even look up. “I may be a fool, but I’ll not fall for that again,” she said, shaking her head. “If he wants to blunder about like a bull in a china shop, then he’ll have to learn to sweep up after himself, won’t he?”

She was packing books into her portmanteau when she heard it—the muffled ringing of a bell, so soft and brief she might have imagined it. Shoving a Sir Walter Scott novel after a slim volume of Shakespeare’s sonnets, she snorted. Gabriel was the fool if he thought she could actually be swayed by that pathetic tinkling.

She was so preoccupied with gathering up the contents of her dressing table that several more minutes passed before she recognized what she was hearing.

Dead silence.

Mirror and hairbrush in hand, Samantha begrudged the ceiling an uncertain glance. A prickle of foreboding inched down her spine, but she quickly dismissed it. Gabriel had probably just crawled back into his bed to sulk.

She reached for her bottle of lemon verbena, only to find her hand wavering. Sinking down on the stool in front of the dressing table, she gazed at her reflection. It was an old mirror, its glass pitted and wavy, and the woman gazing back at her seemed to be little more than a stranger. Samantha drew off her homely spectacles, but still didn’t recognize the pensive expression in her eyes.

Was she being courageous or cowardly? Was she standing up to Gabriel because he was a high-handed tyrant, impossible to please, or was she running away because he had dared to put his hands on her? She touched a hand to her hair, her cheek, her lips, following the path of her dream. Somehow, Gabriel’s arrogance seemed far easier to bear than his tenderness. And far less dangerous to her battered heart.

Sliding her spectacles back on, she rose to tuck the bottle of lemon verbena inside her portmanteau.

It took her less than half an hour to strip the room of every sign of her brief occupancy. She was buttoning the tiny brass buttons of her traveling spencer when someone began to bang on her bedchamber door.

“Miss Wickersham! Miss Wickersham! Are you in there?”

Plucking up her bonnet, Samantha swept open the door. “Impeccable timing, Beckwith. I was just about to ring for a footman to carry my bags downstairs.”

The wild-eyed butler didn’t even spare her trunk and portmanteau a bewildered glance. “You have to come with me right away, Miss Wickersham! The master needs you!”

“What is it now? Does he have a pesky itch he can’t reach? Or have his cravats gone limp from too little starch?” She knotted the ribbons of her bonnet beneath her chin. “Whatever silly ruse he’s concocted, I can assure you that your master has no need of me. He never did.” Samantha was surprised by how much it stung to hear those words coming from her own lips.

To her shock, Beckwith, the self-appointed guardian of all things proper, clutched at her arm and attempted to drag her from the room. “Please, miss,” he begged. “I don’t know what else to do! I’m afraid he’ll die without you!”

She dug her heels into the floor, forcing Beckwith to a halt. “Oh, please! There’s no need to be so overdramatic. I’m quite sure the earl will get along famously without me. He’ll hardly know I’m—” Samantha blinked at the butler, really seeing him for the first time since she’d flung open her door.

Beckwith’s waistcoat was rumpled and the sparse strands of hair he nursed so lovingly were no longer plastered to his head, but sticking out in all directions, revealing the shiny pink scalp beneath. Her gaze dropped to the plump fingers clutching her sleeve. Fingers streaked with rust and already leaving a vivid smear on the drab wool of her sleeve.

Her heart thudded dully in her throat.

Wrenching her arm from his grasp, Samantha shoved past him. Snatching up her skirts, she went racing down the corridor and up the stairs, taking them two at a time.

The door to Gabriel’s bedchamber was still ajar.

At first the only thing Samantha saw was Gabriel sprawled face-down on the floor like some fallen giant. Her hand flew to her mouth to smother a helpless cry.

Mrs. Philpot was kneeling on the other side of him, pressing a handkerchief to the curve of his throat—a handkerchief already soaked through with bright red blood. It wasn’t difficult to deduce what had happened. Jagged shards of earthenware and crystal littered the floor around them.

Samantha rushed across the room and dropped to her knees, ignoring the sharp sting as a piece of glass sliced through the folds of her skirt and into her knee. As she reached for the handkerchief, peeling it away so she could examine the ugly gash in Gabriel’s throat, Mrs. Philpot settled back on her haunches, only too eager to surrender her grim duty.

The housekeeper swiped a limp strand of hair from her eyes, leaving a smudge of Gabriel’s blood on her cheek. “We found him when we were bringing up his afternoon tea. I have no idea how long he’s been like this.” The woman’s sharp gaze swept over Samantha’s spencer and bonnet, missing nothing. She held up Gabriel’s bell. Bloody fingerprints stained its wooden handle. “I found this right next to his hand. He must have tried to ring for help, but no one heard him.”

Samantha briefly closed her eyes, remembering the faint tinkling she had so coolly dismissed. She opened them to find Beckwith standing in the doorway, wringing his pudgy hands.

“Is there a doctor in the village?” she asked.

Beckwith nodded.

“Fetch him right away. Tell him it may be a matter of life and death.” When the butler just stood there, unable to tear his gaze away from his fallen master, Samantha shouted, “Go!”

As Beckwith shook off his daze and lurched into motion, Mrs. Philpot rose to retrieve one of the clean cravats draped over the cheval glass. Samantha snatched it from her hand and pressed it to Gabriel’s throat. Although the wound was still oozing, the bleeding appeared to be slowing. Samantha could only pray that it wasn’t because he was dying.

Gesturing for Mrs. Philpot to mind the cravat, she grasped him by the shoulders, determined to make sure he wasn’t losing blood anywhere else. It took every ounce of her strength, but with the housekeeper’s help, she managed to roll him over and into her arms. Except for the errant streaks of blood and the angry slash of his scar, his face was bone-white.

“You silly, stubborn fool,” she murmured brokenly. “Look what you’ve gone and done to yourself now.”

His lashes fluttered, slowly parting to reveal those bewitching green eyes of his. As he turned his head, gazing up at her with crystalline clarity, Samantha’s breath froze in her throat. Then his eyes drifted shut again, as if he’d just realized it wasn’t worth the bother.

“Is that you, Miss Wickersham?” he whispered hoarsely. “I rang for you.”

“I know you did.” She stroked a lock of hair away from his brow. “I’m here now. I’m not going anywhere.”

He scowled. “I was going to tell you to go straight to the devil.”

Samantha smiled through a haze of tears. “Is that an order, my lord?”

“If it was, you wouldn’t obey it,” he murmured. “Impertinent wench.”

As Gabriel slumped back into unconsciousness, his head lolling against her breast, Samantha decided it must have been his failing strength that made his insult sound so much like an endearment.

When Dr. Thaddeus Greenjoy emerged from Gabriel’s bedchamber nearly two hours later, it was to find the earl’s entire household keeping vigil in the corridor. Mrs. Philpot sat in a straight-backed chair, her lace-trimmed handkerchief pressed to her trembling lips. A miserable-looking Beckwith stood at attention beside her, while the rest of the servants huddled at the top of the stairs, whispering among themselves.

Only Samantha stood alone. Although the doctor had allowed the maids to sweep up the glass and the footmen to carry Gabriel to the bed and cut off his blood-soaked breeches, he had refused to let anyone attend him while he examined his patient, including the earl’s nurse.

As he drew the door softly shut behind him, Samantha stepped forward, still wearing her rumpled, blood-streaked traveling spencer. She held her breath, waiting for him to confirm her worst fears.