The Louise Allen Collection: The Viscount's Betrothal / The Society Catch. Louise Allen
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open and sat back on her heels. ‘The splints and the bandages are…’ Decima swallowed and got up. ‘I’ll go and get the hot bricks.’
She managed to get to the kitchen simply by talking to herself all the way down the stairs. ‘Hot bricks for Bates and Pru. Might as well do all the beds while I’m at it. I must find something to wrap them in. Check the kettle, see the fire is all right in the range. We’ll need something to keep the bedclothes off that leg.’
The admirable Mrs Chitty kept a stack of neatly hemmed flannel squares in the stillroom. Decima wrapped four bricks and made her way unsteadily upstairs to meet Adam on the landing, a bolster under each arm. ‘I can’t find a stool the right size, but these should do to keep the weight off. You’ve got the bricks? Admirable woman. Here, give me one and you go and see to your maid.’
Pru was sleeping soundly and even Decima’s touch on her hot forehead and the insertion of the brick at the foot of the bed did not rouse her. Decima hoped she would stay asleep until morning, but rather feared she would not. This could be a long night, and she only wished she did not feel quite so queasy.
She put a brick in her own bed, then opened Adam’s door to tuck the remaining one between his sheets. From Bates’s room came a gasp of anguish, cut off by the sound of Adam’s voice. It was too much; to hear someone in so much pain clutched sickeningly at the pit of her stomach. Decima doubled up, retching feebly and unproductively over the lovely porcelain basin on the washstand.
‘Decima? Where are you? Oh, my poor girl. Here, come and sit down and I’ll fetch you something to drink.’
She clutched at the glass blindly and gulped, then choked as the fiery spirit burned down her throat. ‘That’s brandy!’
‘Brandy will do you good. Drink it all down.’ It would probably make her drunk as a lord, given that none of them had eaten since breakfast, but anything was better than that pinched look around her mouth and those wide, shocked eyes. Adam took the glass from Decima’s shaking hand and set it on the bedside stand. ‘You were a heroine. I could not have managed without you.’
‘It was just when I could feel the bone move—’ She broke off and passed a hand over her face. ‘I am better now. How is he?’
‘He will be fine. I got another shot of laudanum down him and he went out like a snuffed candle. If I can keep him unconscious all night, it won’t be so bad in the morning.’
‘How do you know?’ She looked at him with curiosity as she asked and he saw with concern the greenish tint of her skin. Otherwise it was very nice skin: smooth and pale and covered with those delicious freckles as though someone had dusted fine bran over her nose and cheeks. How long would it take to kiss each one? It would be like kissing the Milky Way. He found himself wondering if they appeared anywhere else on her body.
‘I had the same bone break when I fell out of a tree when I was fifteen. I watched the doctor, while I wasn’t yelling my head off, that is.’
Decima started to get up, then sat down again on the bed with a thump, eyes closed. ‘My, I am dizzy. It must be the shock of it, I suppose.’
Adam smiled. She had had enough spirits on an empty stomach to knock her out for an hour or two. ‘That’ll be it. Now if you just lie back and close your eyes, you will feel better in a moment.’ He eased her back onto the pillows, murmuring soothingly. With a sleepy mutter Decima curled up in the folds of the soft coverlet. ‘There you are, just rest.’ She was asleep.
Adam stood looking down at her, visited by a strange feeling of tenderness. She was hardly a fragile little bloom, but there was something very vulnerable about her, despite her height and age. Something vulnerable, yet she had plenty of courage to fight, too. He imagined any other single lady of his acquaintance undergoing what Decima Ross had that day without succumbing to hysterics, and failed. What she was doing unmarried he couldn’t imagine. Her height was against her, of course, but with those unusual looks and lively mind, there must be scores of tall gentlemen who would have snapped her up.
Possibly there was a large and anxious fiancé somewhere who might be expected to call out Viscount Weston when he learned what had transpired. Not that anything would, of course, but just being alone with him was scandal enough. He was going to have to give some thought to that.
Meanwhile, what to do with a sleeping Miss Ross who was wiffling, gently, as she slumbered? She was not going to be very comfortable when she awoke to find she had slept in her shoes, let alone with her stays laced. The thought brought with it the recollection of her body as it had slipped through his hands to the ground in the yard.
With a grimace for his own over-active imagination, Adam flipped the other side of the coverlet over her and walked away.
He checked upstairs twice more as the evening wore on. The fires needed keeping in; he set water by the bedsides of the maid and Bates, both thankfully still unconscious, and made himself stay away from Decima. She did not need to wake up to find herself in a man’s bed with the man himself in the room: that would be conducive of hysterics.
At one point he cut a wedge of cheese from a wheel of Stilton in the larder and fished some of Mrs Chitty’s pickles out of the jar to go with it, but by seven o’clock Adam was thinking that he was going to have to forage for food or starve.
Then the kitchen door creaked and Decima was standing on the threshold, her face flushed with sleep, a shawl round her shoulders and her hair in tousled disarray. It just made him want to tousle it some more. Adam got hastily to his feet, then came to the conclusion that staying sitting with his legs carefully crossed would have been a better decision.
‘I’ve been asleep,’ she said accusingly. ‘In your bed. Charlton would be outraged.’
‘I imagine Charlton would be even more outraged if I had carried you off and put you in your bed. Do you think he will call me out?’
That provoked a deep chuckle as she came in, pulling her shawl snugly around her shoulders. ‘What a wonderful image that conjures up. Charlton does not have the figure for duelling, let alone the temperament. Bates and Pru are still asleep and I am starving.’
‘So am I. Now, you said you could cook, more or less.’
‘I exaggerated…no, I lied.’ Decima flushed and regarded her toes. ‘I might as well be truthful about it. I haven’t the first clue. Shall we look in the larder and see what there is?’
The meal they spread on the kitchen table—Decima having put her head around the dining-room door and pronounced it fit only to act as an icehouse—owed nothing to any culinary skill whatsoever.
Cold mutton, cheese, the heel of a loaf, butter and plum cake were washed down with ale, or, in Decima’s case, with water. Adam could not recall enjoying a meal more.
For a start it was a pleasure to eat with a woman who showed a hearty appetite and didn’t starve herself and pick at her food in an effort to appear ladylike. Then, Decima did not stand on ceremony either: she forgot to take her elbows off the table when they were in the middle of an argument about the Prince Regent’s taste in architecture, she waved her knife in the air to make her point when she lectured him on horse breeding, and she completely forgot herself and doubled up laughing when he recounted a particularly wicked story about two of the Patronesses of Almack’s and the Duke of Wellington.
‘No! They didn’t? Not both of them,’ she gasped, emerging from her fit of the giggles, pink and glowing.
‘I should not have told you that,’ Adam confessed ruefully. The trouble was, she seemed so at ease with him, and had such an individual character, that it was like talking to one of the dashing young matrons he was used to in London society. Only Decima had a delicious innocence that none of those sophisticated ladies had shown for many a year.
‘No, I don’t expect you should,’ she agreed with a twinkle. ‘But