It Begins with a Kiss by Eileen Dreyer

Author:Eileen Dreyer [Dreyer, Eileen]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Fiction / Romance - Historical
ISBN: 9781455519316
Publisher: Hachette Book Group
Published: 2012-07-03T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter 2

Saturday June 17, 1815

They had gone.

Olivia stood in the foyer of her little pension and stared at the battered portmanteau on the floor in front of her. She’d just run from the Namur Gate, where she’d spent the day caring for the wounded who had begun to flood into town the night before. She felt stupid with exhaustion, standing there in her stained, wet dress and trying to understand what that poor, solitary bag meant.

She’d gone to the medical tents that morning with Mrs. Bottomly’s blessing, just as she had the day before. “No, no, my dear,” the little woman had said, her mouth full of muffin. “You must help those poor men. We shall make do here until we can arrange transport home. Although I fear it might already be too late to leave.”

It was indeed too late, but evidently only for Olivia. Thunder cracked overhead, and rain beat on the windows. The skies had opened not twenty minutes ago, forcing everyone inside. Olivia had run for the shelter of her lodgings.

No, not her lodgings. Not anymore. Madame La Suire, the landlady, had just made that point clear when she’d briskly informed Olivia that the English madame and her so-stupid daughters had decamped not an hour after Olivia had left that morning. If Olivia chose to stay, she would need to pay the tariff herself.

Gone. While she’d been kneeling on the cobbles giving sips of water to wounded men, her employer had snuck away without her. It made no sense.

“Did Mrs. Bottomly leave anything for me, madame?” Olivia asked as the stout woman set down a pitifully small bandbox next to the portmanteau. “A letter? A small reticule?”

The reticule she’d left behind with Mrs. Bottomly, where it would be safe. Where she couldn’t lose it among the crowds of injured and dying who overran the streets, the civilians who clattered about, swinging from excitement to blind panic. She had every ha’penny she’d earned in the last six months in that reticule, ready to send home to Georgie.

“She said nothing, that one,” Madame said. “She gave nothing. I packed what you see here, and there is no reticule. She leaves with the oh-so-handsome English lord.” Casting a severe eye at her former border, she lifted a blunt finger. “And do not try to accuse me. I thieve of no one.”

Olivia couldn’t seem to think. She still had blood on her hands from the young dragoon who had spilled his life out on the road not twenty feet from the gates. She’d reached him only moments before he died, gasping and pleading and so very young, just one among hundreds stumbling back from Quatre Bras.

She’d held him in her arms as his lifeblood drained onto the cobbles, and she’d watched his eyes fade and still. She’d closed those eyes—Brown. Hadn’t they been brown? She had laid him down as gently as she could and run from the rain. And now she had nowhere to go, and it was all she could seem to think of.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.