Regency Gossip by Julia Justiss

Author:Julia Justiss
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Mills & Boon Historical
Published: 2017-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

I hope it is within your power to forgive. If not, I will understand, thank you for the happiness you have brought me and pray fervently that a merciful Providence may in future bless you with a wife more worthy than I.

She had believed his threat to divorce her, apparently. Would she welcome it, and fly back to Sandiford, the man who trusted and supported her? Nicholas had no doubt the captain would be delighted to receive her, and would care naught for the ruin divorce would bring her reputation, and his.

For perhaps a second, Nicholas entertained the idea of standing nobly aside—and then angrily rejected it. She had pledged herself to him, and he would hold her to it. Damn it, he loved her!

After Lydia, he had built such a wall of suspicion and distrust around his heart he’d not believed any woman could broach it. Yet, somehow Sarah had.

Given his past, he might never be able to trust her completely. But he also knew beyond any doubt that, even were the obnoxious captain to reside next door, a permanent thorn in his side, keeping Sarah’s warmth and passion in his arms and his bed and his life would be worth every risk.

Surely she cared for him a little. The tenderness in her face when she bade him goodbye—was it just this morning?—the way she touched him, loved him that rapturous night, must mean she cherished some warm emotion.

He would woo her passionately until he won back her respect and earned her affection. Until she no longer regretted the loss of her former love. He’d begin, he vowed, the moment she woke.

Feeling more hopeful than he had since tearing open the note twelve hours ago, he leaned over to stroke her cheek. Hot, dry skin scalded his hand.

Panic drying his tongue, Nicholas stumbled to the door and called for Becky.

While the maid ran for water and cloths, Nicholas mixed the powder the doctor left and carried it to Sarah. Raising her by the shoulders, he shook her gently, then with more vigor, to no avail. He could not rouse her.

For several hours, he and Becky dipped, wrung out and applied the cold cloths to her face, chest and arms. Becky had the fortuitous thought of tearing a strip from one of them, soaking it in medicine water, and trickling it in her mouth. From time to time she swallowed and they managed to get at least a fraction of the drug in her.

As his hands worked feverishly, his mind confronted the reality Sarah might die. Wretched as he’d felt before, the agony of that idea made his previous anxiety pale.

Disconnected images of her flitted through his fear-fogged mind: how she tilted her head and looked at him inquiringly…her charming gurgle of a laugh, and the golden lights that danced in her eyes…her head nestled on his shoulder as, after loving, she drifted asleep.

He thought of her independence, her stubborn pride, her insistence on driving herself to fulfill what she saw as her duty.

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