Hart woketo an angel presiding over him, a halo of golden hair unbound and falling around her shoulders, the sweet croon of her voice saying his name, telling him to wake, that he needed to take some sustenance. To her hand on his brow, brushing the hair from his forehead. To the tenderness in her sky-blue gaze. To the feeling he was being looked after.
Tended.
Cared for.
Saint Hugh’s bones.He sifted through the foggy corridors of his memory for what had happened. His body was weak, his strength sapped. He felt as if he’d been run over by a bleeding hackney.
And then at last, recollection returned. The damned wound must have become infected. He remembered making love to Emma and then waking to a fierce ache in his side, the sensation he had been cast into flames. He recalled too, a fierce cold, along with hazy and indistinct memories of his siblings’ worried faces hovering over him, always accompanied by her.
“Just a bit of bone broth, if you please,” Emma was saying from her position at his bedside as she held a spoon to his lips. “You will be needing your strength now that the fever has broken.”
How calm she was. As matter-of-fact as if she were telling him the day would be a fair one, with nary a hint of clouds. As if he were a damned invalid in need of her aid.
With what seemed a Herculean effort, he raised his hand to obstruct hers. “I’ll not eat slop.”
His voice was little more than a rasp, like hinges in desperate need of oiling. Fever, she had said. What the devil had happened to him?
She frowned. “You have been abed for days now, and I have scarcely managed to get anything to cross those stubborn lips of yours. You will be eating the broth.”
Her dulcet voice had taken on a sternness that would have made him smile were he not feeling so bleeding poorly. And if she had not just informed him he’d been in bed for days. Christ.
“How many?” he bit out, for he didn’t have any time to waste.
He had sent the invitation to her father. What if he had missed his opportunity?
“How many what?” she asked, looking at him as if he were a raving Bedlamite. “Are you feeling feverish again?”
She replaced the spoon in her bowl and pressed her hand to his brow. Her touch was cool and smooth and everything his body craved. He never wanted her to take it away. He wanted to luxuriate in that touch. To bask in it. Not because he was roaring with lust as he had been from the moment he had first seen her. No, he was too weak for such a base craving. Rather, he liked the way it felt.
No one had touched him like that, a hand to his brow, just to soothe him, since he had been a lad. He wanted more of it, and he simultaneously hated himself for the weakness. But the yearning remained lodged in his chest, along with something else that was far more alarming.
“I ain’t feverish,” he snapped, shoving her hand away from his brow. “And I don’t need a bleeding nursemaid. You said I’d been abed for days. How many?”
“Two.” She was still frowning, and he took note of the dark circles beneath her eyes, an indication she had not been sleeping well.
He had not missed the game with Haldringham, then. A curious rush of disappointment hit him, along with more questions. Had Emma been tending to him for the duration? Why did the thought send a rush of warmth straight through him?
“Where the devil are my brothers?” he asked, scowling at her, for he did not like the way she made him feel. He was not meant to feel this softness where she was concerned. “Where is Lily or the rest of my sisters?”
“Your sister Caro was here to tend your wound,” Lady Emma said calmly, reaching for the bowl of broth once more. “She is the reason your fever finally broke. Her salve seems to have been healing the infection you suffered.”
Caro was the healer of the family, and her absence at The Sinner’s Palace was sorely felt in times such as these, when the Bradleys came raining down on them all with a vengeance, determined to bring them low. He was thankful his sister had found her way to him in time for her ointment to do its job.
“My brothers,” he repeated, thinking of Jasper in particular. He was not meant to know Lady Emma was here. “Where are they?”
“They are sleeping, I expect. It has been a long and difficult few days for us all. We feared we would lose you.” She held the spoon to his lips. “Open.”
“I’m not a mewling bleeding—”
She jammed the spoon between his cursed lips and the warm, irritatingly soothing flavor of the bone broth invaded his mouth.
“Mrgrwf,” he finished grimly around the utensil before taking her wrist in as forceful a grasp as he could muster—fucking feeble at best—and pulling the damned spoon from his mouth. “You don’t need to feed me, damn it.”
“Hmm,” was all she said, an unimpressed hum as she dipped the empty spoon back into her bowl.
“Don’t bloody well try that again,” he warned.
“Or what?” she asked, considering him with a raised brow as she lifted the freshly laden spoon toward him.
Or what indeed? He was lying in bed. An invalid who had been with fever and who was weaker than the babe he claimed he wasn’t. Laid low by a Bradley, of all people. He would have rather been nearly killed by a spider or a worm. Either would have been preferable to a Bradley.
“Or I’ll take that bleeding bowl and throw it across the room,” he threatened anyway.
“Of course you will,” came her only response, just before the cursed spoon was forced between his lips. “But first you’ll eat just a bit more for me.”
He swallowed the broth, which wasn’t half-bad. It was merely the idea of her tending to him, treating him as if he were incapable of seeing to himself, that rankled. Hell, he was largely incapable at the moment, but damn her hide for telling him she loved him and then remaining at his side, tending to him, when she ought to have bleeding left.
He did not deserve her. And he most definitely did not deserve her love. All his carefully formulated plans were going to hell. She was looking after him. Fretting over him. Feeding him. And he had intended to use her in most cruel fashion. Suddenly, the reason why—the sake of his missing brother—no longer mattered.
Realization hit him, like a fist slamming directly into his breadbasket.
The queer heaviness in his chest had a name.
Love.
He had fallen in love with Lady Emma Morgan.
What the floating hell was he going to do now?