quite enough,” said Titus, accepting a cool cloth from Higgins and crowding her family away. Towering over her, he bent to wipe a sheen of sweat from her brow and upper lip.
When he brought his face close like this, she could see every striation of metallic beauty glimmering in his eyes. She could make out the variations of color in his shadow of a beard.
She could marvel at the feel of a gentle hand on her brow. How novel it was. How necessary.
“Morley, you can interrogate her some other time. She’s in too much pain to be of use to you now,” he ordered.
Nora gaped up at him. How did he know she was in pain? She’d been so careful not to let on.
Because he was a good doctor. Probably the best.
“She’ll come home with us,” Prudence declared. “If these cretins are after her, then she should be somewhere she’s safe until Carlton has dealt with them.”
Nora shook her head, her stomach curling in relief to see that Nurse Higgins had passed Titus a syringe filled with welcome oblivion. “Your house is the first place they’d look for me after Cresthaven, Pru. I won’t put you and the Chief Inspector in danger.”
At that, Morley let out an undignified snort. “I’m entirely capable of protecting those in my own home.”
“But you cannot shirk your duties at Scotland Yard on my account,” she argued. “You’ll be away from home even more often if you’re personally after the brigands my husband apparently stole from.”
His expression was captured on the border between quizzical and offended. “I happen to know more than a few dangerous men who could keep you and my wife safe when I’m at the Yard.”
She turned to the head of the Morley family. “Pru, you’re with child. And until we know who my enemies are or how many—”
“She’ll recover at my clinic in Knightsbridge,” Titus announced before deftly sliding the needle into her arm and depressing the much-needed opiate into her vein.
Still, he refused to look her in the eye.
“You have a clinic in Knightsbridge?” Felicity asked from beside Nora, as agog as the rest of them.
Titus’s chin dipped in a curt nod as Morley elucidated. “The good doctor is one of the most prolific and progressive surgeons in practice today. Hospitals and universities alike are clamoring for his expertise, but he’s insisting on being a man of the people. You’re lucky, Lady Woodhaven, that this new charitable venture of his was operational, or I don’t know what we’d have done.”
“How impressive, Dr. Conleith,” Felicity marveled, staring up at him as if he’d hung the moon.
He took the needle from Nora’s arm and replaced it with a cloth, holding pressure there for a moment as he crooked a lip in Felicity’s direction. “I’ve told you to call me Titus, like in the old days.”
Nora almost burst into tears at the way a touch of warmth laced his voice with velvet.
It would be what she deserved, to have to watch him fall in love with sweet, young, darling Felicity. They had so much in common. They were both so true of heart and she was… well she was many things now.
An invalid. An adulteress. The penniless widow of a murdering thief. Barren, ill-used, and contaminated by scandal. She’d been barely younger than Felicity was now when she’d loved Titus.
When he’d loved her, in return.
They spoke around her as the medication pulled her back down into the void, their voices urgent and quiet at the same time.
A hollow ache lodged within her that the medicine could never touch.
Why would he keep her under his roof when he could barely bring himself to look at her?
Warlords and Dragons
What had he been thinking, insisting Nora stay beneath his roof when he could barely bring himself to look at her?
It was a question Titus asked himself every time he had to endure her presence on his examination table.
For twenty-three days, four hours and—he checked his watch—sixteen minutes, he had felt like some sort of mythic dragon with a captive maiden locked in his tower.
He didn’t want to see her.
And yet, he’d become a hollow sort of fiend at the thought of never seeing her again.
Initially, he’d assumed that in the five-story Gregorian mansion he’d turned into a private surgery facility, Nora would be easy to both protect and avoid.
Stashed in his personal suite situated in the lush living quarters on the top floor, she’d have her every physical and medical need addressed by an army of