cottons and velvets. With her wealth of ebony hair and eyes so dark it was hard to distinguish pupil from iris, every cut and color flattered her endlessly.
But Titus knew red was her favorite. She wore it most often in every conceivable shade.
In the stillness of the morning, he could hear that her breaths were erratic and uneven, as if she were running in a dream, or struggling with some unseen foe.
On carpets as plush as hers, his feet made no sound as he tiptoed past the foot of a bed so cavernous that it would have swallowed his humble cot in the loft above the mews three times over.
Was she having a nightmare?
Would it be a kindness to wake her?
Perhaps. But he’d expect to be summarily dismissed for even presuming to do such a thing.
He dawdled over the fire, laying the most perfect blaze ever constructed. Once the flames crackled and popped cheerfully in the hearth, he lingered still, content to simply share the air she breathed.
“Is it burning?”
Her hoarse words nearly startled him out of his own skin.
Titus jumped to his feet, upsetting his kindling basket, and dropping the poker on the stones with a thunderous clatter.
“The—the fire, Miss? Aye. It’s burning proper now. It’ll warm your bones and no mistake.” Compared to her high-born dialect, his Yorkshire accent sounded like ripe gibberish, even to his own ears.
“It’s burning me,” she complained tightly, the words terse and graveled as if her throat closed over them.
“Miss?” His heart pounded as he approached her side of the bed, then sank at what he found.
Her braid was a tangle, escaped tendrils matted to her slick forehead and temples as if she’d done battle with it all night. Lines of pain crimped her brow and pinched the skin beside her full lips thin and white.
She wasn’t simply curled against the cold but, more accurately, around herself. As if to protect her torso from pain. Though beads of sweat gathered at her hairline and her upper lip, she shivered intermittently.
It was her eyes, though, that terrified him. Open, but fixed on nothing, not even noting his approach.
“Miss?” he whispered. “Can you—Can you hear me?”
Suddenly her limbs became restless as she arched and flailed weakly, shoving her bedcovers away from her body, revealing that she’d clawed her nightdress off sometime during the night.
Honoria Goode was pale in the most normal of circumstances, but her lithe nude limbs were nearly indistinguishable from the white sheets, but for the feverish red flush creeping up her torso, over her breasts, and toward her clavicles.
“It’s burning my skin,” she croaked, levering herself up on shaking arms. “Everywhere. Put it out, boy, please.”
Boy. Later, the word would pierce him like a lance.
She made a plaintive sound that sliced his guts open and made to roll off the bed.
“No, miss. You’re with fever. Lie still. I’ll wake the house.” Without thinking, he reached for her shoulders, meaning to keep her in place.
She stunned him by collapsing back to the bed in a heap of bliss at his touch. “Yes,” she sighed, clutching at his hands. “So cold. So…better.”
The winter air was frigid and damp this morning and laying the fires had done next to nothing to slake the bone-deep chill from his fingers and toes.
Her skin did, indeed, feel as hot as any flame beneath his palms, leeching whatever comforting cold his hands could offer as she warmed him in kind.
Panic trilled through him, seizing his limbs. As an uneducated boy he knew very little, but he understood the danger she was in all too well. She was burning from the inside out, and if something wasn’t done, she’d become just another ghost to haunt the void in his heart where his loved ones used to live.
Snatching up her sheets, he carefully swaddled her enough to keep her from doing herself any harm before tearing out of the room.
He rang every bell, roused every adult from their beds with frantic intensity. The Baron immediately sent him for their doctor, Preston Alcott. Not wanting to waste the time it took for the old stable master to saddle a horse, Titus ran the several blocks to the doctor’s, arriving just as his lungs threatened to burst from the frigid coal-stained air.
Doctor Alcott was still punching his arms into his coat as Titus dragged him down his front stoop in a groggy heap of limbs and shoved him into a hansom. To save time, he relayed all the details of his interaction with