Tempting the Bride - By Sherry Thomas Page 0,31

of the rest of us would have read half as well.”

“More like none of us can read a quarter as well,” Venetia corrected him.

Hastings closed the book. By now Helena must have sickened of his voice—she’d never have consented to listen to him for hours on end if it weren’t for her incapacity. He only wished she could have told him to shut up herself.

“Go have your supper, all of you,” he said to the gathering. “Especially you, Duchess, you should be eating for two.”

There was a round of desultory agreement. “Come with?” said Fitz.

“I had mine two hours ago. You go on without me.”

When her family had gone downstairs, he asked Nurse Jennings whether she’d care for some fresh air. Nurse Jennings agreed readily and made haste to rendezvous with her cigarette.

He took Helena’s hand in his and brushed his fingers against the uninjured side of her face.

“It will be a gloomy supper downstairs,” he told her. “I’m not sure whether you heard the conversation earlier. We’ve been giving you water and bits of mush, but that’s not enough to sustain you. Tomorrow morning they will administer the tube.”

He had to take a deep breath before he could continue. “I told them this is not you, Helena. You will not allow yourself to remain in this vegetative state. You will come around. You will speak; you will walk; you will dance. You will publish a thousand more books. You will live life as it is meant to be lived, on your feet, making your own decisions.

“Wake up, my love. I have loved you for a very long time, and you have never been anything but supremely obstinate. I need you to be more obstinate than you’ve ever been, Helena. Wake up. Everything depends upon it—my entire life included.”

CHAPTER 8

Someone was using a chisel on Helena’s skull. She winced and slowly opened her eyes. A plaster medallion greeted her sight—a plaster medallion three feet across in diameter embedded in an unfamiliar ceiling.

Where was she? At a relative’s house? Did her Norris cousins have such a ceiling? Or her Carstairs cousins? She tried to sit up, but her body was heavy and unwieldy, and it took a surprising amount of effort to raise herself to her elbows. The strain hurt her shoulders; the movement made her head throb harder.

The source of illumination in the room was a wall sconce that had been covered with dark paper. She stared at this light—there was something odd about it: It didn’t flicker, but burned with a disconcerting steadiness. Was she—was she looking at an electric light?

Surely not. Electric lights were what inventors demonstrated to curious crowds, not something to be found in an ordinary dwelling.

She forgot about the oddity of the sconce when she realized that she was not alone. A woman in a green dressing gown slept with her head and her folded arms on the edge of Helena’s bed. Venetia. But she looked…older. Quite a bit older.

Behind Venetia was a man Helena had never seen before, sleeping in a chair, his shoulder leaning against the side of a wardrobe. Helena recoiled in alarm and was just about to shake Venetia’s arm when she saw another man dozing with his head tilted back, on a small chaise opposite the bed.

Her mouth opened wide as she recognized Fitz. The difference in his appearance was stark. His face, covered with dark stubble—stubble!—had elongated and sharpened from what she recalled. He no longer looked like the boy she remembered, but a man well into his twenties. To compound her shock, a woman was on the chaise with him, sleeping with her arm around his knees, her head on his thighs.

Was she still dreaming?

She must have made some sound, a whimper perhaps, at the prodigious strangeness of the tableau before her. Her family remained asleep, but a figure in the corner she hadn’t noticed before stirred. The person rose and stepped toward the bed. Another man—was there no end to the irregularity of the situation?

His clothes were crumpled, his necktie unknotted. He was unshaven, his hair longish and messy, blond curls that hadn’t known the comb for a while. And there were circles under his eyes, as if he hadn’t slept for days.

“Helena,” he said softly. “You are awake.”

His voice was oddly familiar. But as she had no idea who he was, she couldn’t possibly have granted him the intimacy of addressing her by her Christian name. She was about to demand his identity—and chastise him for