Chapter Two
Ambrose Cornelius Holyoake, the second Viscount Holyoake, watched as his wife’s cheeks turned a dark shade of red. It was no small feat to make her blush, though she was a ginger and should blush easily. But then she wasn’t really blushing, was she? Her cheeks were tinged pink with fury. She removed her hand from his bruise, and he was able to breathe again. He hadn’t been ready for her to touch him so intimately, and he’d known the best way to cover the sudden rush of heat he felt was to distract her.
“Don’t like to be reminded that you are married?” he asked.
“I don’t mind being married,” she said. “I just don’t want to be wed to you.”
“Well, nothing you can do about that.”
Behind her spectacles, her light eyes flashed, indicating she had some rather disreputable ideas as to what she might do. He didn’t have to guess to know at the top of her list was letting him die. Perhaps helping him along on the road to an afterlife.
“Baron sent you to find me?” Ambrose could still feel the heat of her touch on his skin. He’d felt nothing but pain the last few days, and he wasn’t sure that he didn’t prefer the pain to the formal way she’d touched him. She’d looked as though she were touching some sort of specimen in a laboratory rather than a flesh-and-blood man.
“I know my mission.”
Still, he thought it best to remind her before the murderous ideas in her mind took hold. “You’ve found me.”
“Yes, and seeing you now, it’s fortunate I did. I don’t suppose you have anything in this flat to eat?”
“Not anymore.”
“And what about medicine?”
“The surgeon gave me laudanum, but I threw it out. Awful stuff.”
She nodded in agreement. “I’ll be back then.”
He grabbed her wrist before she could scurry away. “This is Seven Dials. It’s not safe for you.”
She gave him a withering look. “So says the man with bruises over half his body and a—what is it—a knife wound in one side? I’ll be fine. As always.”
“Maggie—”
“It’s Margaret. And I don’t want to have this argument with you. Again. I’ll be back shortly, Holyoake.”
And with that, she detached herself from him and went out the door to the flat as abruptly as she’d come in.
Ambrose laid his head back on the pillow and wondered if she had been a hallucination. Perhaps his fevered mind had imagined her. He’d been lying on this thin mattress for two days—maybe longer—waiting to die. Mayhap he was close and that was why his mind had conjured Margaret Vaughn Holyoake, his long-estranged wife.
Ambrose pinched himself and decided he was truly awake and alive, not dreaming. With a push from his reserves of strength, he managed to prop himself into a sitting position. He’d been in and out of consciousness since he’d been wounded, and the only way to judge the passage of time was to assess how hungry and thirsty he felt.
The answer was very.
Why couldn’t his mind conjure a kind Maggie who would have given him a sip of water? Even better, if he was imagining his wife, why didn’t she give him a brandy?
That would ease the pain.
The physical pain, at least.
