Chapter Twenty-Seven

Mere hours after Theo had forewarned Nathanial that his family were likely descending on them, they arrived, his mother in full sail and his sisters following behind. For Nathanial, at least, it was a familiar image, but poor Theo shrank back. Especially when his mother bypassed him and plied her with questions.

If he were less of a gentleman, he might have continued to pretend he was asleep, but Theo was pale and exhausted, and he could not allow her to shoulder the burden of his family as well as her—entirely justified—fears for his health and safety.

So he opened his eyes. "Peace, Mama," he said as she demanded from Theo a list of his symptoms and ailments. "I'm recovering."

His mother let out a little scream and fell to his side. "Oh Nathanial!"

Elinor, a little further back, had clapped her hand over her mouth, and Penelope was weeping into a little handkerchief.

"What a maudlin sight," he said dryly, offering his other hand to whichever sister came to claim it first. "Anyone would have thought you had come to mourn my passing. Weep over my deathbed, if you please, and not here."

"When Theodosia sent us word that—" His mother broke off, sharp eyes assessing the bandage around his chest. In truth, his wound ached like the devil and itched something terrible, too. The doctor had assured him that they were healing pains, but it was taking all his self-control not to rip the blasted bandages away so he could address the itch.

"She told us you'd been hurt in a hunting accident," Elinor supplied, sufficiently in control to find a chair for Penelope, who clung to his hand and pressed it to her forehead. Only Cassandra hadn't moved, staring at him as though she couldn't believe what she was seeing.

"She gave us leave to think," Cassandra whispered, "that you were on your deathbed."

"Poor Theo," Nathanial said, looking for his wife, but she'd slipped from the room. He couldn't blame her. "I think she began to fear the worst and wanted to ensure you were all here in case. No doubt her note was unnecessarily urgent."

"There's not a doubt it was suitably urgent," his mother said in arctic tones, "but the question is why it was not sent before."

Nathanial almost wished he'd kept his eyes closed and maintained the fa?ade of sleep. "You must excuse her, Mama. She was tired, recovering from her own illness, and no doubt didn't want to alarm you."

Elinor was staring hard at him, eyes slightly narrowed. "Odd that you took ill so soon after she did," she said after a moment.

"Odd? Not at all," Nathanial said cheerfully. If there was one thing Theo and he agreed on, it was that his family—or hers—would not be privy to the information that someone was trying to kill them. Nothing could be more assured to cause unnecessary panic. "Although certainly unfortunate."

"She ought not to have nursed you alone," Penelope said, dropping her sodden handkerchief on the bedside table and turning red eyes to him. "What a burden to have borne . . ." She shuddered.

"Lord Stapleton did a great deal as well," Nathanial said. "We are greatly indebted to him. But did you think you would nurse me back to health yourself, Pen?" He pinched her cheek when she didn't reply. "You know as well as I do that you would have been quite undone when I was at the height of my fever, and we can't have hysterics."

" I would not have succumbed to hysterics," Elinor said stiffly. "I would thank you to bear that in mind."

"No, you would have rearranged the household according to your inflexible vision of how things ought to be done, and you would have scolded me until I regained consciousness."

Two pink spots appeared on her cheeks. "Well really, Nathanial—"

"And Cassandra shouldn't have left young William," he said, giving her a kind smile at her doleful expression. "At least, not for the period of time it would have taken to nurse me back to health. So you see, Theo made the right choice in not summoning you here sooner. She afforded you the least amount of worry and inconvenience possible."

His mother speared him with a glance. "You appear to think she acted correctly in all things."

"Mama," he said, conscious of an odd feeling of pride in his chest, "I would not have handed my care into the hands of another person. She did everything that was right and my biggest regret is that her health suffered in tending to mine."

His mother harumphed, but the fire was gone from her voice. "In which case, I'm glad she was here, even if another woman might have given us earlier news of your condition."

"If you mean to disparage Theo as my wife, you may as well leave now," he said, anger in every word, and for the first time, his mother smiled .

"No, I don't mean to do that. She's a good girl, and devoted to you, which I concede has its benefits. A wife should be devoted to a husband where possible, and when the husband in question deserves her devotion." What a lady should do when her husband did not deserve her devotion, she didn't mention. Nathanial didn't dare ask.

"Now," Elinor said, providing another chair for Cassandra and seating herself on the end of the bed. "You must tell us everything."

To Nathanial's disgust, he and Theo were forced to remain at the Stapletons' for another three weeks. Nathanial graduated from the bed to the chair, and eventually ventured downstairs, but the doctor refused all mention of travel until his wound had sufficiently closed.

But, just as Nathanial thought he might go mad, or might stride out into the estate in the hopes whoever had taken a shot at him might have another go, the doctor proclaimed he was recovered enough to travel.

They left the next day.

"Thank goodness," Theo said, resting her head against the seat. Her face was pale, and her eyes underlined with deep shadows. "If I'd been obliged to spend another evening with Lady Stapleton, I think I would have screamed."

Nathanial gave a slight smile at the idea of Theo, so determined to step into the role of duchess, losing all sense of propriety. "I only wish we could have left several weeks ago."

"We might have been able to if you hadn't been shot," she said tartly, but the glimmer of a smile in her tired eyes belied her words. "It was most inconvenient of you, Nate."

"Believe me, I'm more than fully aware of it. "

She drew her finger down the windowpane, tracing patterns he couldn't read. "Are you sure going back to London is the best idea?" she asked after a moment. "You're not yet fully recovered, and—"

"I am not an invalid."

"No, you merely have a hole in your shoulder."

"A healing hole."

"A hole," she repeated, glaring at him. "Several of them, in fact. And I hardly see what you think you are going to achieve in London of all places. The Season is over."

If he could have persuaded Theo to visit Havercroft without him, he would have done so, and made enquiries in Town. But she would not have gone, and he did not feel equal to the argument that would have no doubt followed. His Theo was many things, but compliant was not one of them.

Had he known the true state of her stubbornness when he had offered for her, he would have thought twice, which only left him to be grateful he had not known. Just a few months of marriage had served to assure him that there was one woman he could love, and she was sitting at the other side of the carriage.

"We would be better off going to Havercroft," she said. "I haven't seen the estate since our marriage, after all, and I know it's beautiful in the summer. Town is odiously hot and dusty."

"Perhaps after a week or two we could retire there," he suggested.

Her gaze snapped to his, and despite her exhaustion, her eyes were alive with suspicion. "After a week or two of what?"

"What do you think, Theo?" He sighed, but there was nothing for it. And he supposed, if he was being honest with himself—something he had been forced to do alarmingly frequently over these past few months—she deserved to know the precise situation. "I'm intending to investigate who I believe to be behind this." Or rather, how he could prove who was behind this .

There was only one person who, to his knowledge, had the motive to want him dead. All he needed to do was find evidence of it.

Theo narrowed her eyes and crossed the carriage to him, her knee brushing distractingly against his. His recovery had made it impossible to further their intimate relationship, but there was no denying he wanted to. And the longer he denied himself, the more desperately aware of her he became.

"You are not adequately recovered," she told him.

"You have been my nurse, and I'm grateful, but I must ask you to trust me to know my limits."

Her eyebrows rose and she took his hand. "I am to trust the man who once broke his leg climbing a tree that he was warned off by both the groom and the steward?"

"And my father," Nathanial said, grinning slightly at the memory. "But I believe, my sweet, you were standing at the base of the tree encouraging me and telling me which branches I should climb next."

She glared at him, though a smile quivered at the corner of her mouth. "How ungallant of you to remind me."

"You have always been my partner in crime," he said, and unable to resist the temptation any longer, slid his fingers around the back of her neck, brought her face to his, and kissed her.

At first, she froze, and he wondered if he'd made a mistake. Over the course of his recovery, she had been careful to keep her distance, and he had never approached her, knowing that giving into something like this was the first step along a slippery slope he did not know he could resist for long. Self-control had never been a problem except with Theo. He had never found it difficult to resist a lady before, because he wanted none the way he wanted her. Desire was in him a hunger, an ache, and the only thing that could ever sate him was her .

He trailed his fingers along the hinge of her jaw, and she softened under him, pliant and yielding. When he swiped his thumb across her cheek, she opened her mouth to him, and the sound she made as he met her tongue with his almost undid him.

Lord, how he wanted her. That need had him tugging her closer, skimming his hands down the line of her body, along her waist and the curve of her hips. There was too much material in the way, and by the time his rational body had caught up with his instinct, he was already running a hand down her leg.

And she was cupping his face in her hands and kissing him with such desperation he might have believed she was starving. Which suited him, because he'd been starving their entire marriage, and she was the feast, the antidote to his hunger.

"Nate," she whispered against his lips, but he didn't want to hear what she had to say; some instinctive part of his brain knew it was going to be a suggestion they stop, and he didn't want to stop. Not now—not when they were so close.

His fingers had found her calf now, and he ran his palm along the soft curve, inching up until he found her knee. He took hold of it and eased her around until she was straddling him. The skirts of her dress were in the way, and he bundled them up and off. He needed to feel her, and she needed to feel him, how hard he was for her. He wanted her to feel everything .

For a moment, her hips shifted against him, and the sensation was enough to make him groan. But as she did, she leant against his shoulder, and his groan turned into a grunt of pain.

She threw herself off him, eyes wide, hair wild—had he done that?—and panting. Her tongue moistened her lips as she watched him.

Damn. He leant his head back against the seat and tried not to notice how, now the wound had been disturbed, every jostle of the carriage sent spikes of pain through him .

"Nate," Theo whispered. There was something so achingly vulnerable in the sound of his name that he looked at her again and held out a hand.

"I'm sorry."

She took it and pressed it against her lips. "There's nothing to apologise for. I just feel here isn't perhaps the best place, and while you're still recovering—"

"You don't need to explain yourself," he said with a wry smile. "I should not have been so . . . carried away."

She edged closer, and placed his hand against her cheek. Her skin was warm and flushed, and it took every modicum of willpower not to lose himself in her again. "When you're better," she said, dropping her gaze so she didn't meet his, "I would like it if you got carried away again."

He could have told her that there was every chance he would get carried away every day for the rest of their life together. He could have told her that he submitted to her in every way; that over their seven months of marriage, she had stolen his heart in a way no other woman had or could.

There were so many things he could have told her, but just as he didn't intend on taking her in a carriage, rumbling along the main road to London, he didn't plan on confessing his feelings in such an inauspicious location.

So he smiled and kissed her fingertips. "When I'm better," he promised, "I will show you just how difficult waiting has been."

Pink suffused her cheeks and she glanced away in pleasure and embarrassment. Nathanial watched the way her lips curved into an involuntary smile, and wondered what he could do to make her smile like that again.

As soon as they knew who was behind these attacks, he would find out, in painstaking detail.

Until then, he would have to learn patience, no matter how little he wanted to.