Chloe opened her mouth to speak, but nothing came out. Suddenly everything went dark around the edges, like the end of a silent movie, where the circle closes in on itself.
Chapter 4
Chloe opened her eyes. A light grew brighter and brighter, taking a rectangle shape while a piano played downstairs, something Baroque.
“Mr. Wrightman? She’s awake,” Fiona said.
The rectangle became a floor-to-ceiling window draped in yellow silk and tassels. Fiona’s face came into focus, then a video camera. Chloe tried to sit up, but didn’t have the strength. One of her biceps hurt, so she tried to look at it, but stopped to focus on the two faces staring at her. One was Fiona and the other—the light from the window shaded his face. She collapsed back again.
Chloe felt for Fiona’s hand and touched an embroidered cover. She must be in a bed. A lumpy bed that crunched. “Mr. Wrightman? Mr. Wrightman’s here?”
Fiona patted Chloe’s hand. “Yes, yes, he carried you in. Quite endearing, that was, miss.”
Chloe sighed, and an image of herself, in her white gown, draped over Mr. Wrightman’s strong arms, her head against his broad shoulders, his dark wavy hair grazing her bonnet, popped into her head. He had been forced to do the forbidden and touch her—carry her in. She’d have to wait till it came out on DVD. She squinted at the light and struggled to move.
“Mr. Wrightman’s been tending to you the entire time,” Fiona said.
“Miss Parker,” said a deep voice in an English accent.
Chloe melted just a bit. His voice was enough to make a girl forget she’d been shot at.
“Can you see clearly?”
“Yes, I can,” she lied. The blur of a man looking down at her so intently, with so much concern, came through clearly, even if his features didn’t. “My arm hurts. Did a bullet graze me or something?”
Fiona stifled a giggle.
“You fainted,” said Mr. Wrightman. “I’m going to put some smelling salts under your nose now. It will smell rancid and sting a bit, I’m afraid—”
“Ooooo! What the—” Chloe snorted and sneezed simultaneously, and she sprayed droplets into Mr. Wrightman’s face. “Excuse me,” she said, trying to regain composure.
The first thing she really saw was Mr. Wrightman’s lips curving into a smile, a very sexy smile, as he handed her his handkerchief. He wore a brown cutaway coat with tails, an upturned white collar tied with a ruffled cravat, a waistcoat, and cream-colored breeches tucked into buckskin boots. Still, he didn’t look like the guy in the bathtub or out in the field. Instead of dark wavy hair, he had dirty-blond straight hair, with a couple strands falling into light brown eyes. He was pale with round wire-rimmed glasses. Despite his seductive smile, he looked more like a librarian than the local Mr. Darcy.
“The smelling salts really clear the senses after a fainting spell,” he said. With a large but gentle hand he pressed a cool cloth on her forehead.
The cloth felt great, but what if it smeared her elderberry-painted eyebrows? “Fainting spell? I don’t faint.”
“Of course you don’t.” He stepped back and let Fiona hold the cloth to Chloe’s forehead.
She wasn’t the fainting type. But this was England, after all, and people fainted in England. She handed the handkerchief back to him, but he didn’t take it. Her thumb grazed the blue embroidered HW in the corner. “Well, I’ve never fainted before.”
“I suppose it follows that if one has never fainted before, one never will. When a lady doesn’t faint, as you clearly haven’t, I recommend a brief rest in her boudoir.”
Chloe’s head spun. She thought sarcasm wasn’t allowed. The nerve of him to spar with a person who’d supposedly just fainted. But—boudoir?
“Did you say ‘boudoir’?” Chloe dropped the handkerchief in the folds of the bedspread and looked around from under the cool cloth at the floral molding, yellow walls with painted-grapevine border, Empire writing desk, high marble fireplace topped with a gilded mirror, and the mahogany four-poster bed she’d been propped up in. Boudoir. Bridesbridge Place! She couldn’t wait to explore it, so she sat up, the cloth slid off her forehead, the room spun, and Mr. Wrightman, with a firm hand, settled her shoulders back against the bumpy pillows.
“Fiona,” Mr. Wrightman said. “Please fetch Miss Parker a cordial water.”
“How cordial of you,” Chloe said. She looked forward to something that smacked of alcohol.
“Standard protocol for a woman who has fainted,” he replied.
“You gave my Fifi and me a most dreadful scare, Miss Parker,” said a gorgeous, probably eight-months-along pregnant woman as she bustled through the doorway in a periwinkle gown and lace cap. The gown complemented her pregnant shape. She carried a pug dog under her arm. “I’m Mrs. Caroline Crescent, your chaperone at Bridesbridge. This is my boy, Fifi.”
Chloe hated small, hyper, bug-eyed dogs. And who would name a male dog Fifi? She scooched up on her good elbow. “You’re my chaperone?” Mrs. Crescent was not only pregnant, but probably a year or two older than her. Tops.
“We did arrange a more suitable welcome,” said Mrs. Crescent. “But you fainted.”
Chloe opened her mouth, then shut it.
“Very ladylike. The fainting bit,” whispered Mrs. Crescent. “Well done.” She patted the panting pug’s head as if he had something to do with it. “I see you’ve met Mr. Wrightman.”
Chloe felt a ripple of disappointment until Fiona waved in two footmen carrying Chloe’s trunks. They set them on the floor near a great mahogany wardrobe.
Across the room, Mr. Wrightman opened another drapery and light gushed in. “It may well have been hysteria,” he said. “The pistol incident and all.”
Everything came back to Chloe in a flash. “‘Pistol incident’? That woman practically killed us!” She sat up and her left arm, for some reason, felt strange. “Where is that b—”
Chloe stopped herself, but Mr. Wrightman coughed.
“Blanket?” Mrs. Crescent interjected. She covered Chloe’s stocking feet with a tasseled blanket.
“Yes, blanket. Thank you.”
Chloe took a large gulp of cordial water and Mr. Wrightman raised an eyebrow. She barely managed to get it down. Who knew it would taste like mouthwash? Fiona offered it again but Chloe shook her head. “I’m quite refreshed, Fiona. Thank you.” Fiona whisked the drink away.
Chloe’s arm must’ve fallen asleep. She turned her head slowly, trying not to start the room spinning again, but someone had tied a leather strap around her biceps. She quickly untied it. On her night-stand, next to the silver candlestick holder, was a jar with something slithering around in it. What was it? Maggots? Then it hit her. They were leeches. Leeches for sucking the blood from sick people, because that was what they did back in the 1800s. The leather strap? A tourniquet. The leeches squirmed around in blood and she bolted upright. Did he bleed her or what?!
She wanted to scream. To rant. To possibly crash the Wedgwood washbowl atop Mr. Wrightman’s head. Instead, she cleared her throat. “Excuse me, Mr. Wrightman?”
He was packing up his black medicine bag without a care in the world.
“You didn’t by chance, say, bleed me with leeches, did you?” She dangled the tourniquet in front of her.
He stepped back, folded his arms, and took his glasses off, looking, suddenly, not so librarian-like. If she hadn’t been so steamed she might even consider him attractive in a tall, pale, and blond kind of way.
She let her arm with the tourniquet fall. How could he be insulted? The gown might be exquisite, the boudoir charming, but she didn’t come all this way to get shot at and bled to death just to hook up with someone who wasn’t a Regency buck but some sort of bloodsucking vampire with glasses.
She swung her legs out to stand. “Well. It was a pleasure meeting everyone, but I do believe I should go back home. Fiona, call the carriage for me, please.” She stood in her stocking feet, but her knees weakened as she remembered the money, and the glimmer of possible love, although that was fading fast. The man in the tub, the man in the field, was he a stable hand, or perhaps a favored gardener’s son? If so, then Chloe, in all her heiressness, wouldn’t even be allowed to talk to him.