Page 25 of Courting Trouble
She was still the most beautiful woman he’d ever laid his eyes upon.
Still.
Always.
Which was why he’d resolved long ago to never fucking lay eyes upon her again.
But here they were.
In the stormy chaos of life, Titus prided himself on being a smooth lake of glass. Reflective and serene.
But right now, his thoughts spun like a tornado, flinging debris at him that he couldn’t seem to avoid.
“Distract me, Blackwell,” he ordered as he handed the man the clamp to discard, and selected other instruments.
The Black Heart of Ben More—who had assisted in a few late-night surgeries for lack of a nurse—had returned from the sink where he’d removed his coat, rolled up his shirtsleeves, and scrubbed his own hands. He looked at Titus askance. “I rather assumed you’d need to focus.”
“It’s difficult to explain, but often distraction helps me to concentrate.” Titus bent over her, triple-checking his work on her vein before stitching the other sinew. He wished like hell her color wasn’t so grey and her breath wasn’t so shallow. That he didn’t suddenly feel like that helpless boy of fourteen scrambling to save her precious life for the first time. “Since my other nurse, Miss Michaels, isn’t here to assist nor read to me, that responsibility falls to you.”
“You wish me to…read to you?”
“No, dammit, just—talk to me. I don’t know. Tell me what the devil happened.”
Blackwell looked as if he might argue, but something in Titus’s countenance must have convinced him because he sighed and relented. “It’s a rather sordid tale, but from what I gather, her husband was—if you’ll pardon my technical language, Higgins—a fucking lunatic.”
Higgins, a woman used to every curse word in the Queen’s English, asked, “Why shoot his own wife, the poor lamb?”
“On a bit of a killing spree, her husband was,” Dorian said with a grim sarcasm. “Do you remember the Earl of Sutherland, the one who Prudence was supposed to marry before she supposedly murdered him?”
Titus gave a curt nod. “I remember reading that in the papers…didn’t believe it for a moment.”
“Well, come to find out, Woodhaven killed Sutherland and a handful of other men who were reportedly Stags of St. James.”
Titus wondered at Nurse Higgins’s astonished gasp until she clarified. “You mean… the male prostitutes?” She whispered the last word, appropriately scandalized.
“Just so.” Blackwell nodded.
“Was he…were they lovers of his?”
“Apparently not,” Dorian answered blithely. “It was a revenge killing, you see. Woodhaven systematically murdered anyone who shared his wife’s bed.”
Titus dropped his suture clamps with an embarrassingly loud clatter, effectively putting a stop to all conversation. He took a precious breath to compose himself before directing Blackwell where to find another sterile instrument.
He didn’t make mistakes like this. Hecouldn’t.Not when the stakes were so high.
Nora had taken her husband’s best friend to her bed? She’d paid men—ahandfulof men—for sex?
How the years had changed her. Or perhaps they hadn’t…
She’d been a stranger to him the night she’d sent him away; perhaps that was when she’d truly been revealed to him.
Clean clamps appeared in his hand, and he immediately went back to work, muttering to Blackwell out of the side of his mouth. “If you ever tire of a life of crime, you’d have an excellent career as a nurse ahead of you.”
Blackwell’s chortle was nearly mirthless. “Well now, I’m almost completely legitimate these days. I’ve an angel of a wife and two cherubic miscreants with my name. One might even call me respectable.”
“If you find me that one, I’ll find you a liar,” Titus jested, grateful to the man for helping to release some of the tension.
Higgins, however, had to satisfy her bottomless curiosity. “If her husband was a murderer, then, what’s this I heard about cocaine?”
