Page 22 of Courting Trouble
His sharp intake of breath told her that her dagger had met its mark. That her sharp words had sawed through the invisible chord that seemed to link them together no matter where in the world they stood. All she had to do was make certain the link was severed forever.
That she smothered all hope.
“Don’t make a fool of yourself by doing something so pathetic as begging, Titus,” she said with all the frost threatening to harden her from the inside out. She was surprised she couldn’t see her breath as she uttered the cruel words she’d learned from her father. “I can no longer stand the sight of you.”
He stood looking at her as if she’d shot him, his features a mélange of denial and rage, before they, too, smoothed out into the cool lake of unrippled inscrutability she was used to.
“Goodnight, Nora,” he said crisply before he strode to her door.
As she watched him go, she remembered wondering before if that sparkling, incandescent obsession, that cocoon of bliss and warmth in which they’d been ensconced, had been what true love felt like.
And here was her answer.
No.
Thiswas love.
Sacrifice. Regret. Pain.
Love, the purest love, was diving into the lake of brimstone and hellfire, and drowning in it willingly, if only to gain freedom for the one who owned your heart.
Titus would have the opportunity to go to medical college. He’d heal people and find fulfillment and satisfaction in the worthy life he built, free of a powerful enemy like her father. He’d—no doubt—find a girl who loved him and could provide him with fat, cooing babies and happy chaos.
The idea stole her breath, it was so painful.
Thiswas love.
And she was one raw, bleeding wound he could never heal.
A Sawbones in Southwark
London, 1880
“If you don’t hold still, I’m going to have to restrain you,” Dr. Titus Conleith warned.
“Sorry, guv,” said Mr. Ludlow, the dock worker currently perched on his table, gesticulating wildly for a man with sutures only half stitched. “But I just never seen any’fing like it, ‘ave I? Sir Carlton Morley, thebloodyChief Inspector of ScotlandbloodyYard, crawling about on a Southwark warehouse roof. Like a fucking spider he was, shooting his rifle into the windows. Glass shattered everywhere, and as I looks up, one sticks me right in me bloody ‘ead.”
“Morley, did this, you say?” he asked. “Here in Southwark?”
“As I live and breathe,” Ludlow vowed.
Titus had met Carlton Morley when they served together in the second Anglo-Afghan war. He’d picked a bullet from the Chief Inspector’s thigh once upon a time, and in the years since, they’d shared a bachelor’s meal out at their club now and again.
They sometimes reminisced over how they had lost Kandahar and what a blood-soaked ordeal it had been. Then they’d taken Kabul, which had been even worse.
Often in the throes of haunted insobriety, they’d share a hackney to their respective homes and part, only to do it again the next time their schedules permitted.
An unceasingly decent bloke was Morley.
These days, Titus avoided the chief inspector as the man had recently married none other than Prudence Goode under rather scandalous circumstances.
For such a large city, London was certainly a small world.
It brought Titus no little amount of pleasure that the Baron of Cresthaven’s second daughter went to a man like Morley, who had been raised in a Whitechapel gutter.
He’d someday have to get the story from the horse’s mouth, when he could trust himself to sit across from his old friend and keep from inquiring about—
As he always did, Titus firmly redirected his thoughts away from Morley’s new sister-in-law.
