Page 12 of The Hero

He glanced up at the parapet.

“Good God,” the man above gasped incredulously. “Is that you, Oxford?”

“It is.” Gideon closed his eyes, knowing that the next conversation he had with Dunhill would certainly not be about the murder of the Duke of Plymouth, but instead a demand to know what Gideon was about kissing Harry in the garden.

A conversation which could prove awkward when both men knew Gideon was far from being a young scoundrel stealing a kiss from the other man’s daughter.

* * *

Harry felt utterly stricken as she quickly ran through the cavernous hallway of her aunt’s house, up the stairs and along the hallway to her bedchamber. Once inside, she instantly shut the door and leaned back against it. As if by doing so she could shut out her father, Gideon, and the events leading up to her needing to hide herself away.

Because she knew they would have to discuss what had happened this evening. That, despite her father’s easygoing nature, the events were too shocking for them not to.

Her poor father would probably feel forced into talking to Gideon about it too, when he would have preferred to ignore or avoid any confrontation.

At the time, she had thought she was being daring and adventurous. But now, away from Gideon’s sensual allure, she realized she had allowed herself to be goaded into behaving scandalously.

It really was too humiliating that her father had been a witness to that weakness.

Allowing a man like the Duke of Oxford to kiss her was shocking enough—allowing any man to kiss her was scandalous!—but to have her father witness it was so much worse.

Harry didn’t feel in the least reassured by the fact that neither her father nor her aunt, having been persuaded to speak to her on his behalf, came to her bedchamber during the next hour to discuss the matter with her. Instead, Harry fell asleep on her bed, still fully clothed.

How she was ever going to face Gideon again was impossible to imagine.

But as it turned out after all her fretting on the subject, it wasn’t something she needed to worry about the following morning either.

By the time Harry went downstairs for breakfast, the gentlemen had already set off to shoot grouse and other game on the Whitings’ estate. Excluding her father, of course, she discovered during a general conversation with her aunt as the two of them ate together. It seemed that her father hadn’t discussed last night’s kiss with her aunt before going for a walk in the grounds rather than join the other gentlemen shooting.

After so many hours of tension and fitful sleep, it was something of an anticlimax for Harry to realize she was not going to be immediately taken to task by anyone for being seen kissing the Duke of Oxford.

She still had to face Gideon again, of course, but the absence of all the gentlemen this morning meant she had hours before she need find a solution to that dilemma.

Consequently, those hours of strolling about the lake with the other ladies were not the chore she had predicted them to be. But when it came time to meet the gentlemen for luncheon, she claimed to have a headache from the brightness of the sun and returned to the house.

Perhaps, if she was lucky, she might manage to avoid Gideon for the rest of the weekend.

A wish she knew was not about to come true when, hours later, she heard a commotion downstairs.

Rushing out onto the landing, she saw her father being assisted into the house by her brother on one side and Gideon on the other. Her father’s face was ashen, his jacket removed to reveal bright red blood soaking the side of his shirt and waistcoat.

CHAPTER FIVE

“That someone should have been shot at my weekend party,” Harry’s Aunt Amelia wailed, and not for the first time, as she paced the length of her private parlor. Tears fell unchecked down the pallor of her powdered cheeks. “Oh my goodness…” She came to an abrupt halt in the middle of the room. “What if your father should die from his injuries? If he succumbs, we shall be ruined in Society. Ruined!” She sobbed in earnest.

If Harry’s father should die of his wounds…?

Having followed the three men to her father’s bedchamber, Harry had stood aside while the two men helped the earl to lie on the bed, before she’d then rushed to her father’s bedside.

He looked dreadful, his face pale, including his lips, as he concentrated on dealing with the pain he was obviously in.

Too much so for Harry to bother him by demanding information on what had happened to him.

Her brother, having safely delivered her father to his room, had departed for his own bedchamber to remove his soiled clothing.

Gideon stood in front of the window, his back to the room. He did not so much as glance at her, although his profile was enough for her to see the coldness of his expression.

A coldness that, after last night, Harry knew to be nothing more than a veneer.

---