“You were,” Cooper agreed.
Images slammed into him. The world spun. Memories slashed together, all culminating in the sound of Cassandra screaming.
He jolted up.
“Cassandra?!”
“She’s asleep.” Cooper pushed him back down. “I’m not going to wake her right now. She’s exhausted. She hasn’t left your side in days.”
“Was she harmed?”
“Not at all.” Cooper’s face softened with his voice. “Do you know who shot you?”
Memories sifted like grains of sand through his fingertips. The harder he tried to hold on to one, the faster it slipped from him. HydePark. Fighting with Cassandra. A man with a pistol, his face a blur. He had looked right at him, and for once in his life, Seth had the experience of amnesia.
“No.” Seth knitted his eyebrows. “I looked right at him. I knew him, but I can’t remember.”
“It’ll come to you,” Cooper said. “In the meantime, Blackmoor is doing an investigation. He checks in every day. I believe he has security stationed around the house, but Caroline can’t find them.”
If Adrian was handling it, there would be nothing to worry about in the immediate future. Then, a word Cooper said registered in his mind.
“What day is it?”
Cooper took a deep breath before responding. “As of one hour ago, Saturday.”
Saturday.
He missed his own wedding.
Gripping the bedclothes in his fingers, he tried to stave off a crippling disappointment that hurt worse than his injury. Cassandra. She had been rightthere; they had been soclose. They would be married already. He would have spent yesterday making love to her. In this very moment, he would be holding her in his arms, watching over her as she slept in their own bed.
Even without knowing the full extent of the damage, he had weeks of recovery time ahead of him, pushing that dream of marrying her further into the future. Precious time, stolen from him by a madman whose face he couldn’t even remember. When he reached for the glass on the table, his fingers slipped against it.
How could he hold Cassandra now? He couldn’t hold a glass of water.
“Take it easy.” Cooper handed him the glass. “You’re on enough laudanum to down a horse. You’ve been feverish. I’m not surprised your brain is scrambled. Are you one hundred percent lucid?”
“I think so,” he grumbled. “Head hurts.”
“Even better.” Cooper crossed his arms. “I’ve had a lot of time to think about what I would say to you when you woke up, and you’re going to sit there and listen to it.”
He took a breath and glared at him.
“I’m not sorry for thrashing you in Hampshire,” he said. “You deserve worse for what you did to Cassandra. Had you been any other man, we would have dueled. You disrespected me, you ruined my sister, risked the safety of myfamily,and I’m not sorry for pummeling you for it. My only regret is that I wasn’t the one who shot you.”
“That’s fair,” Seth croaked.
Cooper paused before continuing, “You want to know the worst part? If atany pointyou had asked for her hand, I would have given it to you.”
“I tried to tell you,” Seth said.
“No, you didn’t. If you tried to tell me you would have.” Cooper scoffed. “I waswaitingfor you to ask me. You kept acting like a kicked dog about it, so I wasn’t going to drag it out of you. I thought that if you wanted her you would have been man enough to ask permission, instead of going behind my back.”
“How long had you known?”
Cooper pursed his lips.
“I suspected you had feelings for each other for months, but you both confirmed it when you waltzed. Idefinitelyhad it figured out in the library.” Cooper’s eyes narrowed to slits. “Cassandra’s reading a book upside down, and you’re hauling aroundMiss Moffet and Muffins? It’s not like either of you were being discreet. You look at her like you’re starving and she can’t look at you at all without blushing.”
