“Let’s get you to your chair and—”
“It’s carnage in here. Help me to the drawing room.” He looped an arm around her shoulders, leaning on her heavily and giving her no choice but to slide her arm around his waist as they made slow progress out of the study.
All of the commotion had brought the housekeeper and the footman running.
“Your grace!” The housekeeper’s hands flew to her face before one of them pointed to his. “You’re bleeding!”
“Am I?” He instinctively touched the trickle, took one look at the blood on his fingertips, and immediately began to sway. “I hate blood,” he repeated quite unnecessarily as the burly footman rushed forward to help Portia support the duke’s weight. Together, they got him to the sofa in the drawing room while the housekeeper dashed off to fetch some ice and send someone for the physician.
With Portia’s help, the duke heaved his leg onto the sofa. She didn’t know much about nursing but she knew that if his ankle was swelling, then the sooner she got his boot off the better. He winced asshe tugged it, biting down on his lip when it finally began to give and she gently eased it off.
It shouldn’t have surprised her that a man who was so well put together would also have decent-looking feet, but they galled nevertheless. Was there nothing about him that wasn’t perfect? His ankle, however, was practically purple and was swelling like a balloon. There was also a large and vivid bruise marring the annoyingly golden skin of his calf and knee. Without thinking, she smoothed her palm over his lower leg to check that nothing was amiss beneath his marred flesh and immediately regretted it. It felt too familiar. Somehow more familiar than lying prostrate beneath him had just a few minutes ago.
Portia sat back on her heels in case her errant hands went wandering again. “I don’t think anything is broken but I don’t think you’ll be dancing for a while.”
“Every cloud,” he said through green gills and gritted teeth. “I hate dancing. Almost as much as I hate blood.”
That was when Lady Emilia burst through the door. “Oh my god!” She quickly took in the scene and the state of her brother. “Leo!” Then, because apparently all she was good for was screaming, she began screaming for her sister. “Abigail! Leo is injured!”
The older sister arrived shortly afterward, looking as worse for wear after her run-in with the mad cat as Portia suspected she did. “Has somebody sent for the physician?”
“The housekeeper has.” Portia shuffled back a bit as his sister fussed, examining the duke’s leg with more confidence and doubtless with fewer palpitations than she had managed.
She shook her head at the state of him. “Dare I ask how this happened?”
“I fell off the chair that I had foolishly put on my desk to rescue the bird, and then the bookcase promptly fell on us.”
“Us?” Lady Abigail’s head swiveled to Portia and there was genuine concern in her eyes. “Are you injured too, Miss Kendall?”
“No.” And that was all down to him. “His grace was very noble and used himself to save me.” An instinctive and totally selfless actthat forced her to reevaluate her harsh opinion of him somewhat. A truly self-absorbed and selfish aristocrat would have thought only of themselves in a crisis and probably used her as a shield, whereas he had, despite his irrational fear of blood, sacrificed himself rather than see her hurt.
He had also, staggeringly, stuck up forEquitaswith the constable and that also did not fit well with the unflattering narrative that she had constructed around him, which was both enlightening and irritating in equal measure.
Perhaps there was such a thing as a decent duke after all? She would have to write an essay on the topic later, just to properly sort her jumbled thoughts out. “Thank you, your grace.” She smiled at him and, to her surprise, realized that she meant it. “But now I feel dreadful that only you are injured.”
He waved that away. “Better me than you.” Which was a rather lovely thing for him to say too. “It was my cat that caused all the chaos, after all, so it is only fitting that I suffer the consequences. Besides, as my mother and my sisters are so fond of telling me, I have a ridiculously thick head, so I knew it would take more than a few encyclopedias to do it any real damage.” He grinned and his dimples flashed and Portia’s pulse quickened once more, but for once she just enjoyed it rather than castigate herself for her weakness toward one of the enemy. Because something deep down told her that he wasn’t the enemy now, and she didn’t know what to do with that new knowledge other than take it away and ponder it on paper later too.
“He does have a ridiculously thick head,” said Lady Abigail squeezing his hand and inadvertently displaying, for the first time, how much she loved her brother. “But for once I am actually grateful for it.”
And so, bizarrely, was Portia.
Chapter
TEN
Leo didn’t know which was worse—the constant throb in his lower leg or the hunger pangs clawing in his stomach. What he did know, however, was that he wasn’t going to get a wink of sleep while they both plagued him simultaneously.
He was also sick to the back teeth of his bed, which he had been confined to since yesterday thanks to Abigail and his housekeeper. They had taken to heart all the advice from the overcautious physician who had been adamant that Leo needed to keep the weight off the bad sprain for at least a week. Therefore, they had both decided to treat him like he was knocking on death’s door. That meant bed rest and plenty of what his housekeeper called “a fortifying convalescence diet” to get his strength up. A diet that basically consisted of thin, tasteless soup, awful dry rolls baked with bird seeds and served without butter, and pints of a foul herbal tea that were brought to him in an invalid’s cup with a bloody spout.
So instead of doing as he was told and ringing the bell if he needed something, he decided that he was all done wasting away on gruel and penance bread. He would treat himself to a clandestine midnight feast in the deserted kitchen instead.
He shuffled to the edge of the mattress to throw his legs over andtentatively stood. His ankle protested and he almost reached for the cane that the physician had insisted that he use until the swelling went down, but rebelled again. He despised the old-man’s cane as much as he did the child’s drinking cup, and was thoroughly convinced that he didn’t need either. Instead, he used the furniture to support himself while he wriggled himself into some breeches and a shirt, then used the walls to assist him as he part shuffled, part hopped out of his bedchamber.
Barkington and Snifferson immediately rose from their usual sleeping position directly outside of his door and, still yawning, loyally followed him as he hobbled and hopped his way to the stairs.
Three painfully slow stairs down and Leo realized that he might be expecting too much from his battered ankle. It had really begun to hurt with a vengeance now, but as it would be a cold day in hell before he hollered for help and was inevitably chastised for not following doctor’s orders, he decided to sit himself down and shuffle down them on his arse instead. A solution that, although undignified, worked a treat.
In no time at all, he was hopping along the narrow corridor to the kitchen where the promise of some real food lured him like a siren.
