Page 6 of Miss Beresford and the Beast

Still roiling with anger at being so thoroughly put out, he folded the cloth over itself and pressed it to her wound. Only then did the young lady stir. A vague flinch of her elegant brow and a faint shudder of breath. It was hardly detectible, yet Magnus felt it like a lightning strike. Both relief and alarm.

He instantly loosened his grip on her chin, viscerally reminded of how much of a brute he could be without even knowing it. Always too big. Too strong. Too dangerous. The kind of man that could crush something as easily as cure it.

“Did I hurt you?” he asked gruffly. “Or was it this?” He touched the cloth to her wound again, more gently this time.

Again, she flinched.

His conscience twinged. It was no match for his sense of aggravation. “I’m afraid you’ll have to endure it,” he told her as he finished sponging the blood from her hair. “The price of your stupidity in coming here.”

And stupidity it was.

Everyone knew that Moorcross Manor was cursed. And if they didn’t, they damn well should. Magnus certainly did. When he’d left it eleven years ago as a lad of barely seventeen, he’d vowed never to return. His father had taken no pains to persuade him otherwise. Quite the reverse.

“You’re a blight, boy,” he’d said. “Would that you’d never been born.”

Magnus’s jaw tightened at the memory.

Had his father wanted to, he could have protected him. But there never was much loyalty among the Sterling clan. They were each of them lone wolves, ruthless and calculating, caring only for themselves.

Magnus looked to the recently wound clock on the cobweb-strewn mantel. He held out little hope that Turner would be back anytime soon. Even less that he’d come with a doctor. As ever, Magnus was completely and entirely on his own.

Except he wasn’t. Not this time.

His frowning gaze dropped to the unconscious beauty in his bed. “I should never have come back here.”

Chapter Three

Nearly three hours later, the thump of footsteps on the creaking stairs announced the return of Magnus’s valet.

Magnus swiftly rose from his place on the bed as Turner entered the room. He’d remained there for the entirety of his valet’s absence, a reluctant officer at his post, only leaving the young lady’s side to refill the water pitcher and to fetch fresh cloths.

She still hadn’t awakened. She hadn’t stirred again either, not even when Magnus had nearly soaked her hair in a clumsy effort at irrigating her head wound.

“Well?” he asked.

Turner held a folded piece of paper in his hand. He looked unusually pleased with himself. “Good news, my lord.”

Some of the tension left Magnus’s shoulders. For the first time all morning, he felt a flicker of relief. He moved toward the door with guarded anticipation. “The doctor’s with you?”

Turner shook his head. “There’s no doctor.”

Magnus stopped. “No doctor in the village? I don’t believe it.”

There had certainly been one before Magnus left. A pompous, aged relic of longstanding who had helped rally the villagers against Magnus in the aftermath of the scandal. Magnus presumed the old quack would be dead by now. It didn’t follow that an equally insufferable individual wouldn’t have come to take his place.

“Oh, they have one right enough,” Turner said. “He’s in Upper Beadwell attending to a squire with apoplexy. The woman at the market said as how he wouldn’t be back until tomorrow.”

Tomorrow?

Magnus stiffened at the prospect. He had no intention of keeping the young lady here overnight. “You did leave word for him to come here?”

“I mentioned it,” Turner said vaguely.

Magnus’s voice roughened with impatience. “And?”

“As it happens, my lord,” Turner confessed at length, “when I said that the earl required a doctor to treat an injured girl up at Moorcross Manor, she ran me out of the store.”

“She what?”