Page 76 of The Lady Plays with Fire

“No, Graham. No.” She threw her arms around his neck. Clung to him. “I won’t leave you.”

His left hand curved around the back of her head, pressing her momentarily closer before pushing her away. “You must.”

“Julia.” Jeremy’s voice. He spoke low, the better to be heard beneath the noise around them. She glanced upward to find him standing over them, though she hadn’t any notion how he’d managed to get there so quickly. She wouldn’t have put it past him to have swung down to the stage from the box.

Though, since Mr. Remington, who was considerably older, was also with him, such a maneuver seemed less likely.

Less likely, but not impossible.

“If I may, sir,” Mr. Remington said, “I have some experience with such injuries, both the treatment of them and the recovery afterward.”

He had once been a soldier and then a manservant to a notorious rogue, and when he said such things, it made Julia wonder how many other lives he had lived.

Graham’s brow wrinkled, a mixture of pain and confusion. “And you are?”

“My stepfather,” Julia explained. “Arthur Remington.”

“Much obliged to you, sir,” Graham said then. “Right now, the only thing I have need of is someone to take Julia away from here. It wouldn’t do for her to see me . . . faint.”

It wouldn’t do for her to see me die.

Julia knew exactly what he had been thinking, perhaps what he had been on the point of saying. She sent a desperate, prayerful glance upward.

Her gaze came to rest on Aunt Mildred, still seated in the box. Mama and Laura were gone—on Jeremy’s orders, she supposed, given Laura’s delicate condition. He would want to guard her from any shocks. But the older woman could not walk away without assistance.

“What nonsense,” she called down in a carrying voice. “A hale and hearty fellow such as yourself has no cause to concern himself with such things. And besides, I should think you already understood that our Julia is brave.”

“And stubborn,” Jeremy added, shaking his head.

“Aye,” Graham agreed in a gravelly voice.

The physician’s gaze darted among all the involved parties. “How do you wish me to proceed, my lord?”

Graham jerked his chin once toward his hand. “Get on with it.”

Every man nearby surrendered a handkerchief at the doctor’s request. “I advise you to look elsewhere,” he told Graham.

She expected him to refuse out of some misguided sense of toughness, but he turned his head to the side and locked eyes with her. Then again, perhaps that was as much to keep Julia from watching the removal of the blade than anything else.

“Wait,” she whispered as the doctor grasped the hilt. “Just in case you . . . faint, Graham, I want you to know that I love you too.”

“My dearest lass. This isn’t quite as I’d planned it”—he tipped his chin toward his chest—“but reach into my pocket.”

Despite a rumble of disapproval from her brother, Julia slid one hand across Graham’s chest and inside his coat. Her fingers closed around a little box.

“Open it.”

Beneath the brilliant lights of the chandeliers, the amethyst gleamed like a sunrise. A betrothal ring. Without hesitation, she slipped it onto her finger. “Oh, Graham. Yes. The answer has always been yes.”

He blinked as if in disbelief, his gray-green eyes hazy with pain. Her name escaped his lips on a breath.

And then, taking advantage of his patient’s distraction, the doctor pulled the knife free.

The string of oaths that followed—not spoken under his breath this time—flooded her cheeks with heat, even as the remaining color leached from his.

But the doctor made a satisfied sound. “Not as bad as I’d feared.” He applied half of the stack of handkerchiefs to either side of the wound and bound them in place with his own cravat. “Still, an infection might yet cost you the hand. And even if you keep it, it may be of very little use to you—once injured thus, the sinews of the hand do not always recover their strength and flexibility,” he warned. “If you gentlemen could help me take Lord Dunstane back to my practice,” he said to Jeremy and Mr. Remington, “I’ll do what I can to improve matters.”

Julia ceded her place to her brother, who helped Graham to his feet. “Go to Aunt Mildred,” Jeremy said. “We’ll talk about the rest of this business”—he glanced around the stage, pausing at Fanshawe’s still-prone form, then looked Julia up and down—“when I get home.”