Page 110 of The Wedding-Crashing Duchess

“I was so scared,” she whispered.

“I am so very sorry that you were ever made to feel that way. I should have kept you safer. I should have known sooner what danger you were in.” His voice broke on the words, and he did not try to steady it. “I promise you, I will never let anything like this happen to you again. Whatever I must do to keep you safe, I will do it. You have my word.”

She buried her face against his shoulder again, and he held her there, kneeling in the cold, frost-bitten clearing with the sound of constables leading his brother away somewhere behind him and Gregory’s hand steady and anchoring on his other shoulder, and for the first time since he had woken to find his daughter gone, Ronan allowed himself to believe, truly believe, that the worst of it was finally, mercifully, over.

It was Gregory, some minutes later, who finally insisted they could not remain kneeling with a knife wound going unattended, and it took both his friend and one of the constables to get Ronan upright again, his good arm slung across Gregory’s shoulders, Sarah carried against his other side by a kindly-faced constable’s wife who had been summoned from the nearest cottage to help.

Ronan caught one last glimpse of Jonathan before the constables led him off through the trees toward whatever cart or carriage waited to carry him away to a gaol cell and, in time, to whatever judgment the law would see fit to pass upon him. His brother did not look back. He walked with his head bowed and his bound hands held stiffly before him, and Ronan found, to his own considerable surprise, that he felt nothing so simple as triumph in the sight. Only a deep, aching sorrow for the boy Jonathan must once have been, before grief and want had hollowed him into the man who had held a knife to a child’s arm without, it seemed, so much as a second thought. He did not know what would become of him now. Prison, certainly, and very likely worse, given all that he had done.

It was not Ronan’s place to decide that. It was enough, for now, that Sarah was safe.

The walk back through the wood seemed to take a great deal longer than the walk in had done, though Ronan suspected this had a great deal more to do with the blood he had lost than with any true distance.

“Augusta will have my head,” he said, somewhere along the way, half delirious with pain and exhaustion both. “I told her to stay at the house.”

“I imagine she did no such thing,” Gregory said dryly, “given that I passed no fewer than three of your own men racing toward the house not a quarter hour ago to fetch her the moment we knew where you had gone. If I were a betting man, and you know very well that I am, I should say she is very likely already halfway to meeting us on the road.”

He was not wrong. They found her not a mile further on, running toward them along the frost-hard track with her hair coming loose from its pins and her skirts caught up in both fists.

The moment she saw them, she gave a small, broken cry and closed the remaining distance at a dead run.

“Sarah.” She reached the child first, gathering her close, pressing frantic kisses to her hair, and then her eyes found him, found the dark stain spreading across his side, and her face went white.

“Ronan.” His name came out of her as barely more than a breath. “You are hurt and bleeding, oh God, how badly are you…”

“I will live,” he said, and found, despite everything, that he still had it in him to attempt something like a smile for her benefit. “It looks a great deal worse than it is. I told you to stay back at the house.”

“I could not simply sit and wait to learn whether you were alive or dead. I am sorry, I know I promised, but I could not do it.”

“I am glad you did not,” he admitted, and reached for her hand with the one arm not currently occupied by Gregory’s shoulder, and she took it and held. “I am glad you are here.”

They stood like that a long moment in the cold morning light, the three of them together at last, Sarah’s small hand finding its way into the space between her father’s and Augusta’s joined ones, and Ronan thought, even through the pain and the exhaustion and the blood he could feel steadily draining his strength away, that he had never in his life been so entirely, completely grateful for anything as he was, in that moment, for the impossible fact that all three of them were still standing.

“Home,” Augusta said firmly, wiping at her eyes with the back of her free hand and turning her attention, with sudden brisk purpose, to the practical matter of getting a bleeding duke and a shaken six-year-old both safely into a carriage. “We are going home, all of us, and you are going to let the physician look at that wound properly. It’s going to be okay.”

CHAPTER 20

The carriage rolled to a stop before the house just as the last of the morning mist was finally burning off, and Charity was waiting at the open door.

“Thank heaven,” she said, hurrying down the steps to meet them. “We have had the physician standing by since the moment your man rode ahead to warn us. Come, come inside, all of you, out of this cold.”

“Upstairs with you, Your Grace, this instant,” Charity said, already waving the footmen forward before Ronan had so much as crossed the threshold.

“I have had worse than this,” Ronan said, though the protest cost him rather more breath than he would have liked.

Augusta hovered a step behind, one hand still wrapped tight around Sarah’s, clearly torn between following her husband up the stairs and seeing to her daughter first.

“Go with him,” Sarah said, with a solemnity that seemed to belong to a much older child. “I am quite well, truly.”

“I can attend to both of you at once, I promise you,” Augusta said. “We shall have you warm and fed within the hour. But I must see him settled first, do you understand?”

By the time she reached his rooms, Doctor Fenwick had already cut away the ruined shirt and was probing carefully at the wound along his side, and Ronan was doing his level best to appear entirely unbothered by the process.

“How bad is it?” Augusta asked, before she had even properly crossed the threshold.

“A good deal better than all that blood led me to fear, Your Grace,” Fenwick said, not looking up from his work. “A shallow cut, nothing that has gone near anything vital. It will want stitching, but he shall be fine.”

Augusta came to sit on the edge of the bed, taking Ronan’s hand in both of hers as the doctor set to work, and did not let go of it again until the last stitch was tied off.