Page 10 of The Devilish Pleasures of a Duke

“He’s fine,” Heath said with a droll smile.

“He does not look entirely fine to me.” Emma glanced down at Adrian. He stared back at her keenly.

“And indeed he might not be,” the physician warned with a grave air. “If he has sustained a skull fracture, he might never be himself again.”

“Who will I be?” Adrian asked in a wry under-tone.

“A skull fracture is no laughing matter, my lord. There might be bleeding in the brain, and consequences of a lasting nature.”

Emma frowned in concern. “What are we to do?”

“Allow him to rest,” the physician said. “Give him his medicine if he’ll take it. He looks to be a contrary one.”

“Just give me your cursed nostrum,” Adrian said in annoyance. “And I shall go back to my own hotel—” He made a face as the maidservant behind Emma brought a spoon of foaming brown liquid to his lips.

“You’ll not go anywhere after that,” Emma said in satisfaction.

“If he does not rest,” the physician continued, addressing Heath and Emma now, “he shall have to be restrained. Excessive conversation should be curtailed.”

“Then why the hell doesn’t everyone stop talking?” Adrian asked, subsiding back against the pillows.

“Darken the room. Keep his head wet. I shall prescribe strychnia.”

“Strychnia?” Emma asked, stealing another look at Adrian’s face. He stared back at her. “What for?”

“It’s a tonic,” the physician answered. “It also prevents constipation. I suggest keeping him mildly sedated in case he becomes violent.”

Adrian snorted. “In case? Keep cosseting me like an invalid aunt, and it’s certain.”

Emma’s gaze flickered to his. Their eyes held until he glanced down at her mouth. Her lips opened.

The physician leaned over and gingerly probed the back of Adrian’s skull. “Does that hurt?”

“Of course it hurts, you damn fool.”

“Can you describe your injury to me?”

“Yes. It’s a painium in the cranium, and I want you to keep your twiggy little fingers off my blasted head.”

“He’s becoming agitated,” the physician said in a grim voice.

Adrian glanced at Emma. “She can touch my head, but no one else.” She could touch him anywhere she pleased, in fact, but he wasn’t so dicked in the nob he’d say it aloud.

The physician blew out a sigh of concern. “Shock, it seems; he’ll need smelling salts and strong Scottish whiskey.”

Adrian grinned inwardly. Shock, his arse. He had a headache, nothing more. He allowed his eyes, crossed though they were, to drift over Emma Boscastle’s sylphlike frame. He couldn’t remember the last time anyone had worried over him, but he took pleasure in the feeling. “I’ll take the whiskey,” he said tiredly.

“I also recommend a mustard poultice applied to the soles of his feet and his belly.”

“Ballocks,” Adrian murmured, stealing another look at Emma before his eyes drifted shut.

“We can put a poultice on them, too,” the physician said in a dry voice, “but it won’t do your head a damned bit of good.”

The seamless life of respectability that Emma had hoped to maintain had suddenly started to unravel. By now the scuttlebutt of what had happened today at Miss Marshall’s wedding would be repeated in all the polite as well as impolite circles in London. The bon ton did love to talk.

A physical assault. A duke’s heir felled by a footman with a Chippendale hall chair. She understood how it would be interpreted. She accepted her responsibility for having made a poor association in Sir William, and as for what had transpired, she would rise above it.

Still, as the foundress of an academy for the moral edification of young ladies, she had proven herself to be a poor example, indeed. It did not matter that she was entirely innocent of any misdoing. A proper gentlewoman would not have been caught in such a provocative situation to begin with.