Page 198 of Courting the Wrong Duke

Fear.

“Ride like the wind,” she said. “Please.”

His gaze moved briefly toward the bedchamber. “I will.”

“He is badly hurt. We need the doctor before morning.”

“We will have him,” Gabriel promised.

He took her hand and squeezed it once before releasing her and hurrying down the corridor.

Rosalind remained where she was, listening as his footsteps echoed through the empty halls of Bryn Hir, and a door opened somewhere below. A few minutes later came the pounding of hooves, rapid and growing fainter as Gabriel rode hard into the Welsh night.

Only when she could no longer hear them did Rosalind return to William.

By the time Rosalind returned to the bedchamber, Isabella had found clean cloth and was heating water over the fire. Edmund remained beside William, too exhausted to stand for long but apparently unwilling to be anywhere else.

When Isabella brought the water, they opened William’s coat enough to reach the wound.

Rosalind forced herself not to look away.

She had imagined herself brave many times during the search for her father. She had crossed half of Wales without knowing what waited for her at the end of the journey, entered Bryn Hir despite every instinct warning her away, and faced Algernon while he stood between her and the man she had come to save.

None of that had frightened her quite like this.

Bravery looked very different when the man she loved was bleeding beneath her hands.

The thought came so naturally that Rosalind almost failed to understand what she had just admitted to herself.

The man she loved.

Her hands stilled.

She waited for shock to follow, but there was none. No sudden revelation or bewilderment. Only the strange sense that she had finally given a name to something she had known for far longer than she realized.

Of course she loved William.

Perhaps it had begun in the garden, when he noticed that she was choosing every word before she spoke. Perhaps it had been in the gallery, when she learned he had quietly reclaimed a painting simply because he understood what it meant to his mother. Perhaps it had happened beneath the summer sun while they played battledore and Rosalind laughed harder and more freely than she had in weeks.

Or perhaps there had never been one moment at all.

William had simply worked his way into her life piece by piece until she had begun expecting him to be there. Somewhere along the way, searching for her father had become tangled with garden conversations, ridiculous arguments, shared secrets, and the particular way William could make her laugh when she least wanted to.

Now the thought of a life in which he was suddenly absent from all of it was unbearable.

“He is colder,” Isabella said softly.

Rosalind immediately reached for another blanket and drew it over him, while her father had settled into a chair nearby, watching them with exhausted eyes.

For several minutes, no one spoke. Rosalind sat beside William with his hand held between both of hers, rubbing her thumb over his cold fingers as though she might somehow warm him through determination alone.

“Talk to him,” Edmund said quietly.

She looked at her father.

“He may hear you.”

Rosalind glanced back at William. “What am I supposed to say?”