Lucy rolled free, scrabbled to her feet, and tottered toward the fresh air. Quin sucked in one lungful and then pulled Olivia across the pallet, putting her mouth next to the bars. She had not moved. She was utterly limp.
Dead, he thought. She was dead.
“Come on, Olivia,” he said, his voice coming in a rasp. “Breathe, damn it, breathe!”
But her face lolled against the bars. He could see no signs of life.
A tearing pain seized him. His heart was cracking, breaking right there in the smoky room. “Don’t leave me!” he shouted hoarsely. He grabbed her shoulders and shook her, hard. “Don’t leave me.”
As his vision cleared, he could see that Olivia’s face was faintly blue. He suddenly remembered to feel for a heartbeat, but when he pressed his hand to her chest he couldn’t feel anything. Then he realized he was trying to find a heartbeat on the wrong side of her body.
“My brain’s garbled,” he mumbled. Then, fiercely: “You must breathe.” He shook her again, willing her to open her eyes, but her head fell back like a blossom on a broken stem. Her face swam in front of his eyes and he realized that he was crying, his hands moving over her chest, trying to find a heartbeat that wasn’t there.
Lucy was there too, barking hoarsely at her mistress’s ear.
But Olivia did not move. She would never move again.
He lowered his face to her neck, trying to smell that wonderful, elusive perfume that was Olivia, but all he could smell was smoke.
Something twisted hard inside his chest, and all the grief he had never expressed came boiling up, sobs rising so hard that his body jerked as if he were having a seizure. There was no stopping these cries; the world turned into a black swirling hole of grief. Alfie, Olivia, even Evangeline and Rupert . . . they were all dead.
Howls tore through him, bringing with them words that he had never spoken aloud, because a duke is always controlled, a duke never pleads.
This duke pleaded.
Please, God, help. Help.
Finally he realized that he could see Lucy licking Olivia’s cheek; the room was clearing of smoke. The chimney fire must have been extinguished. Lucy uttered a bark that sounded like a low bell, like that of a Great Dane.
The bark of Cerberus, the dog who guards the gates of Hades, perhaps.
His last sob brought with it a strange clarity, a deep calm. “I cannot bear it,” Quin said, talking to the thin air. “I cannot bear this again.” He couldn’t go back to his sterile house, to the pages of mathematical equations, to his mother’s strictures. Without Olivia and Alfie, there was no point in living.
Lucy was still licking Olivia’s cheek. He reached to push her away—and he thought he saw Olivia shudder. He grabbed her shoulders and lifted her toward him. “Please, Olivia! Breathe. Please!”
Nothing.
He pulled her body against his and rocked back and forth, those damned tears falling again.
She coughed.
Tarquin Brook-Chatfield, Duke of Sconce, made a fool of himself that night in France. He always remembered it, and looked back with a tinge of embarrassment.
The man who never cried, not even at his own son’s funeral, wept.
And when Olivia Mayfair Lytton came to, coughing and hurting, but otherwise fine, she—who never cried either—wept as well.
Thirty-two
A Warrior and an Amazon
“It was the mattresses,” Olivia told Petit two hours later. She was sitting on a chair in the middle of the courtyard, taking deep breaths of fresh, sea-scoured air. Her chest ached, but it was already feeling much better. A steaming hot bath had helped. “Your mattresses saved our lives.”
But his eyes were agonized. “It was I, I, who almost cost you your life! I blocked the chimneys to force Madame to leave the kitchen, and then one of them caught on fire. By the time I realized you had not used your key, I couldn’t get through the smoke. I failed!”
“It was an accident,” Olivia told him. “But you must promise never to do something so dangerous again.”
“I will not,” Petit gasped. “Never, never, never.”
“You can make up for it,” Quin said, appearing at his shoulder. “Carry Lucy to the rowboat next to Père Blanchard’s hut, if you please.” He handed over the little dog. “She’s too tired to walk with us. Give her to a sailor named Grooper, who should be waiting.”
“I will run all the way,” Petit said, suiting action to word and tearing out the front gate.
“My goodness.” Olivia watched him go. One of Lucy’s ears was just visible, blowing backward in the wind. “Lucy must feel as if she’s in a race.”
“Petit is taking the road,” Quin said. “We’ll cut through the woods, and we should meet him not long after he arrives, even given his gallop.” He bent and picked her up in one smooth movement. “Time to go home.”
“You mustn’t!” Olivia protested. “You can’t! I weigh too much.” But he merely pressed a kiss on her forehead and walked out of the courtyard, leaving the sordid garrison behind.
His body ached, but he never gave way to fatigue. It was half a league to the inlet where the rowboat waited for them, but the duke’s muscles seemed to be made of steel.
Olivia was quiet, her arms around his neck, her cheek against his chest, so grateful to be with him, and alive, that she couldn’t speak. But when he walked through the woods and she heard the sound of running water, she insisted on being put down.
“We’re almost at the Day Dream,” Quin protested. “I want to get out of this bloody country.”
She ran a hand along his cheek. “Please?”
He groaned, but he put her on her feet.
It was early evening, and the air was warm and smelled of flowers. Bluebells stretched down to the edge of a lazy stream lined by young oaks. “They’re so beautiful,” Olivia breathed, kneeling in a patch of blossoms.
Quin just growled. “Enjoy them now, because you won’t see these flowers again. We are never returning to France.”
She laughed. “Of course we will return, after the war is over. I want to meet Petit’s bride someday, and learn if the drunken capitaine sobers up. Besides, I heard you making plans for cognac to be sent to Littlebourne Manor on a regular basis.”
“The best I’ve had in years.” Quin looked unrepentant.
“I hate to say it, but Madame’s bread was astonishingly good. Worth a trip to France.” Her voice trailed off as she looked up at him.
Quin had bathed as well, and washed away the streaks of black soot that made him look like a thief in the night. Even so, there was something different about him. The cheekbones that seemed aristocratic in England now seemed harsh and undomesticated. He wore no coat, and one shirtsleeve had been ripped away, baring his muscular arm. He was the embodiment of an avenger.
“What?” he asked, scowling down at her.
“You look like a warrior,” she said, her whole body thrilling in a distinctly uncivilized way to the barely suppressed violence pulsing in his every sinew.
He crouched beside her, and his thigh muscles bulged in a way that made her long to run her fingers over them. A lady would never notice that. Her mother would be scandalized, and she could not have cared less.
“I thought I had lost you,” he said, his voice stark and uncompromising. “It turned me into a madman, so I should probably warn you that I may never be the same again, Olivia.”