Pain exploded in the back of her skull. She dropped the candle, pitched forward as all light extinguished and everything went black.
For an instant, she thought it was simply the candle going out, then from a great distance she heard Henrietta start to howl. To bay. The most horrible, bloodcurdling sound in the world.
She tried to open her eyes and couldn’t.
Pain knifed through her head. The black intensified and dragged her down.
Returning to consciousness wasn’t pleasant. For some considerable time, she hung back, hovered in that land that was neither here nor there, while voices washed over her, concerned, some sharp with anger, others with fear.
Henrietta was there, at her side. The hound whined and licked her fingers. The rough caress drew her inexorably back, through the mists, into the real world.
She tried to open her eyes. Her lids were inordinately heavy; her lashes fluttered. Weakly, she raised a hand, and realized there was a wide bandage circling her head.
All talk abruptly ceased.
“She’s awake!”
That came from Harriet. Her maid rushed to her side, took her hand, patted it. “Don’t you fret. The doctor’s been, and he says you’ll be good as new in no time.”
&nbs
p; Leaving her hand limp in Harriet’s clasp, she digested that.
“Are you all right, sis?”
Jeremy sounded strangely shaken; he seemed to be hovering close by. She was lying stretched out, her feet elevated higher than her head, on a chaise…she must be in the parlor.
A heavy hand awkwardly patted her knee. “Just rest, my dear,” Humphrey advised. “Heaven knows what the world is coming to, but…” His voice quavered and trailed away.
An instant later came a rough growl, “She’ll do better if you don’t crowd her.”
Tristan.
She opened her eyes, looked straight at him, standing beyond the end of the chaise.
His face was more rigidly set than she’d ever seen it; the cast of his patrician features screamed a warning to any who knew him.
His blazing eyes were warning enough to anyone at all.
She blinked. Didn’t shift her gaze. “What happened?”
“You were hit on the head.”
“That much I’d gathered.” She glanced at Henrietta;the hound pushed closer. “I went down to look for Henrietta. She’d gone downstairs but hadn’t come back. She usually does.”
“So you went after her.”
She looked back at Tristan. “I thought something might have happened. And it had.” She looked back at Henrietta, frowned. “She was by the back door, but she didn’t move…”
“She was drugged. Laudanum in port, trickled under the back door.”
She reached for Henrietta, palmed the shaggy face, looked into the bright brown eyes.
Tristan shifted. “She’s fully recovered—lucky for you, whoever it was didn’t use enough to do more than make her snooze.”
She dragged in a breath, winced when her head ached sharply. Looked again at Tristan. “It was Mountford. I came face-to-face with him at the bottom of the stairs.”
For one instant, she thought he would actually snarl; the violence she glimpsed in him, that flowed across his features was frightening. Even more so because part of that aggression was directed, quite definitely, at her.