Trial by Desire (Carhart #2)(83)

Kate glanced at Ned again, and a hint of worry flashed across her brow. “You look as if you’re about to fall down.”

No. Not that. He’d proven…he’d proven…he’d proven something fairly clever and intelligent, and as soon as the room stopped whirling about, he would let her know what it was.

“Here,” Kate was saying. She took his other elbow, and then she and Louisa were guiding him toward a chair. He landed in a heavy thud that jarred his leg.

“You’ve been up all night,” Kate was saying. “You’re tired. And your trousers are ripped. Did you take a spill on the road?”

“I think he must have sprained his ankle,” Louisa said. “He limps.”

They were talking about him as if he were not there. In another world, another place, that would have bothered him. But Ned felt curiously as if he were not quite present. It was quite clever of them to sense that.

Kate sat down next to him.

“Sprained your ankle?” she was saying. “What on earth were you doing standing on it just now? Was this some attempt to prove some idiotic masculine point?” Her fingers against his neck were far more gentle than her words.

He thought about explaining that he hadn’t sprained his ankle, but somehow he did not think she would find the truth more palatable.

“If I can do this,” he told her seriously, “I can do anything. And if I can do anything—”

Then he never, ever had to worry about finding himself on a little rowboat in the ocean again.

But she didn’t know the whole of that story. “Well, you can’t do everything,” she said, as if reason and logic mattered. “You can’t walk on a sprained ankle. Thick skull.” She was smoothing his hair against his brow. Before he could protest that he obviously could, she patted his head. “I won’t let you.”

She was smiling. He was supposed to smile back. He couldn’t quite make his lips do more than curl in a wretched little half grimace.

“What is it?” she asked. “Here. We need to get you home, to a physician. Blakely, you’ll have to help.”

“No,” Ned protested. “No—I don’t need any help. Not from Gareth.”

“Ned,” Jenny was saying, “do you want me to—”

“Not you, especially not from you, Jenny. I can do it myself.”

“He’s been this recalcitrant the entire morning,” Louisa said. “I don’t even understand how he managed to walk inside.”

“Riding boot is long and stiff enough that it makes a decent splint.” Ned shut his eyes. It didn’t make the pain any better. “And this isn’t about me and my stupid little broken leg. That will heal. We need to see to Lady Harcroft first.”

“Broken leg?” Kate’s voice was dangerous in his ears. “What do you mean, broken leg? I thought you had a sprain.”

“Oh,” Ned said uncomfortably. “Did I say that?”

He had.

He wasn’t sure how he got to the carriage. On the ride home, Kate fussed over him, her breath hissing in with every turn of the carriage as if she were the one feeling the pain. As if he were some damned weakling, to cry out at every little hurt that came his way.

He was already floating on a fog of pain so pervasive, a little gentle rocking had no meaning. As they alighted, Kate went to his side. He didn’t need support. If he could do this, he could do anything. He was clinging to that thought, he knew, because the alternative was to faint like a girl.

If he could finish this—see Lady Harcroft safe, get Kate home, placate his cousin’s worries and solve the universal problems of poverty and war, while he was at it—well, then he would know he was good enough.

“Kate,” he growled as she tried to get her shoulder under his arm to offer support, “let me do it.”

“Blakely.” Kate’s voice seemed very far away. “Help.”

“I don’t need help,” Ned insisted. It seemed like a very reasonable statement as he made it. “I can do it on my own. I can stand on my own two feet.”

But there were hands on his back, arms around him, grabbing him, lifting him from his feet and threatening his last hold on consciousness.

“No,” he protested weakly, “put me down.”

“Don’t be an idiot, Ned.”

They were the last words he heard, and he wasn’t even sure who uttered them.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

“I FEEL LIKE AN IDIOT.”

Kate stopped in the hallway. She stood just outside her own parlor, and yet she suddenly felt like an intruder in her own home. It wasn’t the words that arrested her; it was the fact that they’d been spoken by Lord Blakely, who had always struck her as the opposite of an idiot. Intimidatingly intelligent, in fact.

Stopping was not a good idea. In the past few hours, her duties as a hostess had carried her forward. After the relief she’d felt at the end of her trial, she could have collapsed. Instead, she’d settled Louisa in a suite of rooms with her baby and left Lord and Lady Blakely in the parlor. Ned had not been conscious when the physician had come, cut away his boot, and pronounced his diagnosis. So Kate had been there as well.

She hadn’t had time to stop. Kate had come to convey the news to Lord and Lady Blakely, who were waiting patiently for word of him. She hadn’t come to overhear their conversation. She surely hadn’t come to lean against the wall, fatigue threatening to overwhelm her. But now that she’d halted, she couldn’t quite make herself move again.