It was worse than he’d thought. The bullet had taken a chunk of his flesh. He would do what he could now and get himself to bed. When he woke up—assuming the bad head did not kill him outright—he would summon Needham, an agent of Holbrook’s who also happened to be a practicing physician.

He soaked several handkerchiefs with water from the pitcher on his washstand and cleaned the blood from around the wound. There was a bottle of distilled alcohol among his shaving things. He doused another handkerchief with it.

The burn of the alcohol made him hiss. His head hurt. Now that the rush of action had worn off, the vast quantity of spirits he’d consumed was once again making its effect felt. He would be lucky if he didn’t find himself on the floor shortly.

Suddenly he stilled. He wasn’t sure what he’d heard, but he knew he was no longer the only person awake in the house.

He turned. The connecting door opened; his wife stood in his nightshirt, which on her dragged to the floor. Strange how his vision, otherwise quite impaired by the alcohol, wasn’t so faulty as to not notice the way the nightshirt molded to her breasts, or the way her nipples peaked in the cool night air.

“It’s so late. I was worried. I thought—” She gasped. “What happened? Did my uncle—”

“Oh, no, nothing of the sort. A hansom cab driver wanted my pocketbook. I wouldn’t give it to him. He pulled out a pistol and waved it in the air. It accidentally went off, he bolted in a mad dash, and I had to walk the rest of the way home.”

A coherent lie, something he’d have thought quite beyond him at the moment. He impressed himself.

She stared at him as if he’d said he’d come home naked, dancing all the way. Her reaction annoyed him—implicit in her look was the assumption that he must have perpetrated an act of unspeakable imbecility to cause his wound to materialize. Surely sometimes cabdrivers shot their passengers. Even a country bumpkin like her should be able to imagine such a scenario.

He returned his attention to his arm and dabbed more alcohol onto his wound. She approached him and took the handkerchief from his hand.

“I’ll do it,” she said.

It was quite charitable of her. But he’d left the house in a very uncharitable mood toward her and that mood hadn’t improved in the subsequent hours.

I’m not so stupid I can’t clean a simple bullet wound.

She left for her room and came back with a petticoat torn into strips. He handed her a jar of boracic ointment he’d found in the meanwhile. She looked at the jar, then at him, with something close to wonder—yet another sign that he was still indisputably an idiot in her eyes when a normal, reasonable act on his part brought forth such disbelief.

She turned on more lights, spread the ointment over a square of cloth, placed the anointed cloth over his wound, and bandaged him.

Working swiftly, she wiped away drops of his blood from the floor and then gathered his bloodstained garments.

“I know London is dangerous. But I was never given the impression that it was this dangerous—that law-abiding gentlemen are in danger from merely going about.” She stuffed all the soiled items into his evening jacket and tied the bundle with the jacket’s sleeves. “Where were you when you were shot?”

“I’m…not sure.”

“Where were you then before you got into the hansom cab?”

“Ah…I’m not quite sure about that either.”

She frowned. “Is this a common occurrence? You don’t even seem alarmed.”

He wished she would let him be. The last thing he needed now was a cross-examination “No, of course not.” Most of the time—the vast, vast, overwhelming majority of the time—he did what he needed to do with a minimum of trouble and even less bloodshed. “I’m tiddly, that’s all.”

Her frown deepened. “What kind of cabbie carries a pistol?”

“The kind who drives at three in the morning?” he said, growing impatient with her questions.

She pursed her lips. “Please do not jest. You could have been killed.”

Her sanctimonious concern angered him.

“You wouldn’t have minded becoming a widow,” he snapped, no longer able to censor his words.

Her expression changed, acquiring a guardedness that could not quite mask her shock and apprehension. “I beg your pardon?”

“It’s Freddie you fancy, not me. I’m not that stupid.”

She clamped her hands together. “I don’t fancy Lord Frederick.”

“Fancy. Prefer. What’s the difference? And since we are on the topic, I do not appreciate what you did to force me into this marriage.”

She bit her lower lip. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I really am. I will try to make it up to you.”

Pretty words. And as insubstantial as butterflies. He hadn’t needed to swig all that vile rum this night. He’d done it for her, so that Holbrook would get off his indolent arse and decipher the coded dossier, so that her uncle could be arrested sooner, so that she and her aunt could live free of his menace.

And this was how she thanked him. I will try to make it up to you.

“Do it then. Make it up to me.”

She recoiled.

He should have been too drunk to care. But the more she shuddered away from him, the more the memories of her sweet willingness seared.

“Take off your clothes,” he said.

He was a dangerous drunk.

His body, by itself, was enough to force her to pay attention. She’d once seen, in a book on classical art, an etching of a statue of Poseidon. She had stared at it in fascination, at what the Greeks had considered the pinnacle of male form, and thought it nothing but a fantasy, a conjuration of the sculptor’s mind that reality could never match.

Until him. He had that body, that impossibly ridged musculature. And just above the top of his trousers, the beginning of the deep, exaggerated indentations at the hips that—on Poseidon, at least—had left a long-lasting impression on her.

And the way he held himself: his head tilted back slightly, his body in one long, mouthwatering line.

Yes, mouthwatering. Physically he was strikingly fit and strikingly handsome. Something to salivate after.

She almost didn’t hear what he said. “Pardon?”

“I would like you to take off your clothes,” he repeated quite casually.

She was at a loss for words.

“It’s not as if I haven’t seen you before. We are married, if you will recall.”

She cleared her throat. “Would it really make up for my taking advantage of you?”

“I’m afraid not. But it might make this marriage more bearable in the meanwhile—if I can remember to practice withdrawal.”

“What—what is withdrawal?”

“Let’s see, since you know your scripture so well, was that Onan? Yes, that bugger. What he did.”

“Spilling his seed on the floor?”

“What a prodigious memory you possess. The whole of Song of Songs, and this too.”

The Bible had been one of the few English-language books that her uncle had let remain in the house.

“And yes,” continued her husband, “it would be lovely if I could take you and spill my seed somewhere else. Not on the floor, mind you. But perhaps on your very soft belly. Perhaps even on your splendid breasts. And perhaps, if I’m in a really terrible mood, I’ll make you swallow it.”

She blinked and did not ask if he was jesting. He probably wasn’t.

He’d been quite decent to her and very nice to her aunt, after everything she’d done. He’d been most satisfactorily forceful with her uncle. And she had trusted implicitly in his solidity and strength as she slept next to him on the train.

But as he’d disrobed in the evening and beckoned her into the depth of his dressing room, she’d been afraid—the memory of the pain he’d inflicted on her was still fresh in her mind. Here again that fear rattled. And it seemed somehow wrong for him to demand that she remove her clothes when it was clear that he was not amorous, but angry.