One Wicked Night (33 page)

I have information regarding your late husband’s death. If you wish to hear it, meet me in the summer house on Lord Daneridge’s town house grounds at four this afternoon. But please come alone. Should anyone else know of this, it could mean my death as well.

Warm water lapped around the sudden chill of Serena’s skin. Someone had information? Maybe this would sew up Mr. Vickery’s case; maybe she would see Alastair in Newgate soon.

Elation filled her. God had finally answered her prayers in this matter, and justice would to be served.

Or maybe this was a trap. But Alastair was her only threat, and surely he wasn’t bold enough to try to end her life on Lucien’s property again. It would look too suspicious.

That dismissed, Serena considered giving the missive over to Mr. Vickery, then tossed the idea aside. Whoever had written the note obviously felt his life was in grave danger; she couldn’t repay that by revealing him and placing him in further jeopardy.

After Caffey dressed her, Serena tucked the note away within her reticule and went about her day. But neither reading nor needlepoint held her attention. She kept considering the note, wondering what its author knew or had seen.

The last hour dragged by as if Father Time had declared a holiday. She paced in the library, discarding first a volume of Lord Byron’s
Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage,
roundly deciding that an example of indulgence to earthy pleasures was not what she needed. She shied away from the usually comfortable
Christian Thoughts,
knowing Mrs. More’s moral teachings would engender guilty feelings about her carnal yearnings. Instead, she paced and watched the clock.

At ten minutes of four, she told her guards she intended to lie down, then sneaked to the kitchens, past a curious Holford, and slipped out the back. Walking beyond the scrap of a vegetable garden, Serena soon came upon the summer house.

It looked wholly unlike any summer house she had ever seen. Up close proved the structure even gaudier than distance promised. Walls of gold and red, surrounded by floor-to-ceiling windows, came together to form angles and Eastern-flavored onion domes. The structure looked somewhat like a miniature of the Prince’s Pavilion at Brighton, though not as lavish, but certainly as hedonistic. Serena knew instantly Ravenna had ordered its construction.

Most of the windows had been boarded shut, and Serena surmised the door had also been nailed closed. But today, someone had opened the boarded door and left it ajar.

Writing off a sudden, ominous feeling to unwarranted fear, Serena resolutely focused on her mission. With a gentle push, she nudged the door open a fraction more. “Hello?” she called.

Inside the nearly-empty structure, her voice echoed. She made a quick scan of the room, looking for the note’s author, but saw only cushioned benches and deserted, dust-laden tables strewn haphazardly throughout.

Cautiously, Serena stepped farther inside. “Hello?” she called again. “Is anyone here?”

A moment later, Serena felt, more than heard, a presence behind her. A muffled footstep confirmed it an instant later.

As she whirled to face the sound and its source, she heard a whoosh, then felt pain explode at the back of her head. Frantically, she tried to retain consciousness, tried to turn to her attacker.

She sank to her knees instead, her world turning black. Then nothing . . .

CHAPTER TWENTY

Lucien stared at his account books, adding a column of figures for the third time. He came to a third different sum.

With a sigh of frustration, he stood and crossed the room to pour tea the maid had brought earlier. After Lucien seated himself once more, he sipped the brew, finally acknowledging his thoughts were not on his finances, but on his wife.

Thrusting the tea cup onto its saucer, Lucien wondered what it was about Serena that fired him to such desire. Why did she saturate his every thought? He was not certain why, but he wanted her. Not just her body. Heaven help him, in the days he’d been avoiding her, he had missed her company, even her scent.

His fashionably convenient marriage was becoming more inconvenient and consuming by the moment. More disturbing, his will to avoid her and his struggle to regard her as a stranger who carried his unborn child slipped more each day.

Serena.

Lucien didn’t pause to examine the cold fear clawing at him as he cast aside his cane. He rushed past Holford and fled down the hall, through the commotion of the kitchen, then tore the door open and bolted outside, praying she was nowhere near the summer house.

Panic ate at his insides, dissipating the jolts of pain smashing their way up his leg.

She had to be alive.

Outside, a rising cloud of black smoke and orange flames assaulted his senses as did the acrid stench of charred wood. It was indeed the summer house, the atrocity Ravenna had insisted on building for her parties and trysts. Lucien had never hated it more than he did in that moment. Around him, servants stood in a line, each passing buckets of water from one person to the next, the final man futilely tossing it on the roaring fire.

Lucien sprinted to the door. He grabbed the handle, only to yank his hand back a moment later when the scalding metal scorched him. Cursing, he tore off his coat, then wrapped his palm around the latch.

He yanked and tugged, his efforts aided by the stable master, but to no avail. The door remained resolutely closed. A horrifying instant later, he noticed a jagged stick of wood wedged in the threshold.

God damn you, Alastair. I will kill you!

Grasping the wooden stick with bare hands, Lucien barely felt the splinters digging their way into his skin. He tugged on the wood. The stick broke, leaving its arrow-slender tip stuck in the door’s frame.

He envisioned Serena trapped within, pounding on the inside of that locked door. The vision sent more panic tearing through his veins.

Flinging his coat aside, he ran to the side of the house and spied a window that had not been boarded up after Ravenna’s departure. Thankful for the oversight, he kicked the glass in.

He ducked through the opening, only to be brought to his knees by smoke thicker than London fog at its worst. He could see nothing before him as he crawled deeper into the orange-flamed inferno.

“Serena!” He heard no response. “Answer me!”

Lucien took a deep breath, then realized his mistake as the dense smoke invaded his lungs. His body protested, racked with coughs. Could Serena breathe . . . or had she ceased to do so?

“Serena!” he yelled. “Whimper or cough. Anything. Tell me where you are.”

Again, cloying, smoky silence prevailed. Fear screamed across his skin, in his veins. He crawled further ahead, noticing the visibility improved closer to the floor. As he moved across the wooden surface, heat pelted him from every direction, the thick, unbreathable air ravaging his lungs.

He shouted her name again. And received no answer.

On hands and knees, Lucien made his way forward, close to the front door. He willed away the dizziness, the black closing in at the edges of his vision.

A few feet away from the door, he encountered a foreign object. Squinting to see through the smoke, he saw a soot-smudged hand. Not just any hand—Serena’s hand, wearing his diamond wedding ring.

With a joyous cry, he reached for her, curling his fingers around her arm, then her waist, glad just to touch her, to feel the warmth of her body. But she didn’t respond at all. Straining with effort, he pulled her dead weight into his arms and stood, tugging Serena up beside him.

Smoke curling its way down his lungs insidiously, Lucien ducked his head, then darted toward the smashed window.

He stumbled over the leg of a chair and tumbled to the hard floor. His injured knee ached from the jarring contact as he skidded across the ground, Serena landing on her side above him. She laid limp and lifeless, just beyond his grasp.

Grunting, he hauled himself to his feet and lifted her again. Ahead, he could see the afternoon sunlight beaming through the open window, penetrating the smoke. Like a ship’s captain on a foggy night, he ran, following the beacon to safe harbor.

Finally, he stepped through the window frame. A jagged edge of glass sliced his arm. Grimacing, he held Serena tighter, angling her legs away from harm.

Beyond the confines of the blazing walls, Lucien deposited Serena gently on the grass. Her usually honey skin looked a macabre mixture of bloodless white and sooty black. Her mourning dress, torn and smudged, displayed a lace collar nearly as dark as the muslin of her bodice. With shaking hands, he smoothed the blackened hair away from her face. He encountered dampness and jerked away to find his fingers wet with Serena’s blood.

Panic serrated his insides like a knife, slashing at his composure. Trying to force panic aside, he bowed his head to her face, listening for any trace she still breathed . . . still lived.

Servants rushed to his side, staring at their fallen mistress. He shut out the noise and turmoil.

A moment later, he felt a whisper-light but nevertheless existent rush of air from Serena’s open mouth to his cheek.

With a warm shower of relief, he scooped her up again and carried her into the house. “Holford,” he yelled in the entrance hall. “Send one of the stable lads after Doctor Thompson. Now!”

Clutching Serena in his arms, Lucien struggled up the stairs, cursing his limp with each step. Vaguely, he heard Mildred and Caffey behind him, talking in frightened whispers of herbal medicines.

At the top of the landing, he swerved toward his bedroom, then rested Serena’s inert form on his bed, the one in which he had first made love to her. He refused to believe she would die on this bed, too.

“Damn it, live,” he whispered to her unresponsive face. “You cannot die on me, not now.”

Caffey rushed forward to remove to help him remove Serena’s soiled clothing, while Mildred sponged her face and arms of soot. Lucien’s apprehensive gaze never left his wife’s face. He pushed back the bitter fear that he would lose Serena to the specter of death, as he had lost Chelsea.

Damn it, he couldn’t let her die. He must beat death at its own game. Then, he vowed to spend his every waking moment by her side; post a hundred guards in the house, whatever required to ensure her safety.

If Serena died, Lucien vowed Alastair would pay the ultimate price—slowly, painfully, at his hands.

****

Doctor Thompson arrived after the longest hour of waiting Lucien had ever endured. He refused to leave the room during Serena’s examination. Instead, he stayed close, hovering near Serena from a nearby Sheraton chair.

“Will she live?” he asked, fingers locked together.

The doctor paused in his examination, his gray mutton whiskers moving as he frowned. “I cannot rightly say yet. The damage to her lungs may be extensive.”

Lucien grabbed the doctor’s sleeve. “What does that mean?”

Thompson shrugged. “It means I cannot speculate on her condition now.”

With curse, Lucien sank back in his chair and watched the doctor stem the flow of blood at the back of Serena’s head. “Have you any notion how the bleeding started?”

Thompson nodded. “She’s been struck, I believe. A knot of swelling surrounds the wound.”

He vowed then to see Alastair swinging from Tyburn.

Lucien swallowed as another thought, one forgotten in his panic, returned. “Doctor, my wife is with child. If she lives, will she miscarry?”

Thompson whirled about, brows raised in surprise. Lucien delivered him a hard stare. The doctor wiped away the questions looming in his expression. “Again, it is far too early to tell, my lord. But an injury of this nature may be harmful to the babe, indeed.”

On second thought, he’d have Alastair drawn and quartered.

The doctor put away his bottles and equipment, then turned to Lucien. “I can do nothing more now. If her condition takes a turn for the worse, call upon me. In the meantime, I suggest plenty of bed rest. I’ve left a bottle of laudanum here to ensure just that. If she awakens and requests food, keep her on a lowering diet—you know, fruit, soups, fish, no animal meats. Keep her away from coffee, tea and alcohol. Such heating foods after a shock like this can be damaging to the body.”

Nodding distantly, Lucien heard the doctor leave, but his gaze lingered on Serena’s sleeping form. Even in repose she coughed, and with each of the spasms that ripped through her chest, Lucien feared further injury would overtake her.

Gripping his hands around the arms of his chair, he stared at the ethereal beauty of her fine-boned face, delicate shoulders, and graceful, long-fingered hands.

He might lose her. Forever.

For reasons he didn’t want to examine too closely, he found himself thinking that if she died, a piece of him would wither away and die with her. He recognized that awakening part of him as the ability to care. And it scared the hell out of him.

****

For the next three days, Lucien barely left Serena’s side. She remained tucked in his bed, two armed guards standing diligently in the hallway. If Lucien slept at all, he did so in her bedroom, with the door between them open—and the fervent, increasingly desperate hope that she would wake.

The day following the fire, Caffey had found the anonymous note that led Serena to the fire. Damn, how he wished she had trusted him enough to tell him of the missive. But he’d been so angry about her deception, that she doubtless felt he would not care or could not be trusted.