Julia Justiss by The Courtesan

tell,” he said with a grimace, “but I can breathe.” Inhaling deeply enough to utter more than a few words at a time, however, was a different matter.
    “Praise heaven!” She opened her mouth as if to say something else, then hesitated.
    Jack might be in a sorry state, but he wasn’t half-dead enough not to feel a spark of masculine response as she ran the tip of her tongue over those plump lips. “Do you remember…how you became injured?” she said at last.
    Why she had tried to kill him? he asked himself. A disturbing vision of her lovely face contorted with hate flickered through his mind and he inhaled sharply, then gasped as another surge of pain seared his chest.
    He struggled to regain his concentration. If he could induce her to describe what had happened, maybe he could find out what had prompted her violent response.
    “It’s all…rather hazy.”
    “It cannot possibly be sufficient, given the injuries you’ve suffered, but I owe you an enormous apology. You had challenged me to a fencing match—you remember that?”
    He nodded, prompting her to continue.
    “Sometime during the match,” she said, moistening her lips again, “the protector on my blade became dislodged. Being unaware of this, when you chanced to drop your guard and I saw a chance to score a hit, I took it. I never dreamed…!” She stopped again, her eyes and expression mirroring a clear distress. “The fault is entirely mine.”
    “Had I done you some injury,” he asked, gritting his teeth against the increasing pain of each inhaled breath, “that you felt moved to attack?”
    Her face coloring, she didn’t immediately reply. So she knew her response had been disproportionate. Why? he wondered anew.
    “Of course you had done me no injury,” she said after a moment. “I—I merely wished to test my skill against one who was accounted a superb swordsman.”
    “Our relative positions now…argue against that,” he observed wryly.
    “There is no way I can make restitution for all you have suffered, but I have arranged to oversee your care until you are sufficiently recovered to be transported to your family’s estate, which Lord Darnley assured me you would wish as soon as possible. At the moment, you are lodged in my house on Mount Street. Not a very…respectable arrangement, I realize, but there seemed no other recourse, you being far too ill to be left—”
    “Nay, madam, don’t apologize! I should be…in bad case indeed had you returned me to Albany. Only hope I’ve not been…too much of a charge.” He attempted a smile. “Many a gentleman would consider…a sword wound a trifling cost…to lie where I do now.”
    “Not if theirs were the chest pierced by the blade,” she retorted, ignoring his attempt at gallantry. “In any event, I shall arrange for your journey as soon as the physician allows. Though I fear,” she added with a sigh, “that shall not be soon enough to prevent the troubling news of your present…situation from reaching your family.”
    “My family will thank you,” Jack replied, surprised that Lady Belle seemed aware of the distress his mother might well experience upon hearing her only son was being nursed by the ton’s most celebrated Fashionable Impure. Odd, he thought, that a woman who had embraced a calling like Belle’s would spare a thought over how an association with her would be viewed by respectable people.
    “Do you feel up to drinking some broth?”
    At her question, he realized he was indeed hungry, though broth didn’t appeal. “Feel like having the steak…I didn’t finish for breakfast.”
    “Beefsteak might be a tad ambitious,” she replied with a smile.
    Despite the pain, Jack’s breath caught at how the sudden warmth of that expression, seen for the first time up close, magnified the natural beauty of her face. Though she was garbed in a high-necked, plain gray gown, her hair once again pulled severely back, the Quaker austerity of dress and coiffure seemed