Emily Hendrickson Read Online Free

chance to hit her target. A muffled cry told her that her shot had struck its quarry. Another sound prompted her to believe the person had fallen to the floor. With trembling fingers she placed the gun on the table, lit her bedside lamp, then slid from beneath the covers.
    It was then she discovered the identity of her victim. “Lord Leighton! Oh, jiminy!”
    Elizabeth dropped to the floor, heedless of the impropriety of her dress or her isolation with the man she’d assiduously avoided. Blood seeped from the wound on his arm, and he looked to be in frightful pain. “Confound it,” she murmured as she rolled his lordship over to better examine the damage. What a pickle!
    “All I wanted was a chance to talk with you,” Leighton protested, his words slurred, to the apparition in snowy white who hovered over him like an angel of mercy. She missed the appreciative gleam that sparkled in his eyes as he viewed the sheer cambric-veiled figure of the well-endowed Miss Dancy.
    “You might have presented yourself in the drawing room, sirrah,” Elizabeth snapped, albeit quietly. She could scarcely miss the alcoholic fumes that emanated from his lordship. The man was foxed!
    “And be informed you were not at home? You have avoided me at every turn.” He winced when she tugged the sleeve of his coat, pulling it from him with none-too-gentle jerks. “That hurts,” he complained.
    “And so it should. You have been shot,” she reminded him, quite unpitying in her care, “And you are most improper, creeping like this into the bedroom of a young woman.”
    Then she remembered that this room had belonged to Hyacinth until this evening. Her heart felt crushed as she considered the implications of that, even as she sought a pad with which to staunch his bleeding.
    The door new open and her aunt charged into the room, a poker in hand, her dressing gown flying about her. At the scene before her, she halted abruptly. “What’s this?”
    “It was an accident, ma’am,” Elizabeth said, trying to figure out how she and Lord Leighton might extricate themselves from what she was rapidly coming to see might be a very tricky situation.
    Her aunt consulted the mantel clock. “After midnight! ‘Tis Valentine’s Day! You have just shot your future husband, my dear girl!”
     

Chapter Two
     
    Pandemonium broke loose.
    A wide-eyed Chloe peeped around the door, Hyacinth right behind her, both arrayed in voluminous white night-robes with dainty caps tied neatly under their chins.
    They were quickly followed by Gibbons, Aunt Bel’s odd butler, clad in an awesome plaid flannel robe of generous proportions, and the first footman, James, attired in a hastily donned shirt and breeches. The latter two properly kept their curiosity under control.
    Elizabeth threw Gibbons a wild glance, wondering if he would rise to the occasion. “Do find a doctor, or at the very least someone who knows more about medicine than I do.”
    “Here, here,” murmured the injured Leighton. He shifted his position and placed his head on Elizabeth’s lap. When she sent him a startled look, the one she received in return was limpid with innocence. “I am in great pain,” he added sadly, then winced as she moved.
    Elizabeth spared him a dark glance that told what she thought about his uttering a word one way or the other.
    Before the plump, absentminded Gibbons could act, he was thrust aside by Purvis, Aunt Bel’s formidable abigail. Her flowered chintz robe wound snugly about her spare frame, tied in place with a no-nonsense belt, and a lone braid of an odd shade of gray hung over one shoulder. Her nightcap was a prim muslin, with the barest frill, and tied precisely beneath her chin. She carried a neat basket from which she began to extract various dreadful-looking objects.
    “All of you, out!” she declared in a brisk voice, seeming pleased to be in command. She placed a restraining hand on Elizabeth’s arm, adding, “Except you. You have sense.” From