Not Quite Married by Betina Krahn

into fists that fell to his sides. “To have another fight for you. A servant, at that. How common.”
    Brien saw Ella sway and rushed to her to steady her. The maid seemed to be on the edge of a collapse, and she thrust the pistol into Brien’s hand.
    “Stay back! Don’t come any closer!” She helped Ella to the nearby chair, while holding the pistol on Raoul with a surprisingly steady hand. When Ella was safe, she turned her full attention to Raoul and advanced slowly on him.
    “You won’t shoot me,” Raoul said, trying to engage her eyes.
    “Don’t bet on that. You should have taken the money, Raoul.
    Now I intend to annul this marriage—and I’ll see that you don’t get a penny in the bargain. When society hears what sort of husband you make, there won’t be a door in England open to you.”
    “After your lies . . . your father will never believe you,” he spat.
    She glanced down at her bitten shoulder. “He will after he sees this.” She leveled the pistol at his face. “Now get out!”

    “This is not finished, chérie .” Again he produced that chilling smile. “Surely you know that.”
    As the door slammed behind him, she rushed to it, turned the key in the lock, and braced her back against it. When it became clear that Raoul was gone, she roused and rushed to Ella’s side. The maid was slumped to one side, with her head against the chair.
    Brien rushed to her, laid the pistol on the table, and seized her hands.
    “Ella . . . oh, Ella, you shouldn’t have left your sickbed.”
    The maid’s lips were dry and her eyes were glassy with fever.
    “’E can be bad if ’e’s crossed.” She sighed. “I couldn’t let ye face ’im alone.”
    “Oh, Ella.” Brien used every bit of strength she possessed to help her maid from the chair to the bed, then perched on the side of the mattress, bathing Ella’s face until the maid lost consciousness.
    Brien lost track of how much time passed and of how many times she’d cooled the cloth. Then as dawn grayed the room, Brien herself was overtaken by a searing hot cloud of sensation. Her lungs felt hot and crackled with each breath, so that she bent double in a coughing fit. When she managed to straighten, her face, her body, and her limbs were on fire.
    A strange, high-pitched whine began in her ears. . . . She felt strangely detached from the world . . . everything started to spin .
    . . and darken. . . .
    Eight
    LIGHT SPLIT THE DARKNESS above her and she drifted upward toward it. There had been lights before, and voices, but they hadn’t lasted long enough to be meaningful. She was lying down; her whole body felt weighted, but still somehow detached and floating; she was chilled and sweating at the same time.
    Those incompatible perceptions circled in her head until they righted and she understood them as all part of a general discomfort. She forced her eyes open and struggled to make them focus.
    In the dim light provided by two small windows at the top of a high wall, she could make out that she was in a small stone chamber furnished with the bed she lay on, a few barrels stacked along one wall, a table, and what appeared to be a brazier. Her arms, outside the covers of the simple bed, were freezing. It took concentrated effort just to draw them inside the cover where there was warmth. She groaned at both the effort it required and the difference it made.
    Opposite the bed was a massive wooden door that was reinforced with hammered-iron bands. The strangeness of it all finally registered. This looked like a cellar. Where was she? At Byron Place still? She tried to sit up, but it took too much out of her and she wilted back onto the bed.
    Her head felt spongy and allowed words and images to leak away before she could link them together into coherent thought. What was the last thing she remembered? It took a while for her to recall the wedding. Then her rooms. Ella. Ella was ill and she had— The gun! Raoul! What had happened after she forced Raoul