Free His Heart's Obsession by Alex Beecroft Page A

finer feelings at all.
    Just…let it not be too late, Lord. Please let it not be too late.

Chapter Eleven
    At sea, off Martinique
    Straps held Hal down, digging into his wrists. His heart thundered as terror choked him. The copper and meat reek of gore filled his mouth and nose from the blood that pattered from the ceiling like rain, splashing tepid onto his face. The doctor’s leather apron dripped with it and his hands, gloved in scarlet, gleamed stickily. He tightened the tourniquet around Hal’s leg so relentlessly that Hal struggled—scrabbling, panic bursting behind his eyes like lights—even to breathe.
    “Shall we cut it off?” said the doctor, in Hal’s own voice.
    “No!”
    “Look at it, you fool, it’s killing you.”
    Hands behind him tipped him up. He saw the broken mess—the bones sticking out from the skin, the gangrene, creeping like black worms through his blood. He shivered at the cold of it, the despair, the aching, chronic pain. For so long, he’d suffered, tried to walk on it, tried to pretend it didn’t hurt. Yet still, something deep within his soul revolted at the thought of giving it up. Being maimed. Being incomplete, forever.
    “No!”
    “Stubborn bastard! Would you rather rot?”
    “No!” Hal strained once more against the restraints, desperately imploring the shadows of the room to part and show him help, to show him— “William!”
    But even as he pleaded, he knew he was dreaming. He understood that Hamilton was the poison in him, the infection that needed cutting away. He had gone onto that ship to die, and now he was being given the choice in its starkest form.
    Utterly vulnerable, poised on the scalpel of decision, Hal had to make up his mind. Live—deformed, the great love of his life excised—or die.
    “Which will it be?”
    He couldn’t feel the leg now. The tourniquet had done its work. Numbness soothed him, invited him to fall into hollowness and never suffer again. But faintly, as if from a great distance away, he thought he heard words, and a last impulse of life made him strain towards them, needing to hear.
    “‘Let us live, my darling, let us love, and all the words of self-righteous old men, let them be nothing to us…’ That’s from Catullus, Hal. Please listen to him. Those old poets knew a thing or two. I only quote them because my own words don’t measure up. I don’t know what to say. Please…”
    He thought suddenly of caramel-coloured eyes and laughter. He was twenty-three years old, and he couldn’t remember the last time he had laughed. Would it not be wonderful if he could learn?
    He watched the doctor’s fingers flex on the saw and, with a feeling of utter surprise and conviction, he realised that what needed to be cut out was not healthy flesh at all but a canker. Instead of being maimed, he was being offered the choice to be healed.
    God, it would still hurt though. Acting before he lost his courage, he closed his eyes and said, “Do it.”
    A hand on the mauled flesh. A burst of agony and loss. Yes, Rob, I want to live. Damn it, William. I’m sorry, but I want to live.
    * * *
    Hal awoke to a Caribbean noon, wretchedly sticky. The heavy drowsiness of laudanum weighed down all his limbs. Its taste rotted like a dead thing in his mouth.
    Nearby, someone snored with a deep reverberation like the creak of the capstan. Turning his head with some effort, he found Robert slumped in untidy sleep on a stool beside his bed. His bristly cheek nestled in Hal’s hand like a rolled-up hedgehog. Hal’s palm lay under Robert’s half-opened mouth, wet with drool.
    Hitching over to see clearer, Hal studied the planes of Robert’s sleeping face with a feeling of tired tenderness that surprised him in its intensity. Here was proof, if he liked. He’d asked for honesty and Robert had given it to him, even though he hadn’t really wanted to hear it at all. He’d asked for hard work and sacrifice and devotion, and Robert had provided them and still