Free I Loved a Rogue The Prince Catchers by Katharine Ashe Page B

the middle of the public room like a princess reclining in her own boudoir.
    But perhaps she did not precisely sleep. A half-empty bottle of Irish whiskey and a spoon rested on the table beside her.
    Not a cup or glass. A spoon.
    Instead of loosening the cords that had been wrapped around his chest since she’d run from him on the beach, that spoon cinched the tension tighter.
    For months she had taken medicine by the spoonful. Never complaining, always obedient to the doctor, by the strength of her will alone she had survived an illness that should have killed her.
    He remembered the moment he had first been allowed to see her during her convalescence. Emblazoned on his soul, it would never leave him.
    She had not stirred from her bedchamber in months. The disease had left her lungs, but she could not walk well, Ravenna had told him with the blithe perplexity of a girl who’d never known a day of poor health in her life. Eleanor’s knees buckled when she tried to walk; she fell over, her sister reported. She ate little, and she had no strength. So she remained in her room, away from his eyes. Every day that he came to the vicarage to work and take his lesson, all the while knowing she was mere yards away, beyond the closed door of her bedchamber, was another day of purgatory for him.
    The Reverend went about with shadowed eyes. One day, when Taliesin was scooping ash from the grate to scatter over the garden soil, the Reverend looked up from the sermon he was writing. In a bruised voice, he told Taliesin that his eldest daughter would not read. Her weakness had turned her despondent. She possessed enough strength to lift a book, but she hadn’t the will for anything more. Devastation had marked the vicar’s haggard face.
    Several days later, entering the house by the back door, Taliesin met Ravenna in hot pursuit of her monstrous black dog.
    “Tali!” she gasped, pausing in her full-tilt run out the door to shove a book against his chest. “Beast is after the squire’s pointer bitch again. I simply must catch him before he catches her! Take this to Ellie, I beg of you. Papa wants her to have it immediately. He’ll be cross with me if she doesn’t.” Flashing him a wild grin, she flew out the door after her dog.
    He didn’t need a second invitation. The vicar’s study door was closed. He wouldn’t know.
    Taliesin knew it was wrong, that he should not enter a girl’s bedchamber under any circumstances.
    He did it anyway.
    He went with his heart in his throat. Then that heart fell to his feet.
    Standing in the doorway of her bedchamber, he stared at the fourteen-year-old invalid wrapped in blankets and shawls, a wraithlike shadow of the girl he had loved since the moment he’d set eyes on her five years earlier, and the backs of his eyes prickled painfully. He’d never in his life wept. But this wan specter was not the girl he knew, not the sharp-tongued tormenter who drove him mad with her nose-in-the-air superiority and her sudden, unguarded smiles.
    Sensing his presence, he supposed, she had turned her head. Her eyes, dull and listless, were ringed with black.
    “Go away,” she whispered.
    “No,” he managed to choke out. The single, rough syllable sounded harsh in the confined space.
    “I don’t want you.” Her voice was barely a breath.
    “I’ve brought—” His throat felt thick. “I’ve brought a book the Reverend wants you to read.”
    “I don’t want it.”
    He stepped into the room. “Then what do you want? To die? Because I can’t think of anything stupider than making it through the worst of it just to waste away afterward.”
    She turned her face from him and her eyes stared like glass at the drawn draperies. “Go away.”
    Crossing the tiny chamber, he pulled wide the curtains, allowing the pale winter sunlight to enter. He sat down on a stool before the window and opened the book.
    “All right,” he said, trying not to touch the pages with his fingers that were filthy from the