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  His body coiled like a tight spring, Jordan tossed his gun down and slowly came to his feet, but Alexandra suddenly sidled up against him as if she mistakenly believed there was safety there. “Move away!” he snapped under his breath, but she clasped his hand in an outward display of terror and simultaneously pressed a pistol into his palm.

  “You’ll have to kill me, too, Bertie,” Tony said softly, standing up and starting forward.

  “I suppose so,” his brother agreed without hesitation. “I intended to eventually, anyway.”

  “Bertie!” his mother cried. “No! That’s not what we planned—”

  Alexandra’s gaze riveted on the man on the floor; she saw him slide his arm toward Tony’s coat and, behind him, another man stepping into the doorway, slowly raising a gun. “Jordan!” she screamed, and because there was no other way to protect him from three assailants, Alexandra threw herself in front of him at the exact moment two guns discharged.

  Jordan’s arms automatically clasped her to him as Bertie Townsende collapsed, shot by Fawkes from the doorway, and the bandit on the floor rolled over, clutching the wound in his arm inflicted by Jordan’s gun. It happened so fast that it took a moment before Jordan realized that Alexandra was suddenly very heavy, a dead weight sliding down his body. Tightening his arms, he tipped his chin, intending to tease her about fainting after everything was over, but what he saw struck stark terror in his heart: Her head had fallen back, lolling limply on her shoulders, and blood was streaming from a wound at her temple. “Get a doctor!” he shouted at Tony, and lowered her to the floor.

  His heart hammering with fear, he knelt beside her, ripped off his shirt, and tore it into strips, binding the ugly wound in her head. Before he’d half finished, blood had already soaked and spread around and through the white linen, and her color was rapidly turning an ashen grey.

  “Oh my God!” he whispered. “Oh my God!” He had seen men die in battle countless times; he knew the signs of a hopelessly fatal wound, and even while his mind was recognizing that she would not live, Jordan was snatching her into his arms. Cradling her against his chest, he ran down the path, his heart hammering in frantic rhythm with the refrain pounding in his heart: Don’t die . . . don’t die . . . Don’t die . . .

  His chest heaving with exertion, Jordan burst into the clearing, carrying his limp, beloved burden. Oblivious to the stricken faces of the cottagers, who stood in quiet, watchful groups, Jordan laid her gently in the carriage Tony had evidently told someone to pull up at the edge of the woods.

  An old woman, a midwife, took one look at the bloody bandage around Alexandra’s head and the deathly pallor of her skin and, as Jordan raced around to climb into the seat, she quickly felt for Alexandra’s pluse. When she turned back to the cottagers gathered around the carriage, she sadly shook her head.

  The women whom Alexandra had helped and befriended a year ago gazed lovingly at her still form in the carriage and, as Jordan drove off, the soft sounds of weeping began to fill the clearing. Only ten minutes before, it had rung with the gaiety she had brought to them.

  Chapter Thirty-One

  THE DEFEATED EXPRESSION on Dr. Danvers’ face as he stepped into the hall outside Alexandra’s bedchamber and closed the door made agony scream through Jordan’s brain.

  “I’m sorry,” he said quietly to the distraught group waiting in the hall. “There was nothing I could do to save her. When I got here, she was already beyond hope and beyond reach.”

  The dowager pressed her handkerchief to her lips and turned into Tony’s arms, weeping while Melanie sought her husband’s embrace. John Camden’s hand came to rest consolingly on Jordan’s shoulder, then he took his sobbing wife downstairs to join Roddy Carstairs.

  Turning to Jordan, Dr. Danvers continued, “You can go in now and say your goodbyes, but she won’t hear you. She’s in a deep coma. In a few minutes—a few hours, at most— she’ll slip away quietly.” At the expression of raw anguish on the duke’s face, Dr. Danvers added gently, “She’ll feel no pain, Jordan, I promise you.”

  A muscle worked spasmodically in Jordan’s throat as, with a look of wordless, impotent rage directed at the innocent physician, he walked swiftly into Alexandra’s bedchamber.

  Candles burned beside her canopied bed, and she lay as still and white as death upon the satin pillows, her breathing so shallow it was almost imperceptible.

  Swallowing past the lump in his throat, Jordan sat in the chair beside her bed and gazed down upon her beloved face, wanting to memorize every line of it. She had such smooth skin, he thought achingly, and such incredibly long eyelashes—they lay like lush, dark fans against her cheeks. . . . She wasn’t breathing!

  “No, don’t die!” he cried hoarsely as he grabbed her limp hand, frantically feeling for a pulse. “Don’t die!” He found a pulse—thready and faint but still there—and suddenly he couldn’t stop talking to her. “Don’t leave me, Alex,” he pleaded, holding her tightly. “God, don’t leave me! There are a thousand things I want to tell you, places I want to show you. But I can’t if you go away. Alex, please, darling . . . please don’t go away.

  “Listen to me,” Jordan begged urgently, somehow convinced that she would stay alive if she understood how much she meant to him. “Listen to what my life was like before you hurtled into it wearing that suit of armor— Life was empty. Colorless. And then you happened to me, and suddenly I felt feelings I never believed existed, and I saw things I’d never seen before. You don’t believe that, do you, darling? But it’s true, and I can prove it.” His deep voice ragged with unshed tears, Jordan recited his proof: “The flowers in the meadow are blue,” he told her brokenly. “The ones by the stream are white. And on the arch, by the arbor, the roses are red.”

  Lifting her hand to his face, he rubbed his cheek against it. “And that’s not all I noticed. I noticed that the clearing by the pavilion—the one where my plaque is—looks like the very same one where we had our duel a year ago. Oh, and darling, there’s something else I have to tell you: I love you, Alexandra.”

  Tears choked his voice and made it a tormented whisper. “I love you, and if you die I’ll never be able to tell you that.”

  Driven by anger and desperation, Jordan clutched her hand tighter and abruptly switched from pleas to stern threats. “Alexandra, don’t you dare leave me! If you do, I’ll toss Penrose out on his deaf ear! I swear I will. And without a reference. Right on his ear, do you hear me? And then I’ll kick Filbert out right behind him. I’ll make Elizabeth Grangerfield my mistress again. She’d love to fill your shoes as the Duchess of Hawthorne . . .”

  The minutes became an hour, and then another, and still Jordan kept on talking, switching mindlessly from pleas to threats and then, as hope finally began to die within him, to cajolery: “Think of my immortal soul, sweetheart. It’s black and, without you here to make me mend my ways, I’ll undoubtedly slip back into my old habits.”

  He waited, listening, watching, her lifeless hand gripped in his as he tried to infuse his own strength into her, and then, suddenly, the determination and hope that had driven him to talk ceaselessly to her crumbled. Despair wrapped around his heart, suffocating him, and tears stung his eyes. Gathering her limp body into his arms, Jordan laid his cheek against hers, his massive shoulders racked with sobs. “Oh, Alex,” he wept, rocking her in his arms like a baby, “how will I go on living without you? Take me with you,” he whispered. “I want to go with you . . .” And then he felt something—a whispered word against his cheek.

  Jordan’s breath stopped and he jerked his head back, his eyes frantically searching her face as he gently lowered her against the pillows. “Alex?” he implored achingly, bending over her, and just when he thought he’d imagined the faint flutter of her eyelids, her pale lips parted, trying to form a word.

  “Tell me, darling,” he said desperately, leaning close to her. “Say something, please, sweetheart.”

  Alexandra swallowed, and when she spoke, her words were so faint