REGENCY: Loved by the Duke (Historical Billionaire Military Romance) (19th Century Victorian Short Stories) (52 page)

Chapter 6

They lay in bed together, their sexual energies spent.  Evie was breathing hard as her lungs settled back into their normal rhythm she couldn’t stop herself wondering, albeit briefly, how it had come to this. 

Her life was in shambles… or it was about to be… and she was lying in her bed naked with a man she had met only last night as if there wasn’t a thing wrong in the world.  She should have been panicking… packing her clothes… thinking of places to run away to… wondering how she was going to survive.  But none of these thoughts came to her.  All she could focus on at all was the feeling of having Erik in bed beside her.

She felt him behind her, his cock was still hard and poking at her and she couldn’t help but admire his virility.  But she needed a break… she needed time to let what little that she cared to think about to sink in.  He didn’t press the issues either; he seemed as disinterested to their plight as she was. 

He gently stroked the skin of her bicep.  The water had long since dried from their bodies, but the air was still permeated by the smell of musk and sweat.  The idea that she might need a second shower passed through her mind and a pleasant smile crossed her face because of it.  A second shower wouldn’t be so bad if Erik was with her.

“Are you alright?” he asked.

She nodded lazily, her smile enduring.

He leaned over and kissed her naked shoulder and she felt the warmth of his lips upon her.  It was amazing how that warmth of his body never seemed to go away.  It was almost like a blanket and one that she didn’t mind wrapping herself up in if she could. 

“So… what happens now?”

She thought about it for a moment.  Strange though it was, the sex had helped her to think.  She had never been able to solve problems without being able to step back and get some perspective on things.  Taking her mind off of the immediate problem had been enough to help her see points… formulate ideas… make plans.  And he had helped her to achieve that.

“You still need your anti-biotics,” she said plainly.  “I can get them from the hospital.  I can go now if I need to…”

“No!” he said quickly.  “No.  If you go there now – when it’s supposed to be your time off – then someone might become suspicious.  They’ll certainly have someone watching the hospital… they may even already have someone on their payroll.  If you turn up now, asking for medicines that could easily be explained as ones needed to treat a gunshot wound we might be discovered too soon.”

She was able to see the logic in that easily enough.

“No, we need things to appear as normal as they can be, at least until the day after tomorrow.  That is the day you go back to work, is it not?”

She nodded.

“Then that is when we must make our move.”

“Do you have a plan?”

He smirked.

“What?”

“Well… my plan is – at least until tomorrow – that we play this game some more.”  He squeezed her breast suggestively.  She smiled back at him.  “After that… I’m not sure.”

She rolled her eyes in thought for a moment.  “You know… I think I have a plan.”

He looked at her interestedly.  “You do?”

She took his hand in hers and squeezed.  “I do… it’s simple, but I think it will work.”

“Simple is good,” he said approvingly.  “And if you formulated it, then so much the better.  My people – well,
used
to be my people – will know my mind and how I might formulate a plan.  But your mind is entirely unknown to them.  I dare say that our chances of survival increase if you are the mastermind behind our escape.”

She squeezed his hand.  “Before I tell you my plan, there something I want to ask you and… and I want the truth.”

The look on his face didn’t change.  “Go on.”

She licked her lips nervously and turned herself over, staring up at him and hooking one of her legs over the back of his knee.  She took a short breath.  “Did you love your fiancé?”

He chuckled, “Evie…”

“I want to know.”

He looked at her and touched her bottom lip with the tip of his thumb, lightly tracing the edge of her mouth with it.  For a moment he looked contemplative but she saw no signs that he was building up the breath to life.  There was a twitch in his pupils, indicating that there was some element of pain within him, but it appeared to hardly have gone as deep as an estranged fiancé should have been.  “No… I didn’t.”

Her heart did a somersault in her chest.  She wasn’t sure why, but knowing this little bit of information made her feel worlds better.  Odd though it was, she had thought she would have felt guilty having another woman’s fiancé in bed with her.  But armed with this knowledge, the pressure of such a thing lifted from her.

“Not at all?”

He shook her head somberly.  “Evie… it was my father’s dying wish that I marry her.  It was he who arranged the marriage.  It wasn’t my choice.  There was never any love there.  It was a marriage of convenience… that’s all.”

She couldn’t detect any lie within him.  The words spilled easily over his lips and she felt that there was no reason to doubt him.  Lies would have evoked some form of hesitancy from him when he spoke.  But none of the classical indicators were there.

The news lightened some of the burden from her shoulders, but still she felt the pull of concern.  She had more questions, some of them major and some of them minor.  But though things were undoubtedly about to change she found that it would be well enough to go on without having most of them answered.  Still, there was at least one that she was dying to have addressed.

“And you think we’ll be safe if we just run away?  You don’t want to try and reclaim what that bitch has stolen from you?”

He paused and looked at her curiously as if she had just asked if he wanted to grow wings and fly around the sun.  For a moment she feared that she had asked the wrong kind of question… that he was offended. 

He laughed.

The sound was loud enough to startle her.  He laughed with such glee that it felt like the room was shaking, surprising even her.  His laughter was tremendous and he carried on with it for what felt like a long time before he finally relaxed enough to have it subside. 

“Fight for it?” he asked her through tears that had formed in his eyes.  “You cannot be serious?”

“Uh… well… I was just…”

“Evie,” he said, his voice amused, “this is not the medieval ages.  I haven’t been robbed of a throne.  It’s not my intent to steal away to some foreign country and raise an army of conscripts and come marching back to reclaim what was stolen.  If she wants to keep the empire my family built, she’s welcome to it… so long as she leaves me out of it.”

“Is that why you’re laughing?”

He wiped away one of the tears.  “Let me tell you a little something about coups, Evie.  You never overthrow a leader unless you’ve made a deal with his successor that assures your safety.  My former bride-to-be wouldn’t have dared make this move unless she had the complete support of those who were supposed to be loyal to
me
.”  He caressed the side of her cheek.  “It was
she
who shot me after all… and in full view of my own bodyguards and they did nothing to try and stop her.  They support her bid for power and don’t support me at all.”

“Bitch,” she said.

“Indeed.  In light of that, it seems perfectly reasonable to believe that she has secured enough power to take over everything that my family had built.  It might even buy us time to escape.”

That surprised her and it must have showed.

“You’re shocked to hear this?”

“A little… uh… I would have thought that you would want to get everything back?”

He scoffed.  “Why would I want to do that?  I never
asked
for this empire that my family built.  It’s built of murder… corruption… lies…”  He shook his head and blew out a long breath as if he were expelling a lungful of smoke from a bad cigarette.  “I never wanted that.”

More of the weight from her shoulders seemed to have disappeared.  “So… assuming that we can get away clean, what happens then?”

He looked down at her and lightly kissed her forehead.  “Does it really matter?”

She smiled at him.  A few hours ago, she would have said yes.  But now, in light of this new information, she found that it was easier to ignore the future.  There was something positively exciting about not knowing what lay ahead.  Her whole life had been about planning… structure… schedules...  and goals.

She had been like a drone, programmed to do and accept everything that was supposed to have happened to her.  She had always thought just to deal with it as it came and try to and avoid the more negative of the consequences.  But now, she had discovered a third choice: to be reckless.

There was something liberating about that.

To live a life without goals, structures, schedules, consequences, or any of the other things that she had spent her life using as a framework in which to flourish sounded positively enthralling.  In all of a moment it felt like something that she was certain that she could hang a lifetime on and not feel bad about.  The only thing that she would have to worry about in the end was survival.

“No, I guess not.”

Chapter 7

When she turned up for her shift she felt like her bones had been stocked with ice.  Every step she took brought a chill and every breath she took stung her lungs.  Suddenly everything that had been familiar and secure about her place of work now seemed threatening… dangerous… something to be avoided.  Even the automatic doors of the hospital entrance suddenly seemed like the gaping maw of a monster determined to eat her alive.

She sucked in one final breath and went inside, daring to run straight down the monster’s throat. 

Show me those teeth…
she thought determinedly.

Evie did as she always did on her way in to work.  She smiled and said hello to a few of the people that she recognized… an orderly… a nurse… a few of the doctors… the man who mopped the floor… people that she wasn’t overly familiar with.  She stopped in the women’s locker room and slipped into her scrubs, donning a white lab coat, she went about her usual routine and tried not to look suspicious in the least of ways.

More than once she heard a few other women and men talking about the party two nights past.  That they would still be talking about it at all didn’t surprise her.  The usual topics applied: who had worn what, who had spoken with whom, and of course who had slept with whomever.  She shook her head, thankful that she wouldn’t have to subject herself to these kinds of politics ever again. 

She checked in on all of her prior patients.  She didn’t want to leave them without having done a proper procedure first.  Their health was still her responsibility and she didn’t want to botch that.  She had her pride, but soon enough she wasn’t about to have anything else. 

The last of her patients was a young woman that had been in a car accident two weeks before.  In which the girl’s leg had suffered three severe lacerations, one of which had nearly severed the femoral artery.  Evie had managed to save the girl’s life and her leg, but the recovery was slow.

“It still hurts, doc,” the girl said when Evie came in to check on her.  The girl had her leg up in a sling and as Evie inspected it she followed her training. 

She sighed.  “The pain killers might not be enough… the cuts were too deep.”

“Is there anything else that you can do?”

She pretended to think about it.  “Well, I can step up your meds.  There are some painkillers that I can prescribe, but they’re going to make you pretty loopy.”

“I’ll try anything,” the girl responded enthusiastically.

Evie nodded.  She updated the girl’s chart and felt a small sense of remorse.  This could be the last time she ever updated a person’s chart in her life.  Who knew?  Maybe one day she could take up medicine again… but that was a day far off and yet to come.  She had to worry about now.  “Alright, there you are,” she said, checking the girl’s char.  “I’ve got to go down to the pharmacy and make sure we’re stocked up on this particular painkiller.  But you’ll have some by this afternoon.”

The girl smiled with impending relief.  “Thanks, doc.”

“Don’t mention it.”

She brought the paperwork to the pharmacy counter.  For security’s sake the pharmacy was always kept locked up better than a bank vault.  A single pharmacist sat behind an inch of shatterproof glass and spoke through a speaker system – one the recent additions contributed by some horny investor to the hospital.

“Whatcha need, hon?” asked the pharmacist inside, an elderly woman that had to be pushing seventy.

Evie slipped the paperwork through the narrow slot in the plastic showing the other woman what she needed.  “Diosatran, thirty milligrams.”

The pharmacist nodded and turned to unseen quarters of the room that Evie couldn’t track her movements.  She took a calming breath and resisted the urge to check her watch.  She’d done this same thing a hundred times before when helping patients and the procedure didn’t take long.  To check the time now might be enough to cause a careful eye to be suspicious.  Erik had told her so and she did her best to appear calm.

When the elder woman returned she set the small plastic bottle on the counter with the patient’s name on it and updated her system on the monitor on the other side of the glass.  “That poor girl with the leg?” the elder woman asked.

Evie nodded.  “Yeah… the pain’s getting a little too much for her.”

“Poor thing!” the elder woman said as her fingers danced across the keys of her computer.  “She’s toughed it out for three weeks!”

Evie nodded appreciatively.  “I know.  I would have gone nuts after the first week.”

The older woman pushed the bottle and the resulting paperwork through the narrow slot in the glass.  “There you go, hon.”

Evie smiled triumphantly at the older woman, though she did not see it.  “Thanks a million,” she said and turned to walk off.

She slipped the bottle of medicine with her last patient’s name on it into her lab coat pocket.  Her patient would, of course, get her medication.  Some doctors chose to administer certain medicines to patients personally and no one questioned it when they did.  That she had come to the pharmacy would not be unusual, nor would her request for this particular antibiotic.  With luck, it would be seen as just another oversight in the system.

At least for a while.

She knew enough about bureaucracies to know that once people realized that she had disappeared that her last steps would be traced.  Sooner or later someone would figure out what it was that she had done and – if Erik’s suspicions were correct – they would know
why
she had done it. 

But by then, Erik had promised that the pair of them would have a new life… new looks… new identities… no one would think to look for them.  Not where they were going.

She walked straight out from the hospital; the monster that she had imagined to be waiting for her opened its mouth and let her pass: a morsel that the beast couldn’t swallow.  And just ahead she saw a taxi pulling up to the curb.  She held out a hand to wave it down and the yellow vehicle stopped.

She climbed into the backseat and closed the door, her muscles dancing with the electric tingle of success. 

“Midtown train station, please,” she said in a cheery voice.

Her driver pulled away and within seconds, the hospital that she had devoted so much time and attention to fell away behind her.  It was a full minute before her driver spoke in his sexy hard-to-place accent.

“You were successful?”

She smiled at him.  “I wouldn’t have come out if I wasn’t.”  She jiggled the bottle in her coat as proof.  “Were
you
?”

He chuckled.  “Two tickets to Northbend, New York… the train’s equivalent of coach, but the security is minimal.  And after that… wherever we choose to go will be our new home.”

“Good.  I can check your bandage once we’re in our cabin on the train.”

“Yes… maybe a little while
after
we’re alone in our cabin.”  His tone was suggestive and she felt her excitement building up inside of her.

“And we’re already packed?”

“People on a honeymoon usually are.”

She started to laugh at that, but held.  Her life was suddenly moving so fast that she felt like the energy of her body was getting ahead of her and the more fleshy parts of her body couldn’t keep up.  She was a fugitive now… not from the law and not even from a crime family… but from
life
.  Somehow, that was exciting.

And she was fine with it.