Fans of Eloisa James & Julia Quinn discussion
Monday Puzzler
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Monday Puzzler March 30, 2015: Saving the Hero
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This is one I almost surely have NOT read, but which fact will have to be rectified as soon as I learn author and title.
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I loved this scene! I recognize the book.
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Manda, I fell in love with her prose while reading this book, and not a single book of hers since has failed to produce the same response.
Ooooh! I want to read this! But I haven't yet!
Looks good. Can't wait for the reveal :-)
Don't know it, but will be added to the TBR list :)
For some reason this one sounds familiar but I can't figure out the book. Can't wait for the reveal.
This one is definetly going on my TBR list if it isn't already there!
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Oh, my goodness! I'm sure I read it when it came out and have completely forgotten it. Will have to go to my three-deep bookshelf and see if I still have it in paperback....Thanks for this one :)
I'm pretty sure I've read this one too. I'll have to do a re-read to check :-)
Heroes who save the heroine are standard in romance fiction. Such scenes can be sigh-worthy if the heroine doesn’t come across as TSTL. However, I prefer reciprocity, and consequently I have an abiding affection for books in which the heroine saves the hero. This scene is a favorite.
“Oh God, Oh God, Oh God,” Heroine murmured like an incantation over Hero’s fallen body. His head lolled sickeningly against the boards of the floor. She touched his eyes, his brows, as though searching for him, willing him to re-inhabit his face; he was breathing, otherwise he seemed lifeless as an effigy. A haze of panic began to move over her eyes.
Her vast and unseemly knowledge of bullet wounds and amputations clamored in her head, words like bandages and suppurating and saws and opium and Peruvian bark jigging among all the other learned advice from her father’s scientific journals. She gave her head a rough shake to sort it. This did the trick; somehow it all fell into place, the things she needed to do in the order she needed to do them.
She drew in a deep breath to fortify her nerves and pressed two fingers to Hero’s throat. A good pulse thumped there, a bit fast, but strong and even. Heroine closed her eyes against an almost bruising wave of relief; it meant he had not yet lost a dangerous amount of blood. Her own short sobbing breaths beat in her ears as she considered the chore of unbuttoning his shirt; how ridiculous, how dangerous, even, all those buttons seemed now. She tore it open instead, sending tiny buttons flying like shrapnel across the room.
She only needed to lift him a little to peel the shirt completely away from his body, but she could not. His weight was astonishing; the solidity of his unconscious body as stubborn as gravity itself. It made her absolutely, irrationally furious. She tore at the seams at the shoulder of his shirt, and then lifted the sleeve away from his arm with breathless care. His own blood and sweat matted the hair of his arms, and this made her angrier still; for miles he had bled, leading her to safety. By the time Heroine confronted her first musket ball wound, a hideous red little crater in the smooth hard muscle of his arm, it had become her mortal enemy, and she would have victory.
The wound was only oozing now; the bleeding had slowed, the blood was congealing. She delicately touched the edge of it; she could feel the ball move. It was close to the surface of the wound, which meant she had a very good chance of retrieving it whole from his arm.
Water. Where was his water flask? She plunged her hands into Hero’s pack and began pulling things out of it in a controlled frenzy, a small sheathed knife, needles and thread, a length of rope, a flint, candles, something wrapped in cloth that turned out to be a brush for the horses, something else wrapped in cloth that turned out to be a couple of meat pies from the T_____ R____ Tavern. All the evidence of Hero’s careful thought and planning, all things she had taken for granted. But no flask. She found his fine brown coat folded neatly and began tugging it out of the pack, but something heavy hindered its progress. Please be the water flask, she thought. Oh please.
Fumbling among the folds of the coat, she found a flask in the inner pocket. When she pulled it out, something tumbled out along with it: a soft copper lock of her own hair.
She went blank for a moment, thrown oddly off-balance. The things lined up neatly on the floor in front of her were like words to a sentence in a language she had only begun learning, a sentence punctuated poignantly by a copper curl. They told a story Heroine sensed she already half-knew; she could feel it radiating, increasing in light, on the far reaches of her awareness.
She gave her head another rough shake. Mulling was a luxury she could not indulge at the moment. She sniffed the flask. Whisky. In the absence of water, it would have to do.
Heroine spilled a bit of the whisky in her hands and rubbed them together, creating a little puddle of dirt in her palms, and then she rinsed the puddle away with another prodigal splash. Cleansed as well as she was able, she tugged her shirt out of her pants and using her teeth and fingers, ripped the hem of it into a length of bandage.
Placing her fingers on either side of the wound she pressed gently, muttering prayers, apologies, vicious imprecations. She felt the ball shift. She pressed again, gritting her teeth, breathing heavily, and this time it surfaced, whole and bloody. With cool antipathy Heroine held the thing between two fingers and glared at it, then flung it to the floor with an oath, as though concluding an exorcism.
She soaked a bit of the bandage in whisky and cautiously, in tiny strokes, swabbed the blood away from the hole torn in Hero’s flesh. The edges of the wound were thankfully relatively clean, and Heroine marveled momentarily at how much her life had changed: she had never dreamed that something like a clean-edged musket ball wound could cause her to give thanks.
She would need to irrigate the wound, she knew, before she bound it up. She took a deep breath before tipping bit of the whisky into it.
At this Hero moaned, a long sound that writhed up out of him like a hot wind blowing through the caverns of Hell, and he stirred, his legs moving restlessly. The sound frightened Heroine nearly witless. “Dear God,” she whispered, but found herself at a loss for words to include in the prayer; it seemed her vocabulary had abandoned her. Of necessity, for the moment, she had become a creature comprised of instinct and nothing else.
Heroine bound the wound neatly, with exquisite gentleness, then sat back on her heels and stared down at him. She placed a tentative hand on his chest over his heart to reassure herself of its steady beating, and after a moment, unable to resist, her fingers curled into the crisp hair there.
Lord God the man was lovely in a way she had never imagined. The join of his neck to his shoulders, the taper of his shoulders to his slim waist, the swell of taut muscle above his ribcage, the wondrous texture and temperature and smell of his skin — this hidden beauty made Hero seem a stranger with powerful secrets, like a whole other country with its own laws. A restless curiosity and delight spiked through her, finding its way even through her fear for him. Beneath her hand, beneath his skin, his heart beat. She put her other hand on her own heart, to compare.
“Was it R______ D________?”
Heroine jumped, jerking her hand away.
“R_____ D_______?” she repeated numbly.
“Who…who taught you just where to hit a man?”
Hero’s voice was frayed, dragging, but the sound of it filled Heroine near to bursting with some nameless emotion.
“Yes,” she said, almost a whisper. She sought his eyes. They were dark and glazed with pain, but behind the pain, he was fully there, indomitably amused and warming at the sight of her. Heroine uncertainly touched his hand, and his fingers closed over hers tightly.
“R_____ D________ should be knighted,” Hero muttered.
He managed to lift one corner of his mouth in a smile before closing his eyes. His face contracted, the quickening of his breath betrayed his struggle with pain. His thumb began moving in an unconscious stroke across the top of her hand
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
She would happily face a dozen pistols, a dozen highwaymen, without flinching. For Hero.
When the sobs had run their course, Heroine felt renewed and absurdly, dizzyingly cheerful. She knelt next to the stream and rinsed her hands, then splashed a little cool water on her face, a baptism, in a way, of her new self. Today she had taken a musket ball out of Hero, and he had gripped her hand, seeking strength from her and finding it. This did not tilt the balance between them, but righted it momentarily: Heroine had not fully realized until that moment how much she had wanted, needed, to give something to Hero. One did not need to pose naked on a chaise to feel powerful and womanly, she now understood. One needed only a musket ball wound and the feel of a beautiful man stroking the back of one’s hand.