My Scandalous Viscount by Gaelen Foley Read Free Book Online

completely different from seeing blood coming out of Carissa Portland.
    In point of fact, he was in an unheard-of state of terror for an agent rigorously trained to fear nothing.
    Beyond that, he was furious.
    I’m going to kill Nick for this.
    And if Carissa lived, he might just kill her, too, for snooping around after him and getting herself shot.
    Maybe now the chit would learn her lesson!
    You see, Father? You see why I don’t get married? he thought angrily. Find one blasted girl he really liked, and he ended up getting her shot. This is why I just bed them and keep my distance. Was that so hard to understand?
    He paid no attention whatsoever to his own wound. He’d had worse. She was the one who mattered, and in the dark, with all that long, thick hair of hers, he couldn’t tell yet how badly she was hurt. But his luck . . . argh.
    Her head was bleeding a lot, but that’s what heads did in his experience, he attempted to assure himself. A lot of blood was never good, but when it came to head injuries, blows that produced no blood at all sometimes turned out worse. The person just fell asleep and never woke up again.
    If heaven showed mercy on a sinner like him tonight, her wound would turn out to be nothing more than a gash like the one on his arm.
    He chose to believe for now that the bullet had only grazed her. Until he could look at her in the light, dig through her luxurious auburn tresses down to her scalp and clean the wound, and determine how bad an injury they were dealing with, he clung to the hope that it might not be as bad as it looked under all the blood.
    Or it might be worse.
    One thing was certain: At this moment, he could understand with crystal clarity why Nick wished to quit.
    In this moment, with his carriage pounding through the dark, foggy streets of London, his driver whipping the horses to gallop as fast as they could, he could quite happily go live a country life as boring as his father’s.
    Aye, forget the spy game and all its illicit thrills.
    He’d become a dull, old, pipe-smoking, gentleman farmer, with no more pressing cares than deciding which breed of sheep to buy next spring.
    “Hold on. Fight for me, girl,” he murmured to her, as they careened toward their destination. “You’ve got a hell of a lot of fight in you. I know. I’ve seen it. Come on, now. Stay with me, love . . .”
    Thank God, his carriage jounced to a halt at last in front of Dante House. Going there was a reflex for him whenever there was trouble, and with his own survival training in battlefield medicine so that he could keep himself and his team alive on their missions, he knew he had everything that he needed to care for her properly.
    If her wound was beyond his ability to handle, the Order always had two or three good surgeons ready to come to the agents’ aid at a moment’s notice.
    His driver promptly flung open the carriage door; Beau gathered Carissa up in his arms with a cold sweat beading on his brow and long-forgotten prayers streaming through his mind. She had to be all right. She had to. He could not bear for any harm to come to her, especially when it was his fault.
    She could not die, moreover, when his last words to her had been so rude and improper, propositioning her like a thoroughgoing blackguard—when the truth was, deep down, she made more sense to him than most of the people in London.
    He lifted her smoothly from the seat, which was now also stained with blood, and carried her out of his town coach. “Door,” he ordered.
    His coachman ran ahead of him to fling wide the black wrought-iron gate, then raced again to the front door of Dante House. Beau strode up the front path with Carissa’s limp body dangling from his arms.
    “Mind the dogs,” he said to his driver. “Wait here. I may want you to go for the surgeon if this is beyond my skill. Otherwise, I’ll need you on hand to assist.”
    “Yes, my lord.” His driver pushed the front door open, and as Beau stepped in,