The Baron and The Bodyguard. Valerie Parv

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СКАЧАТЬ in his dreams.

      Within minutes of the medical equipment registering his return to consciousness, Dr. Pascale hurried to his side. Instantly Jacinta stirred and came to her feet almost in the same moment. “Is something wrong?” she asked the doctor.

      “You can ask our patient,” Pascale said with a smile.

      “Mathiaz, you’re awake.”

      Wishing he knew what he’d done to deserve the look of delight on her face, Mathiaz managed to nod. “Looks like it.”

      “Do you know what happened?” Dr. Pascale asked.

      Mathiaz struggled to think around the fog in his mind. The answer refused to come.

      The doctor rested his fingers against Mathiaz’s wrist and frowned at the fast-beating pulse Mathiaz could feel from the inside. “Don’t agitate yourself. It will come back,” the doctor assured him.

      “You were on your way to the royal treasury. You were caught in an explosion,” Jacinta supplied.

      “Accident?” Mathiaz asked. Surely he should be able to remember such an event? When he tried, he met only blankness.

      “The police and palace security are still investigating,” she said, but her expression told him she had her own theory. “If I’d been working for you…”

      He narrowed his eyes. “Why weren’t you? You’re my bodyguard.”

      She and the doctor exchanged concerned looks before the doctor asked, “What’s the last thing you remember before waking up here?”

      Mathiaz had to think. “Taking Prince Henry some books for his nurse to read to him.”

      “Prince Henry?” she said, sounding troubled.

      Mathiaz’s uncle, Prince Henry, ruled Valmont Province under an ancient charter granted to the de Valmont family by the Carramer crown. “You should remember. You came with me.”

      She took his hand, her grip warm and firm in his. “Mathiaz, the day you remember happened over a year ago. Henry died six months ago. In his will, he left you the Antoinette wedding ring. You were on your way to the treasury to have the ring valued when you were caught in the explosion.”

      Mathiaz clung to her hand, wondering why holding her felt so right. Henry hadn’t been anyone’s favorite member of the family, but he and Mathiaz had respected each other. The old prince didn’t deserve to have his death erased from Mathiaz’s memory.

      “What are you talking about? As far as I know, we saw my uncle yesterday. If he’s gone, then who…”

      Her touch soothed some of his agitation. “Your cousin, Prince Josquin de Marigny, rules the province as Crown Regent until his stepson, Christophe, comes of age,” she anticipated his question.

      That meant Josquin had married Sarah de Valmont, the American-born princess who had grown up in an adoptive family and borne Prince Henry an heir without knowing that she was Henry’s granddaughter, Mathiaz worked out. Their wedding and Josquin’s elevation to the Regency had vanished from his memory as if they had never taken place. He had missed baby Christophe’s accession to the throne, his cousin’s wedding, everything.

      “How long have I been here?” he asked.

      The doctor looked up from the chart he was studying. “You were brought in the day before yesterday. We worked on your injuries for a couple of hours, then you were semicomatose for another twelve and sleeping the rest. All up, you’ve been here two and a half days.”

      “So how can I have lost a year?”

      The doctor came closer, chart in hand. “My diagnosis is post-traumatic amnesia. Happens a lot in cases of closed-head injuries and shock. The mind can’t deal with what happened so it skips backward, to a more tolerable memory, giving the brain time to develop coping mechanisms.”

      “You mean that whole year of my life is just…gone?” Mathiaz let his tone reflect his disbelief.

      “Sounds that way. There’s no sign of any physical injury to the brain, but you were knocked unconscious by the blast, striking your head against the carved doors of the treasury as you fell. I’ll consult a specialist, since this is out of my field, but she’ll probably confirm my diagnosis.”

      No wonder Mathiaz felt as if a team of miners were drilling through his brain. The treasury doors were eight feet tall and almost as wide, and made of foot-thick iron-wood. “No physical injury? That means my memory is intact. All I have to do is recover it, right?”

      Dr. Pascale nodded. “That’s the good news.”

      Mathiaz’s gut clenched involuntarily. “And the bad?”

      “I can’t say when you might get your memory back.”

      Mathiaz refused to accept that his memory of everything that had taken place in the last year was gone forever. Giving up wasn’t in his vocabulary. But some things were beyond even willpower. “You mean I might never recover those memories?”

      “You have to consider the possibility.”

      Mathiaz’s anger warred with his confusion. Having a headache the size of Carramer didn’t help. “What about hypnosis, therapy of some kind?” he demanded.

      The doctor sighed. “This kind of retrograde amnesia is the mind’s way of dealing with the stress of major trauma. Trying to force a recovery could do more harm than good. Better to let yourself remember in your own sweet time.”

      “Or not.” Mathiaz’s voice was edged with bitterness.

      “Or not.” The doctor’s professionally calm expression didn’t change. Only his pale blue eyes registered the depths of his concern. “Give yourself time to recover before you start worrying too much.”

      “Easy for you to say, Dr. Pascale. You don’t have a hole where the last year of your life is supposed to be.”

      “It could be worse. The hole could have been in your head, if not for…”

      “The angle of the explosion,” Jacinta said, cutting the doctor off in midsentence. “Another few feet closer to the source and you wouldn’t be here to complain about a few lost memories.”

      Mathiaz intercepted a look between the two that he couldn’t interpret. Annoyed at being so obviously excluded, he glanced at the tubes feeding into his arm. “Are these really necessary?”

      The doctor snapped the chart shut and replaced it at the foot of the bed. “One thing you didn’t acquire in the last year is a medical degree, Lord Montravel.” He made the title sound vaguely insulting. “I’ll be the judge of what you need and when you need it. Now just lie there and be glad you’re still in one piece.”

      Jacinta asked, “Is he always this abrasive?”

      Mathiaz grinned tiredly. “The time to worry is when he starts being nice.”

      The doctor growled a negation. “You were easier to deal with when you were asleep.” But he managed to sound pleased at the same СКАЧАТЬ