Chapter Eight #2
“It’s all right. I’ve been around illness a-fore. At school, they had an outbreak of ague, and I’ve been raising daughters, and—and my aunts were never well…much. Good heavens—you’re burning up. And sweaty.”
Her hand told her the truth of it, and she frowned. She wondered if he realized just how ill he was, and then told herself that he didn’t. He couldn’t. He probably wasn’t even lucid. “Now, cease that, and let me have a look at you.”
His eyes grew wide and Lisle nearly giggled as she moved closer and pushed the sheet down to his belly, revealing what appeared to be an amazing amount of muscled abdomen and chest, with only the slightest dusting of hair to mute it.
He’d been deep in the throes of his fever, too, for he was heaving for breath, and that movement on such a span of him had her moving her gaze to look at him wide-eyed.
He licked his lips, and that made her gasp.
“I—I…I’ve tended fever a-fore,” she stammered.
His eyebrows rose. That was somehow worse, for she didn’t want to be mesmerized by those dark, amber-colored eyes, even if they were shadowed by lush lashes, the drape of his canopy, and what little daylight managed to penetrate the enclosure of his room.
Her heartbeat wasn’t the only thing filling her ears.
Her breathing was vying for volume and space with it.
“And—and…we’ve got to get you sponged. The chill’s good for the heat. It takes a fever away quicker.”
His eyes went wider, and then he was sucking in on both cheeks, narrowing his face, and making her heart do antics in her very own breast. Then he smiled, and it had everything wolfish and enticing, and not one thing about it that was weak or sickly looking.
“You are…fevered, aren’t you?” she asked.
His brows lowered; he nodded. Lisle let her breath out slowly, and she hadn’t even known she held it.
She’d been right. He was barely lucid. The entire morning had been senseless, but this was something solid, something stable, and something she knew all about.
She’d tended Aunt Fanny through the worst of last winter, and in early March, when they’d almost lost Aunt Grace.
She’d learned it at the convent school. You needed to wrap a fever when shivers took a body, but sponge away the worst when sweat and heat took over.
If you did that, the fever wouldn’t get worse and start cooking a body from within.
She checked his forehead again, and then knelt forward to put her lips to it. He wasn’t as hot and wet-feeling. That was a good sign. In fact, it felt like a pulse was throbbing at the skin her lips were touching, a pulse that seemed to speed up.
She was frowning as she went back onto her knees and looked him over. He didn’t appear as agitated as before, or maybe it was the same, but in a different fashion. And his continued silence was unnerving…as was the glitter of his eyes on her; unblinking, watching, waiting.
Lisle forced herself not to look at the amount of man right beside her, but it was nearly impossible, especially since he raised one leg, crooking his knee, and that made it look like he was making an enclave for her to fit into.
She told herself she was being ridiculous, and then had to make herself believe it as he turned onto his side to face her, showing that the muscles in that chest were large and well defined, and moved easily beneath the skin.
Then he was making it worse, by supporting his head onto one uplifted hand.
That movement only made bulging sinew come out everywhere on his arm, and it looked like he was preening for her.
She told herself she was being silly, and it could just as easily have been he was studying her, as anything else.
She watched as he moved the sheet upward with his free arm, covering himself, until he had it to the bottom of his breastbone, and for some insane reason, she almost told him to stop.
One thing was certain. She didn’t have to worry over what she’d say when she next saw him, or if she could look him in the eye.
She couldn’t. But there wasn’t much left that she could look at.
She tried looking at the wall behind him, where light from the high windows was just making a shadow of itself known.
She tried looking at the door over by his armoire, which probably went to her own chamber; she tried looking at her hands where she’d put them in her lap.
That was very dangerous. He was right next to those.
“Did you pick up one of those jungle fevers while you were in Persia?” she asked, stretching her knowledge a bit, since she hadn’t paid that much attention at lessons, and she couldn’t even remember where Persia was at the moment, or even if there was a jungle attached to it, or not.
He didn’t answer. Lisle didn’t know what else to ask, or even if he understood.
She didn’t know what she was doing, and began heartily wishing she’d just stayed in her maroon and white bed chamber and awaited the seamstresses like she’d been told to do.
The gold weave of his bedspread wavered for a moment, and then what had to be his free hand blocked her view of it.
She flinched, but he adjusted for the movement, moving to put a finger beneath her chin to raise it, making her face him.
Lisle found herself looking into very solemn eyes in a very unfeverished-looking face.
“You should na’ be in here,” he whispered.
Her eyes couldn’t get any wider. She could feel the air on them from the extent she had them opened.
He didn’t look remotely ill, and his black hair was drying, curling slightly where it reached to his shoulders.
He moved up onto his haunches, making an angle of his body as his lower arm straightened out to support him, while the sheet made it impossible to look elsewhere as it dropped to pool in his lap, and all he did was pull her closer with the hook of one finger beneath her jaw.
Lisle begged her own body to stop acting like a fish caught on a lure, but nothing was working.
She rose, almost to her knees, while her thighs took the brunt of the thrust. The bodice of her wedding gown had definitely been measured too tightly.
Either that, or her breasts were supposed to feel weightier, heavier, and like they ached for something she hadn’t the expertise to know of, but was totally certain that he did.
She was also certain he was going to kiss her again, and there was nothing she wanted more. She wondered how he knew.
“You really should na’ be in here,” he repeated, this time from a distance that had his breath feathering across her nose.
“Why?” she asked.
“Because we’re wed.”
“True,” she answered.
“And I’ll na’ take any woman paid for the chore.”
Paid. The word went through her consciousness, and parts of her told herself to stiffen and start spitting invectives, and act like it was momentous and insulting, while other parts of her weakened, became even more pliant.
Her lips parted, her body started relaxing, her tissues opened, softening, dampening… .
“Unless she’s here of her own free will,” he continued.
He was speaking of free will, and she didn’t have any left. He had all of it. Was he too obtuse to know that much? “Are you going to kiss me?” she asked.
His eyelids lowered and he shuddered, the motion transferring to where he held to her until her head felt like it shook with it.
“You’re a very enticing woman, Lisle Monteith,” he said.
“I am?”
“Aye. So enticing a man forgets—” He cut his own words off, and they didn’t make a bit of sense.
“Forgets?” she offered.
“Time. Space. Sense. Duty.”
He was speaking of sense, yet was making none. “There’s nae wine anywhere about.” She whispered it.
“Your meaning?” he asked the bedding.
She had to say it aloud? Lisle didn’t think the words could get out of her throat. She was there—in his bed—and it wasn’t with any wine to make him more enticing for her. He’d chosen a good word, she decided, a good, strong descriptive word. It was very enticing, and she wanted more of it.
She licked her lips, gathered every bit of her bravery, and asked it again, before she tossed herself into his arms and made him give her a kiss, and everything else her senses were tempting her with, and being denied.
“Monteith, are you going to kiss me, or not?”
“Nae,” he finally replied, although he was speaking to the bed.
“Why not?” she asked, absolutely disgusted and appalled at herself for not just taking his rejection for what it was and moving from his bed, and never, ever going there again.
“Because there’s na’ time enough.”
Lisle stopped the movement before she made it, to yank her chin out of his grasp and stomp from there, and it was at the strangeness of that statement. Then, she just wished herself anywhere else as her own mouth betrayed her again. “For one kiss?” she asked in a small voice.
This time, she heard the groan, and it had to be as deep and earthy and full of anger and denial as it sounded like it was.
“Damn you, Lisle! One kiss will na’ be enough!
Never! I won’t be able to stop myself, and I’ve got parts to play, and murderous bastards to fool, and I swore I’d never say a word about any of it to any other soul on earth!
And here you are making me lose sight of my vow, and my goal…
and just about everything else…that matters… ”
He had her pulled into his arms before he finished, and was not only kissing her through the words, but was sending needles of sensation shooting through every nerve ending.
He put both hands through her hair, pulling it back and holding her in place so he could suck on her lips and breathe heavily onto her nose and hold her so tightly, the beading was probably putting small pocklike dents in a large portion of his chest.