chapter 12
Laura dreamed she was lying beside the fire, its heat strong against her back. She drifted awake, hot and vaguely confused. She lay stretched out on her side, an arm thrown across her, and she was enveloped in heat. Her eyes flew open as she jolted into full awareness. She was lying next to James; it was his arm that curled around her, tucking her into his side.
She went still, scrambling to pull her thoughts together. She had fallen asleep, and sometime during the night, she had shifted around until she now lay next to him. Her face flooded with color. Even with the bedcovers separating their bodies, it was an intimate position. What would James think if he awoke and found her cuddled beside him as if . . . as if they were lovers?
She sat up abruptly, pulling out of his arms, and turned to look down at James. She didn’t need to feel his forehead to know he was feverish. She had only to look at his flushed cheeks, the rosy color of his lips. The fever had momentarily given him the mask of health.
He opened his eyes and smiled at her in a lazy way, his eyes bright silver, warm and beckoning. Laura stared, remembering how his lips had felt against hers when he’d pretended to kiss her in the garden the other day.
“Laura . . .” His voice rasped. James laid his hand casually on her thigh. “Why are you here?” He frowned, puzzled, as he slid his hand up her leg. “Not that I mind . . .” His voice drifted off as his eyes closed. His hand slipped from her leg.
Laura stared, shocked by the way her body had reacted to his touch, his smile. For a moment she had wanted to lean down and kiss him, to feel his arms around her again, his heat pouring through her.
Impatiently, she shook off the image. James was obviously burning up with fever. He was delirious. Snatching the damp cloth from the pillow where it had fallen, she wet the rag and wrung it out, then began to wash his face and throat. Draping cool cloths around his wrists and across his forehead, she poured out another dose of the tincture. Laura slid her hand beneath his head, lifting it, and held the drink to his lips.
“Take a sip.” He opened his eyes. They were still that combination of hot and hazy that did peculiar things to her stomach. Obediently he swallowed, then screwed up his face and turned his head away. “No, James, now drink it.”
“Don’t wa—” As soon as he opened his lips to speak, she poured the rest of the liquid in. He swallowed, then pressed his lips tightly together and glared at her.
Laura hid a smile. Who would have thought that the lordly James de Vere could pout like a ten-year-old? She continued to wet the cloth and bathe his face, but his temperature remained stubbornly high. He mumbled, tossing and turning in the bed, and his words were usually unintelligible. But once his eyes flew open and he called her name sharply.
When she turned to him, he reached out toward her, saying hoarsely, “Put it out! Can’t you see it? Your hair—the fire—can’t you see it?” He swept his hand roughly over her head.
As suddenly as he’d awakened, he pulled his hand away and dug his fingers into his own hair, his face contorted in pain, muttering, “Stop, damn it, stop.”
He threw off his covers. His shirt was soaked through with sweat, clinging to his body. Laura opened the top few buttons of his shirt and moved the cool rag down over his throat and into the V of his shirt. Finally she simply unbuttoned it all the way, pulling it from his waistband, and bathed his whole chest.
The sight of his bare chest brought up more of the restless, twisting feeling inside her. He was too thin, his ribs pressing against his skin, but there was something about the broad set of his shoulders, the ridge of his collarbone, that made her vaguely warm and unsatisfied. And when she slid the cloth across his chest, the heat licked higher in her.
Laura was beginning to suspect she was wanton. Even as concerned as she was about James and his fever, she enjoyed stroking him this way. It was stirring and somehow exciting, and when he opened his eyes and looked at her, hunger flaring in her eyes . . . well, she enjoyed that even more.
He clamped one hand around her wrist, stilling it, then pushed her hand downward, leaving the cloth behind. She sucked in her breath, her eyes going wide with astonishment as she felt him move beneath the cloth of trousers, hard and pulsing. James made a low noise and sank his other hand into her hair, pulling her head down to his. Laura didn’t resist.
His lips were velvety soft, as hot as she had imagined them, and more aggressive and insistent than his gentle kiss the other day. His mouth moved against hers, opening her lips to his questing tongue. Laura jerked in surprise. This was wrong, surely. This was fierce and hungry, not at all loving. This was . . . delightful.
He no longer held her hand against him, but Laura found she had no desire to pull it away. She moved her fingertips lightly over the buttons of his trousers and felt his flesh surge in a primitively gratifying way.
His hand wandered up her body, hot as a flame wherever it touched. He slid in beneath the lapel of her dressing gown, flesh searing through the thin cotton of her nightshirt, and settled on her breast, and though that, too, was a surprise, she did not flinch. She was growing accustomed to these new and pleasurable things he was doing, and now she waited for them with anticipation.
James groaned and turned, pulling her beneath him. His body was heavy on hers, pressing her into the soft mattress. His mouth left hers to roam down over her throat, and a shudder shook him. Suddenly he let out a low moan of an entirely different sort, a sound of loss and desperation. “No . . . no . . . don’t go.” He buried his face in her neck, his hand clenching into the sheet beneath them. His breath, already hard and fast, came in pants. “I won’t . . .”
He shivered and rolled away from her, throwing his arm up over his eyes and muttering to himself. Laura sat up shakily, struggling to pull her tattered composure into order. He was delirious. She slipped off the bed, straightening her dressing gown and retying the loosened sash.
It was more difficult to pull her thoughts together. She sank down onto the chair, putting her head in her hands. She was a doctor’s daughter. She had long been aware of what went on between a man and woman. Or at least she had thought she understood. Clearly the mechanics of it didn’t begin to explain what actually happened.
She sat back, leaning her head against the chair, and took a calming breath. Eleven years ago Graeme had kissed her a few times—sweet, stolen kisses that had made her pulse quicken and promised a rosy future.
But it had been nothing like the fierce way James crushed his lips to hers and invaded her mouth. The way his hands roamed her body. She closed her eyes, remembering his palm cupping her breast, his thumb teasing at her nipple through the cloth. His ragged breath as he rolled over, pinning her to the mattress beneath him. The thickened flesh beneath the cloth of his trousers and the way it pulsed against her hand.
Her cheeks flamed at the memory—not just with embarrassment, but with another kind of heat altogether. For however unexpected his kisses had been, they had not been as astonishing as her own reaction. Her entire body had simply burst into flame. She’d wanted to press her body into his; she’d reveled in the weight of him on her, the intensity of his passion.
What in the world did that say about her? Even worse, what did it say that she hadn’t wanted him to stop?
The truth was, her pulse was still racing, and she was suffused with heat. Her insides had melted, a low throbbing ache starting deep in her abdomen. If James had not broken it off, his delirium taking him off on another path, there was no telling what she would have done.
If she had not given up Graeme, if they had married, is that what would have passed between them—no, that was too embarrassing to even think of. She could not imagine doing such things with the man who had been her friend since they were children.
Far easier to feel this way about the man who had that wicked smile, whose silver eyes glittered in sardonic amusement at the world, who had no interest in being any better than he was. James de Vere was not a gentleman, which made her less ashamed for not acting like a lady.
Had James even known who she was when he kissed her? He had clearly been delirious; he could have been thinking about some other woman. It was a deflating thought, but it would be better if he had been unaware. It would make it easier to face him again. If, of course, he recovered.
That was what was important. James had a raging fever; he could be near death. This was no time to be sitting around pondering her feelings. She must get to work. Laura stood up, smoothing her hands down her dressing gown, and turned back to the washbasin.
James was shivering now despite the searing heat of his skin. He turned onto his side, huddling into himself, so Laura pulled the covers up and tucked them in around him. Still he shivered. She added the blanket folded at the foot of his bed. He continued to shake, his teeth chattering. She opened the chest at the foot of the bed but found no other blanket. Finally she took off her dressing gown and added that to the pile of coverings atop him.
“Cold,” he whispered. “It’s so cold.”
Not knowing what else to do, Laura slid into bed and wriggled over until she lay behind him. His body was like a furnace, and the pile of coverings added to the smothering heat. Laura snuggled up against his back, holding him close and wrapping her arms around him. Gradually his shaking stopped, and he once more fell into sleep.
It was so hot beneath the covers that it was some time before Laura realized that James’s body next to hers was no longer blazing. He had stretched out, no longer trembling. She sat up, propped on her elbow, and felt his forehead. It was clammy and much cooler to the touch.
His fever had broken.