“If you’ll just let me get you settled in your bed, I can run down to the kitchen to get what I need. Let’s see now, a—”
Jake’s groan cut her off. “No.” Never! Well, at least not until hell froze over.
“Please, Jake,” she pleaded, tightening her arm around his waist and pulling him to a stop. “Let me do this for you. You’ve done so much for me today. I want to do something to repay you.”
“Hallie …” he began, glancing down into her face. She was gnawing on her lower lip, her soft eyes entreating him. Damn. How could he possibly say no to that beseeching expression? Administering this treatment obviously meant a great deal to her.
He groaned again. Lord give him strength! It looked like hell was about to freeze over.
Chapter 17
Within half an hour, Hallie had stoked the waning fire in Jake’s bedchamber, set a kettle of water to boil, and laid out the makings for a linseed poultice on a small table.
Jake, who had adamantly refused to lie in bed for the treatment, was relaxing in a chair in front of the hearth with his leg propped up on an ottoman.
“No wonder your leg aches,” Hallie scolded as she knelt between his knees and uncorked a small brown bottle. “It’s freezing in here. On nights like this, you need to make sure the servants set a proper fire, and you’d probably be more comfortable if you had Hop put some hot bricks around your leg.”
“Fine,” Jake mumbled, closing his eyes and swallowing hard as Hallie began to pull up his dressing gown to expose his disfigured limb. Did the woman realize he was naked underneath? he wondered. Not that he was worried about his modesty being compromised, mind you. It was just that he was becoming aroused by Hallie’s touch, and he found his lack of control embarrassing.
Every muscle in his body tensed as she pushed the hem to the uppermost region of his thigh. A few inches more …
Then he released a quick breath of relief. She had stopped just short of the articulation where his thigh joined his groin and had let the excess fabric drape modestly between his legs. With that mound of silk shielding him, perhaps she wouldn’t notice the way his hardened flesh was beginning to protrude.
Gently, Hallie prodded the length of the ugly scar. No wonder it pains him so, she thought, her heart swelling with sympathy. He’d obviously been badly hurt, and whoever had tended to the injury had been less than skilled. The damage was extensive, leaving an ugly red scar that was about two inches wide and ran from several inches above his knee to just below the apex of his groin. She felt him flinch as her fingers found the hard protuberance where the torn muscles had healed over the crookedly knit bone.
“I’m sorry, Jake,” she whispered, more out of compassion for what he must have suffered at the hands of the army surgeons than for any discomfort he’d felt during her examination.
Not looking down at her, Jake buried his cheek against the velvet of the wing-backed chair and nodded tersely. She hadn’t hurt him, though his throat was too constricted from his sudden panic to tell her so. Christ! He’d forgotten how much he hated having the maimed area touched. Even now, after all these months, he associated being touched there with being subjected to more pain.
His gut tightened, for he half expected to feel the agony of a scalpel cutting through his flesh. Then his gorge rose with terrible swiftness. The probe. They would dig deeply into the wound, scraping metal against bone, unmindful of his tortured screams. A groan escaped his lips.
Hallie watched the sweat bead up on Jake’s ashen face. Lord! It must hurt even worse than she’d first imagined. Pouring a generous amount of Celine’s liniment into her palm to warm it, she crooned, “Try and relax, darling. It’ll feel better in a little while.”
She spread the oily liquid over the limb and began her manipulations, keeping her touch light at first. As Hallie gradually increased the pressure, she could feel Jake’s tense muscles begin to loosen beneath her palm. And though he didn’t make a sound or open his eyes while she worked, his face began to lose its strained expression.
It feels wonderful, he thought, surrendering to the soothing sensation of Hallie’s now deeply kneading motions. Whatever she’d used on his leg had turned warm beneath the friction of her hands, and the heat penetrated all the way to the bone, easing the chronic ache.
It was the first time since he’d been wounded that his leg had actually felt good.
Neither spoke for a long while, he caught up in the pleasure of being free from pain, she scrutinizing the twisted configuration of the injury. Just as Jake felt the last of his tension ease away, Hallie’s movements abruptly ceased and he felt her fingertips graze an area in his inner thigh.
“Gunshot,” he supplied, looking down at where she was tracing a star-shaped scar. “Fortunately, the Reb who shot me wasn’t armed with rifled musket.”
Jake sighed and leaned back, relaxing again as she resumed her massage. “He was probably some poor farm boy toting his daddy’s shotgun. I would have lost the leg for sure if I’d taken a minie ball. At least that’s what the surgeons said. As it was, the bone was badly broken, and they wanted to amputate it at the thigh and be done with it.”
Hallie stared up at him in horror. “They would have amputated your leg without trying to save it?”
“When you have thousands of wounded and comparatively few doctors, there is often no choice. You do whatever is quickest and most likely to save the patient’s life.” He opened his eyes and forced himself to study his maimed limb.
He’d always avoided looking at it, hating the nightmarish memories that the scar brought back. And aside from Seth, who had been with him through his ordeal, he’d never discussed his wound with anyone. It was too hard to remember.
But looking at his thigh now, cradled between Hallie’s hands, it didn’t seem nearly as disturbing as it once had, and he felt an odd need to tell her about it. If anyone would understand what he’d been through, Hallie would.
“I was afraid,” he confessed in a hoarse voice, watching her hands move fluidly over his ugly war memento. “I remember lying in the dark alone. It was cold … raining … I was terrified that no one would find me. Almost as afraid as I was of what would happen when they did.”
His hands tightened on the arms of the chair at the horror of his remembrance. “I would have died undiscovered on the battlefield if Seth hadn’t been so relentless in his search for me. It was a good thing I was moaning, or he probably wouldn’t have found me lying among the piles of dead soldiers.”
Hallie wanted to weep at the thought of her beloved Jake lying on the cold ground, hurt and alone. What she wouldn’t give to have been there to comfort him, to have been able to spare him the nightmare of such memories, to have saved him from being mutilated in such a tragic fashion.
As she fought to suppress her sob at the horror of his story, her hands tightened on his thigh. She felt him flinch at the sudden pressure. Shooting him an apologetic look, she quickly resumed her gently kneading manipulations.
“You’re lucky to have a friend like Seth,” she murmured.
Jake gave her a gentle smile and nodded. “Yes. He even insisted on staying with me while the surgeons did their work. It was he who convinced them not to do the amputation. I was told that he persuaded them to remove the bullet and set my leg by holding them at gunpoint. He paid for that bit of insubordination by being assigned the duty of burying all the amputated limbs that had piled up outside the medical tents.”
Hallie let her fingertips trace the jagged path of the scar. “It must have been a terrible wound.”
“It got worse with the surgeons’ efforts.” He reached down and after a moment’s hesitation touched his thigh. Pointing to a wide puckered area, he explained, “That’s where the bone came through the skin. They cut me from here—” his hand mapped out an area encompassing several inches above and below the puckered scar. “—to here to probe for the bulle
t and remove the bone fragments.”
He swallowed hard as a shudder rippled through his body. Unable to keep from trembling now, he ran his finger over the entire perimeter of the long scar. “A few weeks later, they cut me from here to here to remove the infected tissue and to probe for the fragments they had forgotten the first time.” He fell silent for a moment, stroking the area reflectively.
“How awful for you!” she blurted out, hating the thought of her Jake being subjected to such savagery. “No wonder you think of doctors as a pack of butchers.”
With some difficulty, he admitted, “It was awful. They were afraid to give me chloroform, because of what had happened the first time, so they tied me down and operated without it. Even with morphine, it hurt so badly I wanted to die.”
Jake squeezed his eyes shut for a moment. He’d hated being tied and helpless. He could almost feel the rough hemp ropes cutting into his wrists and ankles as his body arched uncontrollably at the agonizing brutality of the procedure.
“Jake?” Hallie pulled his hand away from the scar and clasped it in hers. He clung to her with bone-crushing desperation. His face was as pale as ashes, and he looked as if he was about to be sick. “You don’t have to tell me about it if it’s too painful.”
He opened his eyes to focus on Hallie’s upturned face. The tenderness of her expression and the loving warmth of her eyes chased away his dark musings.
“No,” he whispered, squeezing her hand gratefully. “I want to tell you.”
She nodded, understanding his need to talk. Perhaps, if he could release the festering memories from his sickened soul, he could begin to truly heal. Only then would he be whole again.
“Were you all right?” she asked. “I mean, after they’d cut out the infection?”
“I wouldn’t call how I felt ‘all right.’ I thought I had died and gone to hell.”
“No wonder. You’d been through hell.” She kissed the hand clasped in hers. “What I meant was, was the infection gone? I’ve heard there’s only limited success in doing such operations.”
“No it wasn’t. That’s when they suggested amputation again. At that point I almost agreed, I was so miserable.”
“Whatever did you do?”
“Celine happened to be working at the hospital, cleaning the floors and changing the bed linens. Sometimes she would help bathe the soldiers, myself included.” He shrugged. “You get to know someone pretty well when they wipe your bare bottom for you. For some reason she took a liking to me.”
Hallie smiled a little at that. “I guess Celine is no more immune to your handsome looks than the rest of us poor females.”
For the first time since he had begun his story, Jake laughed. Wrapping her braid around his hand and giving it a tug, he teased, “You’re a saucy baggage, Dr. Gardiner. Perhaps Celine developed an infatuation for my backside—rather like a certain Mission Lady I know.”
He chuckled again at her embarrassed squawk. “Whatever it was, she used to make me special treats and coax me to eat them, even when I was at my worst. It was her care that saved my leg … and probably my life. Never underestimate those nasty unguents and poultices of hers. They work.”
Hallie nodded, making a mental note to ask Celine what she’d used to cure such an infection.
“But do you know what was worse than anything else?”
She shook her head.
“The loneliness. Seth eventually had to move on with the army, and though he did manage to check up on me from time to time, I didn’t see much of him. There were other patients to talk to, of course, but only Seth could make me laugh.”
“How long were you in the hospital?”
“Six months. I was confined to my bed most of the time, although toward the end I was able to get around on crutches. Since I couldn’t do much else, I wrote volumes of letters to Penelope and Serena. Penelope was a lively correspondent, but Serena …”
He drew a ragged breath, remembering the pain of waiting for a letter that never arrived. “How I longed for a kind word from her.”
The desolation of his words wrenched Hallie’s heart. With a sob, she threw her head back and met his anguished gaze, exclaiming, “If you’d been mine, I would have fought the whole Rebel army just to get to your side. I never could have borne it, knowing that you were alone and suffering.”
Grasping her face between his hands and staring into her eyes, brilliant with emotion, Jake murmured, “I believe you, Mission Lady. And God help any Rebel who would have tried to stop you.” Then he swooped down and crashed his lips against hers in a needful, urgent kiss. As his lips claimed hers, Hallie’s head fell back and she welcomed his kiss with an ardor that made him moan.
How she loved him! She loved the feel of his mouth moving against hers, drawing her lower lip into his mouth, sensuously sucking and nipping in turn. She loved how the masculinity of his scent stirred her senses, making her quiver out of control. He was like a heady drug, and she craved him as desperately as an addict craved opium.
With reckless abandon, she deepened the kiss, hungry to taste every intoxicating inch of his mouth. She could hear him moan again as his tongue, so wet, hot, and insistent burned against hers. And as if in answer to his primal call, a searing ache exploded low in her belly. Gasping with a need she didn’t understand, yet desperately wanted to fulfill, Hallie pressed her quivering body into the junction between his legs.
Jake gasped with erotic torment as she undulated against his thinly veiled heat. Dear God! She was like a fever in his blood, fueling his desires until he burned with a heat that he knew could be cooled only by dipping into her soothing flesh.
With a sob, he crushed her face closer to his. Her lips were ripe with a provocative invitation which his body begged to accept, and the passion with which she met his kiss inflamed him until his need to possess her was almost unbearable.
Unmindful of anything but the way his kisses made the secret places in her body tingle, Hallie let her hand slide up the length of his thigh. So lost was she in their unbridled passion that she didn’t notice when her fingertips grazed the dark thatch of curls beneath the pooling silk of his robe.
Groaning now with savage desire, Jake grasped Hallie’s buttocks and pulled her nearer. She jerked as a jolt of excitement raced through her body. Unbidden, her hand slipped the rest of the distance until she was intimately cupping his engorged sex.
Fire streaked through Jake’s loins at the sudden contact, and his head snapped back as if he had been burned. Panting harshly, he could only stare at her, stunned.
With a small cry she jerked her hand away, struggling to escape from between his legs. Never in her life had she been so mortified.
“Sweetheart. Look at me,” Jake ordered, catching her shoulders in an immobilizing grip.
She shook her head with a sob and continued to try to squirm from his grasp. She wanted to die. Die! But since she knew that was bound not to happen, she would have to settle for running away and hiding like the coward she was. What he must think of her, fondling him like one of Coralie’s girls!
Jake tightened his hold on her shoulders and drew her near. Bending close to her ear, he whispered, “It’s all right. You’re welcome to touch me there any time you want. I like it.”
She grew still at his words. He liked it. Turning her head ever so slightly, she stole a glance at his face. His lips were curled in a tender smile and his eyes were darkened with … what? No man had ever looked at her in quite that way before. It made her tingle all the way down to her toes.
Shyly, she cleared her throat. “I-I’ve never touched a man’s—uh—you know—before.”
“And aside from peeking at mine, I doubt if you’ve ever really looked at one either.”
Turning as scarlet as a field of poppies, she shook her head.
“Then it seems as if your education in anatomy has been sadly negl
ected. Perhaps you would like to make an intimate examination of mine?”
She gulped and stared down at the bulge beneath his dressing gown. She was curious.
Cupping her chin in his palm, Jake forced her to look into his eyes. “All you have to do is to say yes, Hallie. Then I’ll sit here quietly while you conduct your research.” At least he hoped he’d have enough control to sit still. He was beginning to seriously question his sanity at making such a suggestion.
Hallie chewed her lip indecisively for a moment, staring into his smoldering green eyes.
He nodded his encouragement.
“Yes,” she sighed, almost inaudibly.
Chapter 18
With his gaze holding hers captive, Jake reached down and loosened the tie at his waist. As he leaned back in the chair, the silk robe slithered open. He smiled and nodded again.
Slowly Hallie let her gaze drop from Jake’s face to the broad expanse of his bare chest. Over the months since she’d seen him nude, she had often found herself daydreaming about the magnificence of his physique. That is, before she gave herself a mental slap and accused her mind of liberally embellishing the memory. After all, no man could be that perfect. Could he?
Jake could. She sighed inwardly. And it seemed that she wasn’t losing her wits after all. He as just as she remembered, with skin like tawny satin, impossibly fine and smooth. Just looking at him made her fingertips tingle to explore its texture. Hesitantly Hallie raised her hand, and then paused to meet his gaze again, seeking permission to touch.
Jake nodded his consent. Drawing a deep breath, he closed his eyes and tipped his head back against the chair. Waiting. He was crazy, definitely crazy, to willingly submit to such torture.
With trembling hands, Hallie lightly traced the shape of Jake’s strongly sculpted muscles. He felt every bit as good as he looked, silk over granite with a sprinkling of dark hair that tickled her fingertips.
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