He sat up sharply, his face contorting in a mask of pain as his hand shot to his abdomen. “Ye wretched Sassenach!” he rasped, glaring up at her through long, dark eyelashes as he clutched his stomach. “Ye’ve nae right to keep me here! What have ye done to me?”
“You have to stay still, sir. If you do not, you shall tear open your stitches!” she replied frantically, reaching forward to try and push him back down onto the bed.
Snarling at her, his free hand snatched for her wrist, gripping it savagely with the strength she had known he would possess. “Get yer filthy hands off me, Sassenach!” he roared, his face turning scarlet with fury. “I’d rather rip me whole body open than have one of ye lay a hand on me!”
“Please… you have to lie back. You will hurt yourself if you do not,” she urged, panic evident in her trembling voice. This man could snap her like a branch if he wanted to, and with his hand gripped so tight around her wrist and that pure hatred flashing in his umber eyes, she had the awful feeling that was precisely what he intended to do.
Chapter 4
Camdyn did not know how many times he could viably cheat death. Truly, he was not even sure that he had, when he opened his eyes and found himself looking directly at one of the most beautiful women he had ever beheld. An angelic vision with tumbling blonde curls, held back by two bejeweled hair slides, and the prettiest green eyes, as vibrant as the forests of home in the summertime. A constellation of freckles added character to rosy cheeks and bitten-red lips widened into the most enchanting, welcoming smile.
I’m dead. That’s the only explanation. This is heaven, and she’s the angel sent to guide me through the gates.
But then he realized that his heart was beating faster at the sight of her, and he did not think that the dead could still feel the beat of their heat, nor the breath that came in and out of their chests.
Puzzled, he observed the woman with a sort of happy confusion. He would have been content to lie there and do nothing but look at her. If she had not spoken, he might have done. But the warm, welcoming daze dissipated in a split-second when he heard that voice. That distinctly English, Sassenach voice.
I remember now…
He envisioned himself standing outside a gate, spewing his hatred up at an English house, and his body finally giving out from the exhaustion. He realized, with rage churning in his belly, that he must now be inside that house, or at least one like it. The fancy furnishings all around him, and the soft bed beneath him, reeked of their vile wealth.
Seeing red, he lost it. And when she tried to push him back down onto the bed, he seized her by the wrist, rather than have her touch him again. After all he had endured, even a single fingertip of English skin against his could not be borne. He would rather have walked that lonely road from Culloden Moor, or clashed with the redcoats again.
“I wouldnae be hurt in the first place, if it was nae for yer sort!” he fumed, grasping her other wrist as she tried to pry his fingers away from his first captive. “Ye redcoats were the ones that fired on us and slashed and cut and stabbed and shot at us! So dinnae pretend ye’re concerned about me now, ye devious witch. If I’d kent a Sassenach whore was goin’ to nurse me back to health. I’d have fallen on me sword back there on Culloden Moor.”
Unable to control the bubbling hatred that simmered through his fiery veins, he unleashed every shred of vitriol that he had been saving up, to hurl at these English bastards. Oddly enough, it was not specifically personal. It did not matter who she was, or what she had tried to do for him, or even how beautiful she was. He would have lashed out, all the same, no matter which English person he had seen when he had awoken. It just happened to be her, bearing the brunt of it.
“Please…” she whispered, squeezing her eyes shut. “Please… you are hurting me.”
The pained plea struck him sharper than any firelock shot or bayonet puncture, his hands opening immediately to release her wrists. Pinkish lines where his fingers had been, marked the smooth, pale skin there, the sight of them making him more appalled with himself than any redcoat. He had never laid a hand on a woman, and never would. Grief and hate, it seemed, had made him take temporary leave of his senses.
“I dinnae mean to grip so hard, lass.” His throat constricted. “I just… dinnae want ye touchin’ me. If ye’d been on that battlefield—on any battlefield, as it happens—ye’d understand.”
She swallowed loudly, rubbing her tender wrists. “All I understand is that I aided a wounded man, who was hastily approaching death’s door, and he has chosen to treat me with disrespect and a loathing I have not deserved.” She held his gaze with alarming ferocity. “I do not care what you are. I do not care for the quarrels of dukes and princes and this greed for what is nothing more than a chair. I care only about healing people. Scottish, English, French, Irish, Persian… It matters not to me. I treat everyone as equals. I turn no one away.”
He might have taken her less seriously if she had screamed in his face or railed against him like a madwoman, but there was something intimidating about the even calm of her tone, laced with just a hint of bitterness. And he was not a man who was easily intimidated.
“I also care about my servants, and their part in saving your life,” she continued, with that same measured timbre. “By disrespecting me, you disrespect them. We are not your enemy, so do not treat us as though we are. That being said, I do understand where your hatred stems from. Had I been on a battlefield, perhaps I would lash out as you did, but I have not. All I ask is that you show me the same courtesy that I have shown you, person to person, not enemy to enemy, or Englishwoman to Scotsman.”
“And what of the courtesy that got me a bayonet in me chest and a tear in me belly, eh?” He had not thawed yet, for though he could understand her perspective, he could not simply let go of a grudge that had shaped his life since the Jacobite campaign began.
“That is not a quarrel you should have with me,” she retorted. “That is for the man who injured you.”
Camdyn snorted. “Well, he’s dead, so that will nae be likely to happen.”
“Then, surely, that particular quarrel was ended when he died?” She folded her arms defensively across her chest, though all it did was highlight an ample bosom.
Ye should nae be lookin’ at her bosom, lad!
He chided himself crossly. Radiant and calm as she was, she remained English. He ought to have poked out his eyes for staring at a woman of the enemy.
“One soldier represents his army, lass,” Camdyn bit back. “The quarrel is with all of ‘em.”
“Then I do not imagine you will live a very peaceful life, if all you can do is hate and seek vengeance. You have not even thanked me, though you would not be alive if it were not for my care. I sewed you up. I fed you milk and melted butter, so you would be nourished. I trickled tonics into your mouth and replaced your poultices, so your wounds would not suppurate.” She turned her face away, gazing out toward the window.
He admired the fine curve of her neck, though a high collar and a cameo brooch concealed the hollow that rested at the base of her throat. A sight he would very much have liked to see, despite himself.
“Aye, ‘course ye did,” he scoffed. “Ye’ve probably got some personal physician tucked away in these fancy halls, who’s been watchin’ over me while ye tended to yer needlepoint, or whatever it is ye fine ladies do.”
Her head snapped back, outrage etched across her fair features. “I have no personal physician. I took care of you with my own hands, for eight days!” Her even pitch rose higher with her visible annoyance. “I did everything that I have said and more, and now I wish I had not, if I had known you would be so… so ungrateful!”
She stood sharply and strode across the room to the door, glancing back with something akin to hurt in her mesmerizing green eyes. “Leave, if you want. Tear your stitches, if you cannot bear to have had them sewn by English hands. I asked for nothing but thanks. If not thanks, then due respect. You have given neither. So…
do as you please, for I no longer care.”
With that, she left, closing the door behind her. And he doubted she had any intention of coming back.
“Aye, well that’s what I’ll do then,” he muttered to himself. “I’ll leave, and ye’ll nae get yer thanks or respect.”
But as he tried to sit up, a slice of unbearable pain dug deep into his abdomen, like claws trying to wring out his intestines. The pain branched out into burning brands that seared down his legs and up his spine, and he realized, with no small amount of irritation, that he would not be going anywhere, anytime soon. Not unless he really wanted to try cheating death for a third time.
Chapter 5
Victoria burst into her study and resisted the urge to slam the door behind her. Crossing to the chaise-lounge, where that ungrateful, brutish wretch had been laid after his rescue from before the gates, she sank down, panting hard—her stays too tight, her collar like a noose around her neck, her face flushed with the heat of anger.
“The utter gall of him!” she rasped, clawing at her shift collar to try and loosen it, though there was little she could do about her constrictive stays. “I have never been so… insulted in all my life. A private physician tended to him? Ha! Then why are my hands dry and cracked from endlessly wringing out cloths for his brow? Why are my fine stitches holding him together like an… irksome ragdoll!”
She sank back into the chaise and fanned her face with her hands, struggling to get a deep enough breath. The premium whalebone might have accentuated her natural curves, and given her an exemplary silhouette but, at present, it felt like a too-small ribcage, encasing the real one beneath.
“I hope he does go,” she muttered, venting all of the indignation and fury that she had tried to restrain back in the guest bedchamber. As a physician in everything but name, for a woman could never be allowed such a title, she had learned much of bedside manner. And she had not wanted to give him the satisfaction of seeing her lose her temper.
“If my husband were alive, he would have beaten that knave senseless for grasping me like that.” She rubbed her sore wrists, the faint red lines of his fingers still visible. A wry laugh escaped her throat. “Then again, if my husband were alive, that man would never have been allowed to set a toe inside the house.”
The strange sense of bitter irony, and that gasping laugh, seemed to relax the tension in her chest, allowing her to breathe easier. For the most curious thing was, in the last week of nursing and caring for the wounded soldier, she had not felt so alone.
Since her husband’s death, she had done her best to distract herself with daily patients, but it had not stopped her fruitlessly listening for the familiar sounds that she would never hear again: the heavy tread of her husband’s footfalls downstairs, or the way he would call her name when he came home, or the deep baritone of his voice, humming a ditty as he dressed of a morning and undressed at night.
I became accustomed to him, I suppose.
Even though there was no romantic love between them, there had been affection and companionship, and a routine that she had lost when he died. The house had never felt the same afterward. She would wander these halls as though there was something she was forgetting but could not remember. Until he collapsed at her gates, needing her.
“I forgot what it was like to be needed. I forgot what it was like to have a steady purpose, and someone to receive my tenderness again,” she said to the empty room. It infuriated her to think that way, for the soldier did not seem to care what she had done for him, or even concede that he had needed her, thus tossing her right back to where she had been before his arrival.
I preferred him when he was asleep.
A despairing half-smile crept onto her lips, as she thought of that handsome, peaceful face. How he had mumbled slightly, now and then, when she had taken a damp cloth to the muscled ridges of his abdomen and chest, and run it down the firm, thick delights of his limbs, as though he took subconscious pleasure in it.
Her cheeks flushed for a different reason, as she remembered how shyly she had bathed him beneath his tartan kilt. Though she was no novice when it came to the masculine secrets that lay at the apex of a man’s thighs, she had thought it improper to lift his kilt and bathe him while exposed.
As such, she had slid her cloth-wielding hand up the brawny contours of his thighs until it disappeared beneath the folds of heavy cloth. Every time, she had paused just shy of his private domain and retracted her hand as though it had been bitten. Eventually, Genevieve had rolled her eyes and sent Victoria out of the room, so she could bathe him properly.
I should have taken a peek.
She giggled to herself, though it was not long before her annoyance returned.
No, I should not have taken a peek. I should not have admired his handsome face, even, or a single patch of his… tanned and warm and supple skin. I should have left him out there, as Genevieve instructed me to.
She did not mean it. Even if she could repeat that night again, knowing how he would react when he awoke, she was certain she would have done exactly the same thing. Not every patient was grateful, and she had seen to her fair share of cantankerous sorts, especially those in a great deal of pain or suffering.
A knock at the door distracted her, as Genevieve entered. “I thought I heard you come in here.” She looked concerned. “Was there some shouting going on?”
“Our ungrateful patient has awoken,” Victoria replied tersely.
Genevieve gasped. “He’s awake? Is he asking for anything? Should I fetch tea, perhaps?”
Anyone would think you were secretly enamored with the soldier.
Victoria kept the amused retort to herself, for Genevieve’s kindness toward the Scot had increased exponentially in the days that had gone by, to the point where Victoria had even caught her reading him poetry. She had protested, saying she was merely reading it in the guest chamber because it had the best light, but Victoria did not believe a word.
“He would likely throw it in your face,” Victoria muttered.
Genevieve’s expression darkened. “Was he the one I heard shouting?”
“He was thoroughly rude to me, Genevieve.” Victoria nodded. “Why, he even had the audacity to grab at my wrists like a madman. He calmed down, and I think it came from an initial astonishment, but I have decided that I want nothing more to do with his personal care.”
Genevieve came to sit beside her. “He has been through a lot, Victoria. I don’t suppose we should judge him too harshly until he’s recovered awhile and has more of his wits about him.” She eyed Victoria’s wrists. “Though, I can’t say I like that he grabbed you. He’ll get a scolding from me, for that.”
“You would only be wasting valuable breath if you chastised him.” Victoria absently rubbed her wrists. “He evidently despises anyone English, and I should say there is nothing wrong with his wits or his health, for he was quite recovered enough to yell at me for a considerable time.”
“Do you think he will leave?” Genevieve sounded somewhat disappointed. And, despite herself, Victoria shared in it. She supposed she had also grown accustomed to having the soldier here, where she could dote on him, and feel as though she had some use in this country again.
Victoria shrugged. “I do not know what he will decide, but I will not take care of someone who does not want to be taken care of.”
“Do you think he is… dangerous?” Genevieve’s tone shifted to one of alarm, for though the soldier’s fine features and honed physique might have charmed both women while he was asleep, it was a different matter to have an awake, fearsome warrior in their house, who had made it clear that he hated the English.
Victoria turned her gaze out of the window, where a misty morning shone hazily across the landscape, dew twinkling in the apple trees in the front garden. “He seemed… chastened when he realized he had hurt me. As such, I do not think him an immediate danger to us, but I do not believe we will have to worry about such things for long. He will go of his own
accord.”
And, most bizarrely, I feel as though I will miss his presence when he does.
She could not quite dismiss the way he had looked at her when he had first awoken, before anger had taken over his face. There had been a soft sweetness there, almost like admiration. A turning up of his plump, delicious lips, and a crooked smile that had made her heart quicken, while bewildered light glittered in his pretty brown eyes. As though he could not believe what he was seeing.
She supposed that was why it had come as such a shock when he had suddenly turned into a monster, snarling and snapping and wrenching her hands away from him as though she were a cruel beast who intended to do him harm.
“What will you do, until then?” Genevieve asked.
Victoria sighed. “I will continue to be a gracious host and offer him food and anything else he might need, even though he will likely think it poisoned.” She snorted, wishing the sweetness she had seen in his eyes could have lingered longer. “Nor will I turn him away from the house until he is fully recovered, but I have no further reason to go back into that room and speak to the rude wretch.”
Highlander's Fallen Angel : A Steamy Scottish Historical Romance Novel Page 4
