Christmas At The Castle: Tarnished Rose of the Court / The Laird's Captive Wife. Amanda McCabe

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       Chapter Eight

      “Shh. Be still. Rest now.” John slowly smoothed the cool, damp cloth over Celia’s brow and whispered to her until she settled back in the bed. She still frowned, and her hands were curled tightly against the sheets as if she fought demons in her sleep. But she quieted.

      John sat back in his chair by the bed and ran the cloth over her shoulders and along her arms. It had been three days since she’d tumbled into the icy river—three days that they’d been alone in the small hunting lodge tucked into the woods. The chills and fever that had come upon her seemed to be subsiding, but sometimes he feared that was his own wishful thinking. His own fear of losing her all over again—for ever this time.

      He balanced her hand on his palm and studied the delicate pale fingers. She had survived the fever that killed her parents and husband because her delicacy hid a fierce spirit. He had told her she was the most stubborn person he had ever seen, and she was. She would survive this. He would make certain of it. He would use all his strength to pull her back to him.

      Once he had dared to begin to think of a future with someone else, with Celia. Could he afford to think of that now? What could he offer her? She was in this place now because of him. He never wanted to hurt her again.

      “I should never have quarrelled with you that day, Celia,” he whispered. He should have known she would fight like the warrior she was, his fairy queen with claws. But he wasn’t willing to let her hurt herself.

      He laid her hand back on the sheets at her side and went on bathing her skin. She felt cooler to his touch now. Most of the heat on her bare arms was from the fire he had built up in the grate. She wore a chemise with the sleeves cut away, a bandage wrapped above the elbow, where the physic had bled her before the others moved on with their journey. Her hair fell over one shoulder in an untidy black braid.

      John slowly smoothed the cloth up her arm and over her collarbone. He saw again the shoulder that had had him so furious when he first undressed her.

      It had obviously been damaged, wrenched out of its socket and then reset improperly, so that it stood out crookedly under her smooth white skin. Pale scar tissue lay in a pattern over it. There were also faint marks on her back and buttocks, thin white scars that had not been there when they’d made love three years ago.

      Her bitterness and distance, her hatred of her husband and gratitude for his death, made terrible sense now. If the man hadn’t already been dead John would have killed him with his own hands, in a slow, terrible way involving red-hot pokers and dull daggers.

      But torturing Thomas Sutton wouldn’t bring his Celia back. How could he do that?

      “You have to fight to live now, my fairy queen,” he said fiercely. “Fight so you can go on hating me.” Go on punishing him. He deserved no less. Yet he could never bear it if Celia died. She would take with her every dream he’d ever had of a better life than the one he led.

      “Fight, damn you!” he shouted.

      “Oh, John, do leave me alone,” she murmured hoarsely. “I cannot sleep with so much noise.”

      John’s eyes shot to her face. Her eyes were open and clear, not glassy from the fever, and she watched him as if she actually saw him, not some nightmare hallucination.

      “Celia, you’re awake!” he said, and a new happiness pushed away the fear and fierceness. He carefully took her hand in his, reassured when her fingers weakly squeezed his.

      “Am I?” she said. She carefully shifted on the bed, frowning. “I feel as if I’ve been drawn and quartered. Where are we?”

      “At one of the Queen’s hunting boxes. Luckily one of Darnley’s cohorts remembered it was nearby.”

      “Nearby what?” She looked terribly confused, so young and vulnerable.

      “Do you not remember?” John asked.

      “I remember riding in the cold. СКАЧАТЬ