A Notorious Countess Confesses (PG7) (30 page)

“That maid employed by the Countess of Wareham. Henrietta? She’s been ill, and she’s taken a turn for the worse, I understand. The countess fears for Henrietta’s life. I was terribly sorry to send him away. Sir?”

Adam had slowly risen from the table as the footman spoke.

“Will you get my coat, please? And have my horse brought around? At once.”

He didn’t wait for answer.

He didn’t look at his hosts.

He strode the hallway, a roaring in his ears, aiming for the door, and intercepted the footman with his hat and coat and seized it.

And then galloped for Damask Manor as if the Nemean lion itself pursued him.

Chapter 21

A HARD GALLOP later, he threw himself down from his horse at the arbored entrance of Damask Manor and left the reins tangled in the hawthorn. Then bolted for the door.

He thumped it with his fist.

It was flung open so swiftly, he stepped back.

Evie stood here in bare feet and a night rail, her hair a wild tumble around her white face. The taut fear he saw in it snaked around his heart.

“The doctor couldn’t come, Eve. He was called away.”

Her knees buckled.

His hand whipped out, and he seized her elbow before she crumpled. He gently took the lamp from her grasp. And when he lifted it, he saw that her eyes were swollen and red and shadowed beneath, as though she hadn’t slept in weeks.

It made him desperate.

“She won’t die,” he said firmly. It wasn’t a promise he could make, but if it killed him to do it, he wouldn’t let Henny die. “Take me to her.”

HE FOLLOWED HER up to Henny’s room, silently, swiftly. Rapt, he watched her bare feet touch down on the wooden stairs. The candlelight found hidden colors in the spirals of her long hair, flickering shadows showed him tantalizing glimpses of her slim legs through the muslin of her night rail. He hungered after her with his eyes.

Neither said a word.

And then they were in the dense heat of Henny’s sitting room, where an enormous fire leaped and thrashed in the hearth as fitfully as Henny did in her bed.

“I’ll sit with her, Eve. Rest. Leave us. Please lie down and rest in the sitting room.”

She turned toward his voice as if it were a raft in a stormy sea. Fear had stolen hers; it seemed in the moment there was naught left to say, anyway. Henny was sick. Henny might be dying. Adam had come. There it all was.

It was clear he wouldn’t go in to Henny until she obeyed him.

And so she did.

She was too weary to do anything other than surrender to his certainty. He’d come. It was a miracle. Or perhaps it was her answered prayer, which amounted to the same thing, she supposed.

And all at once the weight crushing her shifted, lightened. Which is when she understood she’d always felt lighter near him. As though, she thought drowsily, she’d been given the use of wings. Or more likely he had, which is why he was so suited to help others bear their burdens.

Thoughts like these were how she knew how very, very tired she was.

She curled up on the sitting-room settee next to the fire, drew her knees up, and rested her cheek on them. She’d done all she could for Henny; she’d brought in the best person she knew to pray for her. Surely, Adam Sylvaine of all people had some influence with God.

And she wanted to stay awake, she did. But his will was stronger than hers, and it seemed she had no say in the matter. For the first time since she’d last seen him, she slept.

THE ROOM WAS dark and stifling as a coffin itself; it smelled of the goose fat and the astringents of possets and tisanes, all of which had allegedly failed Henny. Of sweat and illness.

Adam dropped into a kneel next to the bed. He placed his hand on her forehead, jerked it back briefly; the heat of her was like a forge. He replaced it, left it there.

Then he captured one of Henny’s thrashing hands in his other hand and gripped it hard.

And prayed.

She moaned and muttered in her sleep, each little mutter a clue to her life. He heard “McBride.” She snarled something like “snap his neck.” Her great legs kicked out and nearly knocked him over, sent her blankets tumbling onto him.

And still he prayed.

He breathed with her, willing her breath to match the steadiness of his own. He willed her temperature to match his. Willed her health to match his robust health.

In the dark of the room, it was easy to feel as though he’d slipped into eternity, a place where time no longer moved or mattered.

And so he didn’t know for certain when it happened, only that it did; he could feel it when the fever’s grip began to loosen its hold on her, almost as if she’d been aboard a runaway cart, and it had at last lost momentum.

And still he prayed.

And he might have dozed. It was impossible to know in the twilight depths of that room, to know sleep from wakefulness from prayer.

But something roused him to full alertness. And he realized a new sound had entered the room. Or rather, an old sound had transformed.

Her breathing was no longer labored.

It was steadier. And steadier still.

And at last … steady. The normal deep in-out sway of a person peacefully asleep.

And all of her wayward limbs ceased flinging about.

Her fever had broken.

He dropped Henny’s hand and folded his own together, dropped his head hard to touch them. And dragged in an enormous, shaking breath.

Thank God.

He realized then that he was shaking, too.

She smiled a little, in her sleep. She murmured something. He thought it sounded like “Postlethwaite.”

Which was nearly as startling as the sudden break of a fever.

EVE AWOKE WITH a jerk, her heart pounding in panic. She swiveled her head about. And froze when she saw Adam sitting on the settee a foot or so away from her, watching over her.

Adam!

Was she dreaming? Had she died?

“Henny’s fever broke,” he said immediately. His voice was a weary rasp. “She’s on the mend.”

Eve sat bolt upright, hand to her throat, still not convinced she wasn’t dreaming. And listened.

She heard it for herself, the reassuring rise and fall, rise and fall of a deep, restful sleep.

And then she sighed, flinging her body backward against the settee, her entire body deflating with the relief of it.

He gave her a small smile.

She struggled with tears of relief. “How … what did you …” She gave her hair a shove out of her eyes.

She saw him avidly follow the black waterfall drop of her hair with his eyes.

“I prayed. I sat with her. I held her hand. Perhaps the fever just needed to reach a point where it was prepared to break. I don’t know for certain. I could feel it when it began to ease from her. All I know is that … she’s with us still. Will likely live to plague you for a good while longer.”

He sank back against the settee then, pressed his back against the giving softness, and just watched her. The firelight cast Eve in amber and cream and pink—the pink was her nose and the feverish blotches on her cheeks.

He watched her toes disappear beneath the hem of her night rail like forest creatures retreating into a burrow. She tucked her knees up and pulled her night rail taut over them, pulled her hands into her sleeves, laid her cheek on her knee for an instant. She would have looked as innocent as a girl if the firelight hadn’t obligingly limned her body in shadow, showing him for a swift instant that reverberated through him like a lightning strike the elegant arc of her spine, the round contours of her buttocks, the upthrust of her breasts.

And sensation traveled his spine like a lit fuse.

And then her hair was spilling down over her arm and knees in anarchic black ringlets, disguising all of it.

“I don’t know that I could have borne it if she’d died,” she said softly. With a rueful laugh at her own expense. As if she hadn’t the right to be anything other than strong.

“I don’t think there is anything you cannot survive and somehow turn into a strength.”

She turned abruptly to him. “Do you … do you think I’m hard, Adam?”

“No. No. God no. Tempered, like a sword?”

“Not like a blossom?”

He laughed softly. And as though they’d been crowding the exits of his mind, longing for escape, he freed them. They emerged one at a time, slowly, like dancers in a procession.

“No. You’re difficult … Unique … Courageous … Funny … Strong … Smart … Loyal … Loving.” They seemed to exit in the order in which he’d experienced her. Other words queued behind these. Magical. Beautiful. Dangerous. Remarkable. Mine. He wouldn’t say them. They hummed as an undertone in every single one of the other words, anyway.

She drank each word in as though he were building her, word by word, right before her eyes. She dropped her eyes to the settee.

“I’m so glad you came.” Her voice was broken.

Nothing could have kept me from you. He knew the truth of it. He’d had no choice in the matter. His heart and soul had driven him to her.

He just nodded, too weary, too full of the enormity of the truth, to speak.

She dropped her eyes to where his hand lay flattened between them on the settee. And her breath hitched as she noticed his healing barked knuckles, the ones he’d split on Haynesworth’s hateful jaw.

“Oh, Adam.”

And gently she scooped it, lifted it with hers, and held it.

His breathing stopped. And time slowed to a silken river.

“I never again want to be the reason you’re hurt. I …” Her voice cracked wonderingly. “I can’t bear the idea of you being hurt at all.”

She looked up at him. She looked rueful, almost frightened by her admission. Her skin taut over her features now.

“Eve,” he said hoarsely. “Evie.”

He took his hand from her and slid it up through the silken chaos of her hair, capturing her, winding himself deeper and deeper into a snare. And he melted toward her, softly urged her head back.

There was no preamble, no finesse. Just a slow, incinerating unleashed hunger, when he kissed her.

Eve sighed from the crushing relief of it, trembled from it. A lifetime, it seemed, she’d waited for this. And he took her mouth with a shocking confidence, urging her head back and back, cradling it in his big hands as though she were made of porcelain, mercilessly setting fire to her nerve endings with lips and tongue and the velvet heat of his mouth, so thoroughly, so nearly savagely, her bones went molten. She was comprised now only of need: hers and his. And herein lay the danger of this man. But it was too late; she was on the other side of desire now, and there was no thinking, no return. She was his.

She’d never dreamed a kiss could be a beautiful drug. She spiraled in the throes of it, amazed, and terrified, then desperate for more, until their mouths met with a sensual near violence, tongues tangling, lips colliding and parting in order to meet again.

He groaned low in his throat and shifted to accommodate the hard swell of his cock. Quaking from desire, awkward-limbed and frantic, she slid into his lap, straddling him, her body jerking from the pleasure of his straining cock against her. She hooked her arms around his head. He released her hair from his fist, let it tumble over the both of them. His eyes burning into hers, he skimmed his fingers along her jaw, along her lips, down her throat, snagged them in the collar of her night rail, dragged it lower, lower, until her shoulders were bare. He kissed the place her heart clanged, in the soft, hidden well beneath her jaw. He was trembling, too, and she wondered how long it had been since he’d taken a woman and whether he thought he had the right to take her now.

She took the decision from him. She reached for the buttons of his trousers. He wrapped his arms around her as she did, his hands hot against her shoulder blades even through the muslin of night rail. And he didn’t stop her, didn’t say a word, as she, with trembling, graceless fingers, loosed them, one by one. He just kissed her softly—her mouth, her eyelids, her throat.

She lifted out the miles of linen shirt from his trousers, and his cock, thick and hot, sprang into her fist.

He hissed in a breath as she dragged her hand down hard over it. When she brought it up again, caressing the silky taut head of it, slick now, she ducked his forehead against her throat. His breath gusted against her skin. Her touch was expert; she knew from the tension in his body, from the rhythm of his breathing, just how hard, how fast, how to make him mad with want for her—but never before had giving pleasure been indistinguishable from her own. Her own desire was a thing with teeth now; the more she touched him, the more she needed to take him, or she might die. She stroked him again, and watched his head tip backward. The cords in his neck were drawn tight, his eyes squeezed closed. And then, suddenly, his hand closed over hers, stopping her.

For a fleeting moment, she was terrified he meant to stop.

But then he seized her night rail in both hands and eased it off over her head; it floated to the floor.

She could feel it when he stopped breathing. Unprepared for the impact of her body on his senses.

Like a man who scarcely knew where to begin to feast, his hands remained still, spanning her waist. But his eyes burned into her. She was shy, suddenly, when she saw herself through his eyes: as a gift, as a miracle visited upon him, as wholly herself.

It was a relief when his arms went around her, clothing her in his heat, for she’d never felt so seen. He was entirely dressed, and she was nude, and she liked it; the vulnerability whetted her desire. When his hands began to move, she closed her eyes, isolating herself with the pleasure, lost to the wonder of being touched by him for the very first time. His hands coursed the slope of her hip to the nip of her waist, across the curve of her belly, slipped between to find the vulnerable skin hidden inside her thighs. He delved deeper, to find her folds wet with wanting him. All of this was swift, thorough, a claiming; he was impatient now. And with that confidence that assumed rightly she was in his power now and that his will was hers, he slipped his hands beneath her hips and raised her, and eased her down over his cock.