Princess (6 page)

She shrugged to herself, then went on about her business, rising to go pour water into the unused teapot, then putting it over the low fire to boil. Returning to him, she knelt down on the floor and opened the sewing basket.

“Will white suffice for your stitches, Colonel, or would you prefer something more dashing?” she asked, trailing one graceful fingertip over the various hanks of thread. “Scarlet? Gold filigree, perhaps?”

“I really haven’t time to play doctor with you.”

“Don’t make me pull rank on you,” she advised him, the sewing needle between her lips as she pulled out a neat loop of white thread and unwound some of it. “If you refuse, I shall have to make it an order. Strip, sir.”

He didn’t move. He couldn’t, suddenly. His heart was pounding and he couldn’t find his voice.

Done threading the needle, she set it carefully aside. She laid both hands on her thighs, gazing up at him.

He stared down at her, feeling increasingly cornered, unable even to spit out the words to explain his protest. What was he to say,
Don’t touch me
? He wasn’t that skilled a liar. Truly, over the past few years there had been moments, desperate moments near the edge of his solitary endurance, when he wanted this girl so much he quite despised her. He could not be fire for her, so he had chosen to be ice.

Now she was gazing at him as only she ever did, as if she saw things in him no one else could see, those unforgettable violet eyes looking too deeply into him, her gaze like a flash of lightning, illumining landscapes within him he preferred to keep dark.

Save me.
The thought trailed through his mind, he knew not why. He could only sit there, captivated, immobilized, halfterrified. Someone wanted to help him and he didn’t know how to react. Not just anyone.

Serafina.

The only living thing he’d ever trusted.

The only one he couldn’t have.

Staring at her, he couldn’t force out a single word.

Yet somehow she seemed to understand him.

“Very well,” she said softly, searching his face. “You just sit. I’ll do it.”

He couldn’t find the wherewithal to stop her or to move. He knew she shouldn’t be touching him. She knew it, too, of course, but when had she ever done as she was told? And when had he ever disobeyed a royal command?

She slid his untied cravat from his shoulders first, then came closer, kneeling between his legs. Wary as a wild animal, he watched her every move as she unbuttoned his simple black waistcoat. He was only minimally helpful as she pushed it down carefully off his wounded shoulder, then freed him from it. His shirt remained, sodden, ripped, bloody. A lot of blood.

“Poor thing,” she murmured. When she reached out and began gathering the wet cotton of his shirt in both hands so she could slip it off over his head, he pulled back, staring at her, heart racing.

“What’s the matter, Darius?”

He swallowed, dry-mouthed. The way she said his name could make him drunk.

Between his legs, she stood, bracing her hands on his knees. He watched her rise and felt his loins pulse, felt his whole being in thrall to her, as if he were an uninitiated boy being slowly seduced by a goddess.

Hands on her hips, she frowned at him in puzzlement. Then a strange, tender smile of understanding curved her lips.

“Shy?” she asked softly.

He stared at her, unable to speak, his soul in his eyes. He did not know all of a sudden what was happening to him.

Slowly, he nodded.

She reached out and caressed his cheek, then gently brushed his forelock out of his eyes. “I won’t hurt you, Darius. Don’t be shy. After all”—her gaze slid away from his—“you saw mine.”

Mischievously, her eyes flicked back to his.

Her impudent remark shocked him out of the trance. He stared at her in awe.

“You bad little girl,” he breathed, suddenly afire for her.

Her smile flashed.

Jesus, what was he doing? His very hands burned with the need to touch her, run his palms from her slim waist down her elegantly curved thighs, part that dressing gown and smell her rain-scented skin. He curled his fingers tightly over the edges of the chair’s arms, fighting it for all he was worth.

If anyone ever found out about this, he thought feverishly, if the king ever found out about this . . .

Then he realized he would be dead in a few weeks anyway, considering the suicide mission ahead of him once he’d finished routing the spies, so what did it matter?

It was too late to get out of this now and he should at least let her dress the wound.

Maybe she knew what she was doing, which he doubted, but he could talk her through it, and it would save him a trip to the bumbling surgeon’s.

But as he hesitated, strangely, he thought of all the men he’d slammed up against walls over the past few years, warning them away from her, enforcing the ironclad rule that Serafina di Fiore was off limits. The rule applied to him, too.

Especially
to him.

Hell, he thought, bristling, he wasn’t the one who had started this tonight.

It wasn’t as if anything was going to happen, after all. He would not let it. Tonight his black temper had slipped the leash, true, but he still ruled over his passions with an iron fist. Not for nothing was he descended on his father’s side from Torquemada of the Spanish Inquisition. Besides, it would be over soon and then she would be somebody else’s problem.

His heart raced faster as she read his wary surrender in his eyes, an answering flicker of anticipation in her own that told him perhaps she wanted to touch him as badly as he wanted her to do so.

“Well?” she asked coolly.

They stared at each other in equal challenge, both riveted, both panting slightly. The moments ticked by, the mantel clock booming in the silence, the rain drumming, wind-driven, against the glass.

Finally, he shrugged in nonchalance, as if nothing mattered a whit to him—if she seduced him or if he bled to death—but he doubted she was fooled.

“Take it off,” she whispered.

He lifted his shirt off over his head and held it bunched in one white-knuckled fist.

The first thing her gaze fixed upon was not his wound, but the tiny silver medal hanging on a long, sturdy chain around his neck.

Ohh, hell,
he thought suddenly, his heart sinking.

Now he was in for it. He had forgotten the damned thing was there.

He held very still—trapped, unmasked, revealed to her.

With a look of disbelief, Serafina sank down on her knees between his open thighs and captured the medal reverently in her palm, her knuckles brushing the skin between the swells of his chest. She stared at it, then lifted the violet innocence of her gaze to his, her lips parted slightly in wonder and question.

It was the medal of the Virgin she had given him after he’d been shot like a dog right before her eyes on her twelfth birthday.

To this day, she hated her birthday.

She could never accept that the shooting wasn’t her fault. She had stayed at his bedside constantly. All the while he wandered in the nightmare dreamscapes of fever, he had been vaguely aware of her talking to him, whispering prayers, her soft, froggy little voice his lifeline.

They told him later that when they had tried to make her come away from his bedside, she had gone berserk, kicking and punching, biting and scratching, rather than leave his side.

He had never forgotten that. He had never expected that anyone would ever be that loyal to him. She had put the medal on him herself once he was out of the woods. It would protect him, she had said. And then she’d said that other amusing thing—what was it?

He stared into her eyes, remembering that impish, little-girl whisper close to his ear.

You are the bravest knight in all the world, Darius, and
when I grow up, I’m going to marry you.

CHAPTER THREE

“You still have it,” she said faintly, wide-eyed as she stared down at the tiny silver medal, still warm in her palm with his body’s heat.

“Still have it,” he replied, sounding a trifle hoarse.

Wonderstruck, Serafina searched his soulful, onyx eyes. She held her breath, not daring to overstep her bounds again by foolishly reading into this discovery some significance that was not there, but surely, surely it meant something that Darius still wore this trinket she had given him so long ago. It was all she could do not to laugh aloud and hug him.

An indescribable glow of joy, painfully sweet, sparked in her chest and spread, flowing upward, beaming from her suddenly misty eyes. “Told you it would work.”

He gave her an embarrassed, little-boy smile and lowered his gaze.

For a moment, she studied him lovingly by the warm light of the sconces. His sun-bronzed face was more angular than she’d noticed before, and pale from losing blood. His eyes were sharper, more wary than ever, with faint dark circles beneath them, more tiny, careworn lines at their corners. Gorgeous as always, she thought, but he didn’t look altogether well. He was too lean, too intense, with a restless, hunted look.

“You haven’t been eating,” she chided softly.

He shrugged as he mumbled a denial.

Sometimes, she knew, he even starved himself, making austere fasts as part of his self-punishing regimes in his quest for knightly perfection. Constantly he strived, piling glory upon glory as if, deep down, he did not believe he would ever really be good enough. Privately, it broke her heart.

She thought again of the rage he had unleashed on Philippe and wondered about the firestorm inside him just beneath his armor of cool invulnerability, all his suffering concealed by his magnificent pride.

Well, he had made up his mind to let her help him in this way, at least, she thought in determination. It was a start.

She let the medal fall once more against his gleaming chest and rose from her knees, bending to kiss his forehead lightly.

“I’ll be right back,” she whispered, then went to fetch the now-boiling water.

She poured it into two basins, the steam rising to warm her face. She carried the two basins over near the chair where he waited, then she washed her hands thoroughly, wincing at her cut, swollen ring finger.

Briefly she tried to remove the monstrous jewel from her finger, but the gold band was skewed all out of shape. There was no time to muddle with it. She turned to her patient.

“Now, then. Let’s have a look.” Barefoot, she padded around to his left side to tally the latest damage his courage and selfless loyalty had cost him.

His smooth, sun-browned skin twitched at the first touch of her hands as if she’d tickled him. She caressed him firmly to still the involuntary response, trying at the same time to conceal her own reaction to the beauty of his finely honed, powerful body.

His skin was warm and smooth as velvet. His muscles were like tempered steel and she would have liked, she thought, any valid excuse to stroke him and explore him at her leisure. His hard, sculpted chest entranced her. The curve of his throat beguiled her. She could not resist the temptation of running one hand slowly, carefully over the rock-hard musculature of his arm as she approached his wounded shoulder.

Darius sat obediently, head down. She felt him slowly relax, saw his long-lashed eyes drift closed as she began to work on him.

As she wiped the blood away from his left shoulder, she reached over and touched the star-shaped scar just below his right shoulder blade. There, the would-be assassin’s bullet had struck him eight years ago, on her birthday. He should have died of that wound, the doctors said. The priest had given him last rites and Papa had wept, which was unheard-of. She herself had gone a little mad. She didn’t like to think about it, but what she’d seen him go through had inspired her interest in medicine as a hobby.

She wrung out the cloth in the water basin, then examined the knife wound more closely.

It was deep. She probed. It bled.

“Tincture of amaranth will help slow the bleeding, but I’d feel better if we stitched you, just to be safe,” she said thoughtfully after a moment. “You’ll need about nine stitches, I think. Would you like a drink before I begin?”

“I don’t drink spirits.”

She rolled her eyes. “I know that. I’m not suggesting you get foxed, I just thought you might want something for the pain.”

“No,” he said sternly.

“Suit yourself, you wretched paragon,” she muttered, dousing one of the clean, dry cloths with the whiskey.

She pressed the cloth to the cut, staring at his face because surely now, with alcohol dousing the wound, he would show some reaction. But he merely swallowed down the pain, then turned to her, eyes narrowed, the insolent look firmly in place. She shook her head at him in grudging admiration.

Next she applied some of the pungent tincture from the little vial onto one of the clean hand towels. She held it to the gash for a few minutes.

Darius and she sat in silence. She smiled when she glanced at his face, for he looked like he was falling asleep sitting up.

I’m so damned tired,
he’d said. It was the only time in her memory that he’d admitted to any kind of weakness. Frowning slightly, she decided that between his loss of weight, his indifference to his own injury, and the way he’d torn Philippe apart, she was quite worried about him.

Checking the wound a few minutes later, she saw the amaranth had indeed slowed the bleeding. The royal surgeon did not hold with the old herbals and folk medicines, but Serafina had seen them work. When it came time to take up her needle, however, her mouth went dry.

She could do this, she told herself. She had to. His wound required it. She would do it just the way the textbooks said, just the way the royal surgeon had showed her. She had assisted a dozen times in her eagerness to learn and had even performed the procedure once herself with the doctor looking over her shoulder. Besides, she thought, trying to encourage herself, she was excellent at lace and embroidery.

With her left hand she pressed the edges of his incised flesh gently together, then brought up the needle, wincing with hesitation when the moment came to pierce him.