Fever Dreams

by Nicole Jordan

  The first time had been a surprise. She was a highborn Spanish lady, older than he by several years—a beautiful widow, lonely and hot-blooded. This hacienda was her home. Despite the fact that he had helped drive the conquering French troops from her country, she hadn’t been eager to let a wounded British cavalry officer billet there, not until she’d learned he was a war hero and an aristocratico as well. Even then she’d demanded an extravagant sum for his accommodation.

  The cost had been worth it. The opportunity to recover from his injuries here rather than in a wretched field hospital had undoubtedly saved his life. And the attentive personal care he had received from the lovely widow had been an unexpected bonus.

  Demonstrating that same attentiveness now, she climbed into his bed to kneel naked on the mattress at his uninjured side. Her gaze was fixed on his lower body, on his arousal rigidly defined by the pale linen sheet.

  “You please me also,” she murmured with a seductive smile.

  Reaching for her hand, he kissed her fingertips lingeringly, one by one, while he held her heated gaze. “I fear the honors must again fall to you,” he apologized. Before his wounding, he could claim an advanced degree of sexual prowess, but although his body was mending, he was not in the best condition to perform any demanding feats of athleticism.

  His hostess responded by reaching up to touch tenderly the savage wound that slashed across his right cheekbone all the way to his temple. “Leave everything to me, vida mía.” Her throaty whisper resonated with promise as she brushed back a tousled lock of his pale golden hair. “I will help you forget your dark dreams.”

  Doubting, he remained silent.

  The warm, moon-splashed room grew hushed. The woman bent over him, scattering kisses along his throat, his collarbone, his bare shoulder, while her hands traced the smooth contours of his naked chest. Before his injuries had weakened and scarred him, he had been endowed with a beautiful male body, graceful and tautly muscled, well toned by years of sporting endeavors, honed to steel by the rigors of a military campaign. His lover’s roving, slowly gliding hands expressed her appreciation now, lingering on his belly, flat and hard, circling his lean hips, drawing down the sheet that covered him.

  She drew a sharp breath as she boldly revealed his rigid manhood, her gaze riveted by the sight. In the pale light his erection stood blatant, powerfully formed.

  “Magnífico.” Almost reverently, she took his hard, straining arousal into her hand and caressed it with long, lingering strokes.

  Shuddering, he closed his eyes. His desire was insistent and sharp now, dominating the diminishing ache in his thigh.

  She continued to tease him, moving her hand slowly up…then down. At length, she lowered her mouth to his chest, arousing him further with tongue and lips. When she encountered a hard male nipple, she bit lightly with her teeth.

  Reaching up, he closed his fingers urgently on her shoulders, drawing her against him in a wordless command.

  She mounted him then. With careful regard for his bandaged thigh, she settled one leg over his hips and lowered herself onto his pulsing arousal, her gasp of pleasure loud in the heated quiet of the room as he penetrated her moist entrance.

  “Slowly…” he murmured. His hands moved to cup her full white breasts with their tight brown nipples. Restraining her momentarily, he raised his good left knee and braced it against her back to keep her from sliding onto his wounded thigh. “Now,” he ordered as he surged deeper into her sleek, hot passage.

  Her dark, passion-hazed glance locking with his, she obeyed, riding him slowly, clenching her inner muscles with practiced expertise, her honeyed silkiness holding him tight.

  He tensed with mingled pleasure and pain. Shifting his hands, he grasped the smooth mounds of her buttocks and hauled her closer; at the same time he arched his hips upward, swelling and probing deep within her.

  Her eyes shut. Her mouth went slack. Soon she threw her head back, and the room grew loud with the ragged moans that tore from her throat. As he rhythmically thrust into her, she dug her nails into his shoulders, whimpering and writhing and grinding her hips against his.

  A few moments later, the flame-hot woman above him cried out and her body jerked in a wrenching shudder. Closing his eyes, Julian let the searing release flood through him in a rush of sensation.

  Eventually he regained awareness and found her lying limply on his chest. A thin sheen of perspiration covered his body, while pain throbbed in his right thigh. With care, he rolled onto his uninjured side, easing her onto the mattress.

  In the dim light, her eyes were half-lidded in languorous contentment, her pale flesh suffused with the afterglow of passion.

  Solicitously he brushed his lips against her damp temple. “Forgive me, querida, for being unable to pleasure you as you deserve.”

  She opened her heavy lids, her slow smile sated and amused. “I doubt that I could bear any more pleasure,” she replied in thickly accented English. Her glance dropped below his waist. “A wound could not slow a magnificent man like you. It is fortunate, however, that the injury was not slightly higher and to the left.”

  He laughed, a pained sound as the ravaged muscles in his thigh cramped in protest. With clenched teeth he waited until the spasm passed. Then he kissed Pilar’s fingers once more and shut his eyes, wondering if he would be able to sleep without the drugging effects of laudanum.

  He forced himself to think of something other than his injury. Home. His family seat in England. Lush pastures, ripe fields, thick woodlands teeming with game. His longing to see the cool green country of his birth was like a physical ache inside him…an ache that turned to fire as he drifted into a doze…

  The searing heat originated in his right thigh and speared throughout his body, echoing sharply in his right temple and cheekbone. Half blinded by the blood streaming from his brow, he tried to lift himself from the rocky ground and nearly screamed in agony.

  Where in God’s name was he? Who was he?

  Recognition of the tumult came slowly…the explosive booms of cannon, the crackle of musket fire, the moans of dying men, the screams of horses. An acrid black smoke obscured his vision, but through the haze he caught glimpses of devastation. The hillside was dark with dust and blood, splashed with the scarlet and blue of shredded uniforms.

  Ah, yes. This hell was Spain. Vitoria, he remembered. A battlefield…one of many he’d seen during the four years since he’d condemned himself to this war. He was Julian Morrow, Sixth Viscount Lynden. Lieutenant Colonel Lord Lynden, second-in-command of the Fifteenth Hussars. His wife was Caroline…. No…. Caroline was dead. He had killed her. This hell was his penance for causing her death.

  His mission…to lead a cavalry charge against a French divisional battery. He remembered succeeding, and yet he must have taken a volley of cannonfire at close range.

  He lay where he’d fallen, on a rocky hillside, surrounded by the piteous moans of wounded men and horses. The battle still raged around him. Mortar shells shrieked overhead and burst, the thunder of artillery fire rolling and echoing around the hilltops. The suffocating stench of powder smoke burned his nostrils and throat, while his mouth filled with the coppery tang of blood…the acid taste of fear.

  Fear. He was afraid to die.

  No, not afraid. Simply not eager. He wanted to live after all. Surprising, considering how zealously he had courted Death for the past four years. He truly wanted to live. Ironic to discover it only now, when Death stared him in the face. His right thigh was a mangled, bloody mass of torn flesh.

  He knew he should try to stanch the flow of blood, but the effort was too overwhelming. Abandoning the struggle, he slipped back into oblivion…

  Voices, snatches of conversation drifted toward him in the darkness. Something about his leg. He tried to open his eyes, but he couldn’t manage to weave his way through the labyrinth of pain and fever fogging his mind. The harsh pain dulled his senses, weighted his eyelids…while images floated in the fuzzy corridors of his
mind…haunting images of Caroline…her lifeless body lying amid the stone ruins. He let himself slip back into the dark world where the pain was not so fierce.

  “Please, señor, lie still. You will hurt yourself.”

  He came awake with a start. At first he didn’t recognize the darkened room, but the dense night air was warm with the musky scent of lovemaking, and the cool hand on his brow was one he remembered from his weeks of convalescence. The Spanish widow. His hostess.

  “You had the dream again, no?”

  He closed his eyes, trying to ignore the question, trying to shut out the haunting memories.

  “What are these dreams, vida mía, that torment you so? Who is this Caroline? You cry her name in your sleep.”

  He didn’t answer, yet his thoughts would not be silent. Young, beautiful, unfaithful Caroline. As blond and blue-eyed as he was himself. A member of the nobility as he was, raised to wealth and privilege, indulged and fawned over. They made the ideal couple, until their last fierce argument had ended in her death…

  The woman beside him ran her tongue lightly, provocatively, along his naked shoulder, and slid her arm around his lean waist. Pouting as if jealous, she glanced up at him, her dark eyes flaring hot with a familiar emotion.

  “I shall drive away your nightmares,” she murmured, pressing her nude, voluptuous body against his in an unmistakable invitation.

  He had not planned on taking her again tonight. Certainly not with such force. Definitely not with her beneath him, a position which placed a severe strain on his healing thigh. But she was a willing body. And she had black hair, not blond like Caroline’s. She could help him forget, at least momentarily.

  Her gasp was loud and startled when he rolled over her and plunged his rising maleness between her open legs, but then her eyes widened in pleasure as she caught his savage rhythm.

  Roughly he buried his hands in her hair and drove into her, slamming his body against hers, thrusting hard, over and over again, as if he could exorcise the devils in his soul. In response she clung to him, whimpering raggedly, her climax coming swiftly, with racking power.

  His own violent release followed shortly. His breathing was harsh, his body glistening with sweat when he gave a final shudder and collapsed against her, his leg wound throbbing like fire.

  Far from being offended by his fierceness, though, she stroked his spine soothingly, offering comfort, whispering endearments in soft Spanish, until he eased his body away and rolled onto his back with a groan. “Forgive me, querida.”

  “There is nothing to forgive.” But instead of drifting back to sleep, she kissed the damp skin of his shoulder and slid out of bed in order to dress. “I must go. It will not do to have the servants find me in your bed.”

  Julian made no protest.

  When he was alone once more, he lay there and stared at the ceiling, remembering the past, thinking of the events four years ago that had brought him here.

  Murder. That was the allegation whispered behind his back.

  He was never officially charged, of course, since there was no proof. He was too wealthy, too wellborn, and too high-ranking to be arrested for murder on only circumstantial evidence. Lady Lynden’s death was ruled the result of a riding accident. Yet the rumors, fanned by her lover’s grief, persisted.

  The rumors were not unfounded; Julian had been unable to refute them with any degree of honesty. He was to blame. He had killed his wife.

  In the end it was his own guilt that had decided him. To punish himself, he had gone off to war—bought a commission in the cavalry and joined the Peninsular Campaign in Portugal and Spain against Napoléon’s invading forces.

  Not caring whether he lived or died was a decided asset in war. Ironically, his indifference had often been mistaken for courage, his reckless deeds hailed as heroic. He had driven himself relentlessly, desperately, only to discover he could never toil hard enough, never ride swiftly enough to escape his guilt and self-recrimination. He couldn’t fill the aching void in his soul. There was nothing left in his life. No joy, no passion, no fire. Nothing but dreams of his late wife. Nothing but his guilt….

  The sunlight streaming into the room made him wince as he slowly came awake. He was lying in bed, naked except for the bandage that wrapped his injured thigh. Feeling a familiar touch on his leg, he groaned softly and squinted against the bright light.

  Will Terral, his batman and personal servant, was leaning over him, scowling as he probed the bloody bandage.

  “I never would have taken you for a fool, m’lord, but you’ve proved me wrong. The scab has broken open.”

  Julian bit back a savage retort. His exploits last night had been imbecilic. And his batman had a right to criticize. Will had saved his leg from the “butcher” field surgeons, later nursing him through the worst dangers and the long bouts of agony that followed his injury…feeding him, changing his bandages, forcing him to drink bitter-tasting nostrums. Once, the terrible wound had putrefied and had to be drained, the mortified flesh cut away. But Will eventually had triumped with his simple home remedies and the same poultices he used for his master’s horses. Julian had emerged from the ordeal a gaunt, pain-racked ghost of his former self.

  And now, just when he was beginning to recover his health, he had set back his progress in exchange for only a transient moment of forgetfulness.

  Still grumbling, Will changed the bandage, then brought water, razor, and soap in order to shave his patient. Looking in the hand mirror afterward, Julian hardly recognized the man he had once been. His skin was tanned from the summer months he’d spent fighting, but beneath the tan waxed an unhealthy pallor. Worse, his once-handsome face was disfigured by the savage puckering scar that slashed across his right cheekbone, upward toward his temple. It was probable, as well, that he would always limp. And yet he was grateful to still have the leg. He had survived, thanks to Will, and with that he would have to be content.

  His batman was not so content. As Will gathered up the shaving equipment, he muttered for perhaps the hundredth time, “I’ll be right glad to see the last of this Papist country,” before he stalked from the room.

  Julian lay back wearily, contemplating his future as he had frequently during the past weeks. He would be invalided home to England unless he asked to remain here in Spain. Did he want to make such a request?

  He knew Will’s feelings on the subject. Not only did his faithful servant wish to return home, but Will didn’t mind saying, regularly and frankly, that his lordship had wallowed in guilt long enough.

  Perhaps his batman was right, Julian reflected. Perhaps it was time to end his self-banishment and go home. Perhaps he had suffered enough. He had lost his wife, his friends, his good name, the life he once knew…. In four years he hadn’t found the redemption he’d sought. And he was so weary of war, of death, of pain.

  Gritting his teeth, he slowly sat up and swung his legs to the floor, then reached for the crutches that stood beside the bed, prepared to endure once more the torture of forcing the knotting muscles of his thigh to function.

  But he was girding himself mentally, as well. He had finally come to a decision.

  He had punished himself long enough. His penance had been served.

  It was time that he returned home and faced the ghosts of his past.

  By Nicole Jordan

  Paradise Series:

  Master of Temptation

  Lord of Seduction

  Wicked Fantasy

  Notorious Series:

  The Seduction

  The Passion

  Desire

  Ecstasy

  The Prince of Pleasure

  Other Novels:

  The Lover

  The Warrior

  FOOTNOTES

  To return to the corresponding text, click on the reference number or "Return to text."

  Fever Dreams is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any res
emblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  A Ballantine Books Mass Market Original

  Copyright © 2006 by Anne Bushyhead

  Excerpt from Touch Me with Fire copyright © 2006 by Anne Bushyhead

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Ballantine Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  BALLANTINE and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  This book contains an excerpt from Touch Me with Fire by Nicole Jordan. This excerpt has been set for this edition only and may not reflect the final content of the forthcoming edition.

  www.ballantinebooks.com

  eISBN: 978-0-345-49354-5

  v3.0