Pleased. Michael decided that he was pleased at having been tended by her. How could he be embarrassed when it was apparent that she had been neither disgusted nor appalled by anything she had seen or had had to cleanse from his flesh? Adoring her more than he’d ever have believed possible, Michael pulled Emily’s prettily flushed face to his, kissing her as he declared, “Not only do I not mind you bathing me, I am pleased that you care enough to wish to do it for me.”
“There is nothing I would not do for you. Surely you know that by now?” she countered, kissing him back.
“Yes, I do know.” It was true, he did know, with all his heart. He had been a fool to have doubted her love. At that moment, as he gazed into her eyes, so warm and full of devotion, he vowed that he would die before he would ever again be such a fool.
For long while thereafter they simply held each other, secure in their love and wrapped in the quiet contentment of the moment.
It was Emily who finally disturbed their blissful reverie. “Michael?”
“Hmmm?”
“I—I just want you to know that you can always trust me … with anything.”
He frowned at her odd statement, wondering what had prompted her to introduce the subject of trust. Hoping that she hadn’t somehow divined the reason behind his tears, he cautiously replied, “I know that, Emily, and I do trust you. Is there a particular reason for you reminding me of the fact now?”
“It’s just that—well—it was just something Mr. Eadon said while I was bathing you.”
“Which was?”
She hesitated a beat, as if measuring her response, then haltingly replied, “He commented upon how at ease you seemed beneath my touch. He said that you usually become agitated when he tends to you after one of your spells, because—” He could see the motion in her throat as she swallowed hard before finishing, “Because of Bamforth Hall.”
“Ah. I see,” he murmured, surprised when he did not feel the usual dread he experienced at the mere mention of the asylum.
She nodded gravely. “He also said that he does not know why you react so, since you have never confided your experiences there to him.” She paused, as if deciding whether to proceed, then timidly added, “I know that I promised not to pry into the matter and I do not mean to do so now, but I want you to know that I am here and willing to listen should you ever wish to talk about it.”
Michael smiled and nodded, touched by her compassionate little speech. It was odd, but lying here in her arms like this, cradled in her tenderness and the intimacy of her love, he could almost view his misery at Bamforth as a blessing. After all, had he not feared returning to the asylum as much as he did, he would never have consented to wed Emily. And if he hadn’t wed her—well, such an existence was simply too dismal to contemplate.
Suddenly wanting very much to tell her about the asylum, to let her know the wretchedness from which she had delivered him by marrying him, he murmured, “I would like to tell you about it now, if you are in the mood to listen.”
“Are you certain that you are up to doing so? You have been through so much today,” she replied, anxiously searching his face.
“Very certain. It will be a relief to tell you.”
“Then I will be glad to listen. Before I do so, however, we must get you off this cold floor. It wouldn’t do at all for you to catch a chill on top of everything else. Can you walk, or should I fetch Eadon to help you?”
“I am fine now. I am always fine when I am with you,” he replied, the honesty in his voice reflecting the trust in his heart.
“And I intend to see that you are always so,” she countered with equal sincerity. “Now let me help you back into bed. It is where you belong, you know.”
When Emily had escorted him the short distance to the bed and had tucked him snugly beneath the blankets, she lay down upon the coverlet next to him with her head beside his on his pillow. Her lovely face the picture of tenderness, she murmured, “You may tell me about Bamforth Hall now, if you still wish to do so.”
He smiled and moved his head nearer to hers, enjoying the intimacy of having her share his bed. “I do. I just do not know how to begin.”
She thought for a moment, then suggested, “Why don’t you tell me how long you were there?”
“Six months, though every moment seemed like an eternity.”
She nodded at his response, then waited for him to continue. When he had difficulty doing so, she aided him by saying, “I must admit to being puzzled by your dread of the place. You said that Bamforth is very genteel and respectable.”
“It is. And I suppose that it might not have been so very bad were I insane, like most of the other patients.”
“What?” She couldn’t have looked more flabbergasted.
He nodded. “Bamforth Hall’s main function is to provide civilized care for mad members of the aristocracy, though they do boast of superior treatment for peers with seizure ailments as well. According to their doctors’ claims, they have had much success in curing them, which is what prompted my grandmother to send me there.” He shrugged. “As you can tell from my performance today, they had little success in curing me, though I can assure you that it wasn’t for a lack of trying. Indeed, Eadon’s treatments are gentle compared to what I was subjected to there.”
“Oh, Michael, no!” she cried, visibly stricken.
Michael closed his eyes and nodded again. “Do you know how many different places a person can be bled?” Without pausing to await her reply, he quietly answered, “Twenty-two. And I was bled from them all, regularly. Indeed, not a day went by that I wasn’t bled from two or more places. Add the endless leeching, blistering, electrical treatments, clysters, purging, and the thrice daily draughts of saline and opium, and it is no wonder that I couldn’t stir from my bed for weeks on end.”
He opened his eyes then to see her staring at him, anguish for what he had suffered written on every line of her beautiful face. “My poor, poor love. No wonder you were so terrified to go back there. It is a miracle that you survived six months of such torment,” she whispered, her voice raw with sympathy.
“Perhaps, though, it isn’t just the treatments, awful though they were, that make me dread the place so.”
“I cannot imagine anything worse than daily bleedings,” she interjected with a shudder.
His lips twisted into a brittle smile. “The loneliness and the lack of humanity I suffered were much worse. Oh, I am not saying that anyone deliberately abused me,” he quickly clarified. “To be fair, most of the attendants were kind enough. It is just that they were used to treating the insane and handled me in much the same manner. Thus, no one ever thought to talk or listen to me, and I was allowed absolutely no privacy for fear that I might in some way harm myself. I was constantly watched and shadowed during the day, and tied to my bed at night, forced to lie in my own foulness on those occasions when I could not wait for morning to use the privy. As if such treatment wasn’t quite humiliating enough, all of my needs, no matter how personal, were tended to by someone else.”
“Which is why you cannot bear to be tended in such a manner now,” she commented softly.
“Yes. Unless, of course, it is you doing the tending.”
Emily’s head was shaking now and she looked on the verge of tears. “Your grandmother must be the cruelest woman in the world to have allowed you to suffer so. Surely she saw your misery during her visits?”
“She didn’t visit me. Visitors are thought to be overly stimulating by the doctors at Bamforth, so patients are not allowed contact with anyone outside of the asylum until after they have been there for six months. At that point they are considered well enough on the way to being cured to withstand the excitement. When my grandmother saw my terrible condition on her first visit, she ordered me promptly carried to her coach and took me home. She hired Eadon shortly thereafter.”
Emi
ly remained silent for several moments, as if considering all that he had told her. Then she propped her head up on her hand, a frown worrying her brow as she reflectively inquired, “Do you really think that she would have forced you to go back there had you refused to marry me?”
“I do not know. Though”—he paused to wince at the pain in his hip as he shifted his body to face her—“I must say that I am glad that she made the threat. Had she not, I never would have wed you and my life would have been much the poorer for never having known you. I really must remember to thank her the next time I see her.”
Emily met his gaze, smiling rather shyly. “Truth be told, I am grateful to her myself. I simply cannot imagine my life without you to love. I told Rebecca that very thing today.”
Rebecca—he had forgotten all about her visit. Pulling his hand from beneath the covers to brush an errant tendril of hair from Emily’s cheek, he ruefully murmured, “I am sorry about ruining Rebecca and Magellan’s visit. I do hope they understood.”
“Of course they did. In fact, when Rebecca heard what had happened, she told me about a remedy that she thinks might help you. We spent the entire afternoon at her cottage gathering and preparing the required ingredients. Even Magellan helped by going out on the moor and gathering several plants that Rebecca doesn’t grow in her garden.”
Ah. So that was where she had been when Eadon had said that she had gone out. Touched that she would go to such an effort on his behalf and genuinely intrigued by the notion of a magical cure, he inquired, “Then Rebecca has the power to heal as well as to break curses?” After his experience at the stone circle, he was far less skeptical about mumbo-jumbo than he’d once been.
“In a sense, yes. As with the curse, she has the power to divine what is amiss with a person and then advise him how to remedy it. When she touched you that day at the cottage, she discovered what ails you.”
“And she honestly thinks that her remedy will cure it?”
“It might, if you believe that it will. Much of the power of magic comes from simply believing. The rest comes from here.” She lightly touched the place just over his heart. “Rebecca can only show each person how to unlock the magic that is inside of them.”
Michael considered the theory for a moment, then nodded, deciding that it made sense. Well, at least as much sense as anything else he’d experienced that had had to do with Rebecca Dare. Eyeing his wife, who seemed to be studying him rather intently from beneath her long lashes, he inquired, “What is involved in the cure? No stone circles and phantom priestesses, I hope?”
“Oh, no. We can do it right here. Though I am not allowed to tell you exactly what is involved, I can promise you that you will find the whole process pleasant to the extreme.”
“Indeed?” he countered, becoming instantly suspicious. “And if this spell is so very pleasant, then why, pray tell, are you not allowed to divulge what is involved in working it? In my experience, the worst treatments are the ones that doctors refuse to detail, usually because they are hideous and no one would submit to them if they knew what was involved.”
“Ah, but we are discussing magic, not medicine,” she reminded him. “Besides, you said that you trust me. If you truly trust me, you will take my word on the matter and allow me to try the remedy on you. If you feel well enough, I would like to do so tonight, since the preparations are the most powerful when they are fresh.”
She was gazing at him so earnestly, with such sweet expectation, what could he say but, “All right, then. I put myself in your hands.” He only hoped that he wouldn’t regret doing so.
Chapter 19
“You want me to do what?” Michael, who lounged in bed sipping the honey-sweetened herbal decoction Emily had bid him to drink in preparation for the spell, stared at his wife aghast, praying that he had misheard her instructions.
“Remove your nightshirt,” she repeated, looking up from the circle of candles she had arranged and now lit around the bed. There were gold, green, and orange ones to promote healing and to restore his strength, with several red ones tossed in to increase his vigor. Nodding, she added, “You need to be naked so that I can rub the magical oil Rebecca and I prepared all over your body.”
“Everywhere?” He more choked than uttered the words in his dismay. Good God. He shuddered to think of how his love-starved body would react to being rubbed with oil by a temptress like Emily … especially if she rubbed a certain place that was quickening even now at the mere prospect of being touched.
She smiled indulgently, as if he had just asked the silliest question in the world. “Of course not everywhere. I am only required to apply the oil from your neck down, though I will initiate the spell by anointing your forehead.” Her response was casual, almost breezy, as if what she proposed doing was just another service to be rendered in her quest to heal him.
Then again, to her, perhaps it was, Michael conceded, watching as Emily touched the flame of the taper she held to the wick of one of the green candles. In her innocence she probably didn’t realize how hungrily his body would respond to the kind of sensual benevolence she proposed, nor could she possibly understand the agony he would suffer in the wake of his violent arousal. It would be sweet agony, true, the sort of erotic martyrdom that most men would give anything to endure and that they would seductively turn to their own carnal advantage.
Unfortunately he wasn’t like other men, who could enjoy the lustful adventure. He was Michael Vane, the man who had fallen into a foaming, thrashing fit the last time he’d been coaxed into a sexual frenzy—the same man who might possibly experience an equally atrocious response beneath Emily’s unwittingly seductive ministrations, perhaps with identical results.
No, not identical, he corrected himself, his meditative gaze still on Emily, who frowned as she tweaked the wick of a red candle, which refused to light. Unlike Violetta, who had cruelly spurned him in the aftermath of his fit, Emily had weathered the sight of his most recent seizure without suffering any apparent revulsion or loss of affection for him. Indeed, if anything, seeing his suffering seemed only to have drawn her closer to him. Though he found that fact reassuring to the extreme, he was nonetheless reluctant to tempt a repeat of his morning’s performance, which was exactly what he would be doing if he allowed himself the measure of arousal the application of the magical oil was certain to excite.
On the other hand, it had been a very long while since he’d had two fits in the same day, not since the earliest weeks of his illness, which was proof in itself that his condition had improved. Then again, he’d never deliberately provoked a fit on the heels of another. He’d most certainly never attempted a sexual encounter on the same day he’d suffered one. So who knew what would happen?
“Michael?”
Michael, who had been staring at the scene before him without really seeing it, refocused his attention on Emily. She stood just inside the circle of candles, all of which were now lit, gazing expectantly at him. She couldn’t have looked more beautiful or tempting.
Her hair, which was always glorious and alluring, tumbled over her shoulders in a lustrous tangle of curls, capturing the fire of the candlelight in a way that made it seem to shimmer from within, as if each midnight strand hid a core of molten bronze that seized and reflected the flames. Her cheeks were flushed a soft, silken crimson, rouged, no doubt by the heat of the room, which she had elevated almost to the point of sweltering with her overzealous stoking of the fire, determined, as always, to ensure that he didn’t take a chill.
And then there were her lips, those ripe, luscious lips which currently formed the sweetest of frowns. They were the lips of a temptress set in the face of an angel. As for her eyes, well, what could he say? He could gaze into their brown velvet softness forever and never grow tired of what he saw in their depths. Add her delectable figure to the artless sensuality of her every move, and it was all he could do not to moan aloud in his desire.
&
nbsp; He wanted her—dear God, how he wanted her!—worse than he’d ever wanted any woman before. If only he could take her. If only he had the courage to try.
As Michael sat there, watching the vision who embodied his every heated dream of a beautiful woman slowly approach him, he berated himself for not daring to brave that which he knew she wanted as badly as he did. Of course, unlike his own reasons for wishing to consummate their union, which at the moment involved relieving what was quickly becoming his excruciating sexual urgency, the soul of Emily’s desire was pure, noble. She yearned to bear his babes, to propagate the Vane family line, and to gift him with the children she knew that he would love as much as she. And though she had tactfully refrained from broaching the subject of children in the wake of his painful confession in the nursery, he knew that she still hungered for them, perhaps even more now that they had declared their love for each other.
Desperately wishing that he had the courage to truly love her, that he was brave enough to at least try to gift her with her heart’s desire, Michael looked away from Emily as she sat on the bed beside him, sickened by his own cowardice.
After a beat, during which he stared bleakly into his cup, she smoothed his tousled hair from his cheek and brow, murmuring, “If you don’t feel up to trying the spell tonight, we can do it another time. I shall understand.”
Yes, she would understand. Sweet, patient Emily always understood, sometimes all too well, which he suspected might be the case now. If he were indeed correct and Emily sensed his inner turmoil, she was offering him the chance to bow out of the spell without any loss of dignity on his part. He had only to say that he was unwell, and that would be that. She would tuck him snugly beneath the bedcovers, after which she would sit by his side, crooning and stroking his hair until he slept. Then she would leave him alone.
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