“An angel,” he muttered dazedly, turning his head so that his cheek nuzzled against her captured tresses. “An angel with red hair.”
And then he began to shiver violently.
chapter three
He was delirious from fever, Amanda realized, and breathed a little easier. Plainly weakened by whatever it was that afflicted him, he surely couldn’t do her any harm. All she had to do was to disengage her hair—gently—and run to fetch the authorities. She doubted that he would try to escape before she was able to lead them back here. He was clearly in no condition to run away; he probably couldn’t even stand.
Those silvery eyes were still fixed on her. She could feel the hand that trapped her hair shaking convulsively. Her eyes never leaving his, she reached out tentatively to touch that hand. Her movements were as gentle and unalarming as she could make them as she sought to unclench the fist that held her prisoner. His flesh was burning hot to the touch; his long limbs were racked by tremors. Unfortunately he seemed to have no intention of letting her go—if he even knew he was holding her. From the glassy blankness of his eyes, she questioned whether he did.
Amanda was afraid to be too forceful in her attempts to free herself, afraid that any careless movement on her part might provoke him into violence: he had already killed half a dozen people that she knew of.
“I’m cold,” he said suddenly, conversationally, sounding so normal that Amanda jumped. Inching a little farther away from him, as far as she could get without snapping her neck, she eyed him nervously. Was it her imagination, or did his eyes seem more aware than they had a moment ago?
“If you let me go, I’ll . . . I’ll fetch you a blanket,” she promised with sudden cunning. He frowned, seeming to understand and consider her words.
“Will you?” He sounded doubtful.
“Y-yes.” Amanda was willing to promise anything that might induce him to let her go. “I promise.”
“They were going to hang me, you know.”
Now, what on earth could she say to that? If he was even the least bit aware, and she let on that she recognized him, her fate was as good as sealed. He would kill her. He certainly couldn’t let her go; even she could see that. She would immediately run to the authorities, as he must realize as soon as he regained his senses. She said nothing, her eyes wide in the pale oval of her face as she stared at him.
“But I escaped.” He chuckled hollowly. “By God, I escaped. But they shot me, and then that damned horse went lame and I had to walk, and I fell, and then it rained. God, it rained. Does the sun never shine on this wretched country?” He lapsed momentarily into incoherent muttering. With his black hair straggling in wet curls all around his face, his thick beard bristling at her, and his eyes wild and staring, he looked out of his mind. And not just with fever. Amanda tugged despairingly at her hair, wishing vainly that she had a pair of scissors with her. She would gladly have cut the whole mane off if it would have freed her from this madman.
“Who are you?” His eyes were suddenly sharp on her face, and his voice was demanding. Amanda swallowed. He looked extremely fearsome, glaring at her as he was. And she was very much afraid that he had just regained his senses, if in fact he had ever lost them.
“My . . . my name’s Amanda. Amanda Rose Culver.” Then, desperately, she added in what she hoped was a confidence-inspiring voice, “And I’m going to help you.”
“You know who I am.” It was not a question. The words rang like a doomsday bell in her ears. She felt her muscles tense in horrible anticipation. Denial would be useless, she saw, staring wretchedly down into his set face, even if she could have found the right words and forced them from her lips.
“I—I can help you,” she said again, weakly. His mouth twisted into a bitter grimace; his hand tightened painfully on her hair. Amanda cringed away from him.
“Don’t lie to me,” he said, his voice harsh. His fingers, embedded in her hair, dragged her closer, so that her face was just inches from his. “I’m not stupid.”
“I’m sorry,” she murmured frantically as he glared at her. His teeth were bared in what she could only think of as a snarl, and he looked like a dreadful beast bent on devouring her. Amanda shuddered. He must have seen the convulsive movement or correctly interpreted the fear in her eyes, because he relaxed his grip a little, a faintly satisfied expression flitting across his face.
For a moment neither said anything, the man seemingly bent on recouping his strength and his senses at the same time, and Amanda thinking furiously.
“Could you please let me go?” she ventured at last in a small voice. “You’re hurting.”
It wasn’t much, but this appeal to any latent chivalry he might still possess was all she could come up with. As she had expected, it won her nothing but a grunt and a scornful look. But after a moment, to her surprise, his hand did readjust itself so that it was not pulling quite so hard on her hair.
“Thank you.” Amanda couldn’t quite keep the surprise out of her voice. He made no reply, only stared up at her in a considering way that chilled her more than the wind. He was probably wondering how, with his small store of strength, he could kill her, and where he could hide the body . . .
“What do you have on under that dress?” Whatever she had expected him to say, it certainly hadn’t been that. She stared at him, her eyes going suddenly enormous.
“Well?” He sounded impatient. Amanda wet her lips before replying.
“A petticoat,” she whispered. She was not going to describe her underclothing in any more detail than that.
“Is it clean?” he demanded.
“Of course,” Amanda retorted, stung, before she remembered her situation and hastily subsided.
“Take it off.”
Amanda blanched. Oh, dear God, surely he didn’t mean to . . . to ravish her? Sheltered as she had been, she knew that low men sometimes forced women to perform indecent acts, and a murderer was about as low as one could go. She stared fearfully at him. He was eyeing her, his expression unreadable, his teeth clenched against the spasms that racked him, as they seemed to periodically.
“No. Please,” she breathed, knowing it was useless to beg but not willing to resort to physical resistance unless she had no choice. Incapacitated as he was, she had little doubt that he was still considerably stronger than she, and she was afraid of putting her assumption to the test unless and until it became absolutely necessary.
At her whispered plea, his eyes raked her from head to toe as she crouched beside him, her head bent with the weight of his hand in her hair. Although she did not know it, her small, slender body looked very young—and very vulnerable. His mouth twisted sardonically.
“Despite anything you may have heard to the contrary, I’m not in the habit of raping children,” he rasped. “You’re perfectly safe from that particular fate, I assure you. Now, are you going to take off that damned petticoat—or do you need help?”
That threat, plus his assurance that he had no intention of raping her—which, oddly enough, she believed—sent her fumbling under her skirt for the tapes to her petticoat. But with his eyes watching her every move, and obviously noting with interest the slender, white-stockinged ankles that she could not help but reveal, she could not seem to untie the knot, and her awkward position made it doubly difficult.
“Hurry up,” he said through his teeth. Amanda thought that he looked quite fierce as his eyes moved from her ankles to her face. She did her best to comply with his order, then swallowed nervously.
“If you would close your eyes—and let me stand up,” she tacked on hopefully, “it would help.”
“Oh, for God’s sake,” he muttered, but he did close his eyes. Amanda guessed that she would have to be content with that concession; she hadn’t really thought that he would let go of her hair so that she could stand up. Moving as quickly as she could, wanting to get the business done before he could open his eyes and catch her with her skirts up around her knees, she at last managed to loosen the
tapes of the petticoat. The white linen garment crumpled into a heap around her feet. His lashes flicked up just as she kicked free of it. Seeing his eyes on her fallen undergarment, she felt sudden color heat her cheeks.
“Tear a couple of strips off it,” he directed. Amanda, thankful not to be told to remove anything else, obediently picked up the petticoat and proceeded to try to do as he bade her. It was, however, easier said than done. Finally she had to resort to chewing the edge of the linen between her teeth. When at last the material gave with a loud rip, she felt a small spurt of satisfaction as she tore several long strips out of the skirt. She looked up to find his eyes on her.
“I took a bullet in the hip,” he said abruptly. “It’s basically just a flesh wound, the bullet went on through, but it’s been bleeding like be-damned. I want you to bandage it for me.”
His fingers slid beneath the tails of his tattered, once-white shirt to unfasten the buttons of his rusty-looking breeches as he spoke. Amanda stared, horror-stricken, at the movement of that hand, then jerked her eyes back up to his face. He surely was not intending to remove his breeches in front of her?
He saw the frantic expression in her eyes and had no trouble interpreting it. One corner of his mouth turned down in an expression of pure disgust.
“I have neither the inclination nor the strength to pander to your girlish modesty,” he said coldly. “I’ve been shot in the hip, and the wound is bleeding and needs to be bandaged. If I could do it myself, I would. But I can’t. You, however, can—and you will. I’ve already told you that I have no intention of raping you. You’ll be perfectly safe—as long as you do as I say.”
His eyes were hard, his expression stony as he stared at her. Amanda swallowed, then nodded slightly. Of course, tending the sick was the Christian thing to do—the nuns did it all the time. The mere fact that he was male, and his body was therefore strange to her, should have no effect on her as his nurse. But still . . . She couldn’t prevent the fiery scarlet color that spread from her neck all the way to her hairline.
The breeches were unbuttoned now, and he was lifting his hips from the shale, trying to pull the garment down with one hand. As Amanda watched, mesmerized, he winced and fell back against the ground. His eyes closed for an instant, his pain obvious. Then they opened again, faintly cloudy as they met hers.
“You’ll have to help me,” he muttered. “Pull these damn things down so that you can get to the wound. And don’t worry—it’s pretty high on my hip. You should be able to bandage it without swooning.”
This last was said with such a sardonic inflection that Amanda bit her lip. But, she thought hotly, her confusion was very natural under the circumstances. No gently reared young lady could be expected not to feel some trepidation at the prospect of looking at an unclothed male body . . . He was glaring at her. Amanda closed her eyes, sent a brief SOS to God, and did as he’d told her. The material of his breeches was coarse and cold and wet under her hands; the furred, tautly muscled flesh beneath was fiery hot in contrast. He wore no underdrawers, Amanda noted with embarrassment as she eased the breeches down over his hips. The sight of a neat, round navel cozily nestled beneath a covering of curling black hair brought more color flooding to her cheeks. She averted her eyes abruptly, looking at the sky, the sea, anything except him. He groaned a little, bringing her eyes swinging back around, first to his face, which had paled, and then to his now-bared abdomen. She had uncovered the wound. It was, as he had said, fairly high up on his hip, a jagged gash plowed perhaps a half inch deep into his side. The edges of the wound did not mesh properly, which was probably why blood continued to ooze sluggishly through the opening, which was about six inches long. Dried crusts of blood here and there attested to the fact that the bleeding had stopped several times, only to start again. In order for the flesh to heal properly, she guessed, he would have to remain quiet for some time.
“What are you trying to do, memorize it?” he demanded testily. “Bandage the thing and have done with it.”
Amanda flushed at the thought that he might imagine her to have been staring at his body, and reluctantly set to work. Folding a scrap of petticoat into a pad, she laid it over the wound. Then she picked up the strips that would bind the pad in place.
“Lift yourself up, please,” she said faintly, trying and failing to achieve a fair imitation of Sister Agnes’s no-nonsense voice. Sister Agnes was a weathered, salt-and-pepper-haired former fisherwoman who had taken the veil ten years before after losing her husband and two sons, fishermen all, in a sudden off-shore squall. Her keen eyes and brisk efficiency, to say nothing of her sharp tongue when provoked by slow or incompetent helpers, had won her the respect of every resident of the convent and, indeed, of the entire village. She had a knack for healing—Amanda often wondered if it didn’t have a great deal to do with the fact that the sick were simply afraid not to get better when she ministered to them—and had taken on the role of lay doctor to half the population of the county. Amanda, whose unprecedented refusal to swoon or get sick when presented with a gruesome injury had won the old woman’s curtly nodded approval, was often called upon to assist her. With females and children, of course. Sister Agnes tended to the needs of the men and boys herself.
“Yes, ma’am.” There was a spark of humor in his voice that sent her eyes flying up to meet his. She must have been mistaken, she decided, meeting those stony eyes and seeing the hard, unrelenting set of his mouth, which was just barely visible through the bristly beard. Her eyes dropped back to her work; with commendable efficiency she wound the strips of petticoat around him, trying to make as little contact with his bare skin as she could. She couldn’t help but notice that, from the feel of it at least, the lower part of his back was not covered with hair like his belly and chest. The pattern of hair on his front side was very interesting, she decided almost subconsciously as she knotted the ends of the bandage directly over the pad. His shirt was pulled up around his ribs, leaving bare the lower part of his chest and abdomen to where the breeches rested low on his hips. There seemed to be a thick growth of hair on his chest—at least, what she could see of it—that narrowed until it was hardly more than a silky trail once it got past his navel. From there the trail began to widen again down the center of his abdomen until the breeches abruptly cut off her view. She wondered how much hair he had lower down—and was horrified at the thought. This time her blush was almost painful. To hide her confusion, she quickly pulled the breeches back up over the bandage, apparently hurting him in her haste because he grunted. But he didn’t say anything, and she sat back with a feeling of relief, leaving him to fasten the buttons himself, which he did one-handed. His other hand showed no signs of releasing its tether hold on her hair.
“Good job,” he said approvingly as he fastened the last of the buttons. “Now see if you can dry my hair. It feels like it’s turning into icicles around my ears.”
It took Amanda an instant to realize that he meant for her to use what was left of her petticoat for that purpose. Hesitating only a moment, she picked up the ragged garment and, inching closer to his head, began rather gingerly to dry his hair. The icy wetness of the curling black strands soon penetrated the thin linen of her petticoat, chilling her fingers. He was soaked to the skin; she could feel the muscles of his neck and shoulders trembling with cold. If she hadn’t been so afraid that he meant to murder her at any minute, she would almost have felt sorry for him. After all, she wouldn’t have been able to stand seeing even a mad dog in his condition without wanting to do what she could to alleviate its suffering. But, then, a crazed murderer, sick or well, was a different proposition from even a mad dog . . .
Finally his hair was as dry as she could get it, and she sank back onto her heels, eyeing him, the petticoat in her lap.
“Wrap that thing around me as well as you can, will you?” he requested next, and it was a request, not an order, despite the gruffness of his tone. Amanda did as he told her, spreading the damp linen over his chest and tucking
it in around his shoulders and neck. It covered perhaps a third of his body, leaving his hips and long legs protected from the wind only by the raggedy breeches. The petticoat could not have provided much comfort, but he snuggled into it as if it were the woolliest of blankets.
“What did you say your name was? Amanda? Amanda Rose?”
Amanda nodded, slowly backing away from him as she did so, eyeing him warily. Now that she had seen to his comfort to the best of her ability, would he decide her usefulness was at an end and wrap those long, strong fingers around her neck?
“What are you doing wandering around in the dark, Amanda Rose? Did you sneak out to meet someone? A man, perhaps?”
“Yes.” Her voice must have been a shade too eager, because he looked at her silently for an instant before slowly shaking his head.
“Don’t lie, Amanda.” It was surprising how formidable he could sound, even lying flat on his back with his body racked by tremors and his shoulders huddling into her torn petticoat.
“I’m not,” she began, then gave it up. She had always been a dreadful liar anyway; it was no wonder he could see through her clumsy attempts at subterfuge. “I often walk on the beach before the sun comes up. I . . . like to be alone.”
“So you weren’t looking for me?”
“No.” She spoke so fervently that his lips moved in the semblance of a wry smile. Amanda stared at the crooked twist of those lips, thinking that it made him seem suddenly so much more human. Maybe he wasn’t totally evil after all, she thought. Maybe, just maybe, he had done what he had out of sincere political convictions. If so, it meant that he was that much less likely to murder her out of hand . . . she hoped.
Amanda Rose Page 3