But the lion’s share of the reason was that caring for the injured man gave her purpose. Made her feel needed again, in a way she hadn’t since Daniel had been a young boy. It wasn’t that she wished to baby her son or keep him eternally dependent on her. Quite the contrary—the point of raising children was to ensure they could fend for themselves as adults. But once Daniel was a man and took over ownership of the farm, what would be left for her? Paradoxically, succeeding in the most meaningful task she had ever taken on in life would render her redundant. If Samuel were still alive, she was sure she would feel differently, for her husband had needed her—and she him—in ways that could not be outgrown. But he had died, and here she was, fading into insignificance.
And ever since she’d found the injured, she’d been plagued with questions. How had he been injured? How had he come to be lying in the woods near her home, miles from the battlefield? What was his name? Where was he from? Did he have a wife and children?
What color are his eyes?
And so each night, she promised herself that if he did not waken on the morrow, they would do as Daniel wanted and take him to the fort. And each day, she utterly failed to do so.
Until mid-afternoon on the fifth day.
Chapter Two
Geoffrey’s first impression as his eyes fluttered open was of light. Dazzling white light so blinding that even when he squeezed his eyelids shut again, he could not escape it. He waited a few seconds and tried again, blinking gingerly as he attempted to bring his too-brightly-lit surroundings into focus.
Everything was white.
Where the hell was he?
Well, in a room, certainly, since there were four white walls and a white ceiling. And since he was lying on a bed, covered by a white—well, perhaps more a buff color—quilt, it would be reasonable to posit he was in a bedroom. But a bedroom where?
The last thing he remembered was… He frowned in concentration, which hurt, so he immediately stopped.
He had been encamped with his battalion on the north side of the Saranac River, awaiting the order from Prévost to begin the ground offensive.
Well, this certainly was not a tent in a military encampment.
So where the hell was he, and how had he come to be here?
Gingerly, he turned his head…and found an angel.
She sat in a chair that had been pulled up alongside the bed. Her dark hair had been arranged in a simple knot at the back of her head, but curling tendrils of it escaped here and there to brush her cheeks and forehead. The dress she wore was not white, but a very pale shade of gray that sparkled in the beam of light streaming in from the window behind her. In profile, her features were as fine and lovely as a porcelain doll’s, the way he imagined an angel’s would be, though there were tiny laugh lines around her eyes and mouth that seemed a trifle out of place on a divine being. But then, perhaps angels had a lot to laugh about, seeing as how they lived in paradise. She didn’t seem to be laughing now, however. Instead, her head was bowed, and her expression conveyed a state of relaxed concentration.
Prayer?
He squinted. Maybe the question was not where the hell he was, but where the heaven he was.
Except that heaven made no sense.
Geoffrey had known from the moment he’d killed his first enemy in battle that heaven was not a place to which he could have any aspirations of admittance. Oh, his younger brother Walter—who had defied all possible predictions of the likely course of his life not only by becoming a vicar but also by turning out to be a damned good one—had tried on more than on occasion to convince Geoffrey that God judged not merely actions, but the motivations behind them and the character of the actor.
But even under those rules, Geoffrey would be condemned. He killed because it was his job. He killed because it kept him and, when he was lucky, those around him alive. And he killed because he was efficient at it, and he didn’t care if the cause he killed for was just or not. The morality of the wars he fought was the responsibility of the politicians who sent him into battle. The only thing a solider could afford to care about was carrying out his orders and surviving to see another day. And the fact that he had lived to see nearly twenty-five years’ worth of days since taking that first life demonstrated how successful he was at being a killer.
Until now, perhaps.
Because, if this was heaven—or hell masquerading as heaven until it could taunt him with the surprise, a possibility he deemed more likely the instant it occurred to him—then he was dead.
He lay still for a few seconds, contemplating the rise and fall of his own chest. Did a person still breathe in the afterlife? It was a question he’d never thought to ask Walter, and now he regretted it.
Slowly, other physical facts began to register on him.
Beneath the duvet, he was naked but for several layers of cloth that had been wrapped and secured between his legs and over his groin. Slightly damp cloth, he realized with a rush of humiliation and disgust.
His head also ached. Phenomenally. Not the way it did when he was ill or otherwise out of sorts, but when he bumped it hard on something by mistake. Only much, much worse.
Also, he was thirsty. As if his mouth had been stuffed with cotton, and every ounce of moisture had been sucked away before its removal. He licked his lips. Dry and cracked, even by comparison to his parched tongue.
This was beginning to feel a lot more like hell, although it was somewhat lacking in the fire-and-brimstone department.
But probably not heaven, either.
And angels are not female. They’re sexless, you pillock. This thought was supplied in Walter’s teasing voice.
Geoffrey looked at the woman in the chair again. She was just as lovely as he’d first thought, but on a second appraisal, she seemed more real. More substantial. And he saw now that her head was bent not in prayer, but over a piece of white linen, through which she was dragging a needle and thread with neat, efficient strokes.
There might be breathing in the afterlife, but sewing seemed unlikely.
“Where am I?” he asked. Or that was what he tried to ask. But thanks to his desiccated lips and throat, what came out of his mouth was more of a groaning mumble than actual speech.
The angel—no, woman, he corrected—startled violently at the sound and leapt from her chair, dumping her sewing from her lap as she hurried to his side, alarm scrawled across her pretty face. Their eyes met. Hers were a shade of blue-gray so pale, they nearly matched the color of her dress.
As they stared at each other, the panic drained out of her expression, replaced by what he could only describe as pleasure. Or maybe even joy.
He wished he knew who she was, because no woman had ever looked at him with anything like that kind of gladness, except perhaps his mother, but he had been so young when she died that he couldn’t remember her having done so.
“You’re awake,” she exclaimed, and there was no mistaking her delight. “We’ve been so worried.”
Questions piled up in his brain like soldiers rushing a breach in a fortification. Who was she? Who was “we?” Why had she and they been worried about him? Where was he? What had happened to him? How had he come to be wherever here was? Where was his regiment? His commanding officer?
And why did she have an American accent?
He couldn’t ask any of them, though, because his first and most desperate need was for water. So that was the word he forced himself to form, though his voice cracked and creaked on the syllables. “Waah-ter.”
“Oh, yes, of course.” She returned to her chair and retrieved a clay pitcher and cup from a small, round table. After decanting water into the cup, she set the pitcher down and brought the cup to the bed. He shifted, thinking to sit up and take the cup from her, but she shook her head vehemently at him and pressed a gentle hand to his shoulder. “No, you mustn’t do that. Just lie still. I’ll help you lift your head so you can drink.”
Geoffrey wanted to object, but since he couldn’t speak pr
operly and was also fairly certain that sitting up would be painful, he subsided and let her do as she said. Her hand slipped beneath the back of his skull—above the place where it hurt the worst, he noticed—and raised his head from the pillow. When she pressed the cup to his lips, he opened his mouth obligingly. The water was lukewarm rather than cold, but it was blessedly wet, and as she poured what amounted to small sips into his mouth and he swallowed, he could feel his shriveled tongue and throat returning to a slightly more normal state.
He would have been content to keep drinking for quite a long time, but after he’d emptied about half the cup, she pulled it away from him, saying, “I’ve only been able to get a few drops at a time into you up to now. I’m afraid if you drink too much at once, it will come right back up. Your stomach won’t be accustomed to it.” After lowering his head back to the pillow, she said, “If you keep that down, we’ll try a little more soon.”
“Now” would have been preferable to “soon” in his estimation, but no sooner had that peevish thought crossed his mind than a wave of nausea gripped him, and he had to fight not to do the very thing she’d just warned he might. Fortunately, the sensation subsided after a few seconds, but it was a nearer brush than he would have liked.
Once his stomach settled, he tried his first question again. This time, actual words issued from his lips, albeit with a thick, gravelly undertone he did not recognize as his own voice. “Where am I?”
The woman, who had left his side to return the cup to its table, turned and gave him a dazzling smile. It was almost as bright as the light that had blinded him when he’d first opened his eyes. “You’re on Farnsworth Farm. My farm.” Her cheeks pinkened, and she shook her head. “Well, to be precise, it is my son’s farm, but I help run things.”
She didn’t just have an American accent. She was American. What the hell was he doing in an American woman’s home? An American woman who had apparently nursed him back to health.
This made even less sense than finding himself in heaven would have.
“Why?” he grated out.
Her pretty eyebrows knit in confusion for a second, and then she let out a self-deprecating huff of laughter. “Oh, you mean why are you here, not why do I help run the farm.” Her smile returned, and he wished he was a poet, because he had no way to capture in words what that expression did to him. She pivoted slightly and hitched a hip onto the mattress near the end of the bed. “My son Daniel and I came across you lying in the woods near the road on our way home from town. I can’t say how long you’d been there, but you had obviously suffered a severe blow to your head, and it looked as if it had been some time since you’d had food or water. Given that, we didn’t deem it prudent to take you all the way to the hospital on Crab Island for treatment and brought you here instead. And once you were here, well—” She shrugged. “It just didn’t seem to make sense to move you again.”
While her words were perfectly comprehensible, insofar as they were set forth in the proper semantic order and described a plausible series of events, Geoffrey still didn’t understand how he had come to be here. When had he been struck on the head? And where? He had no memory at all of such an event, let alone of leaving the British encampment north of the Saranac. And he certainly couldn’t imagine what had possessed an American woman and her son to make any effort whatsoever to save the life of a British soldier. They should have left him to rot.
At least his crushing headache now had an explanation. Or a partial one, at any rate. He only wished he had the slightest recollection of how it had happened.
He needed to get back to his regiment. As soon as possible. Which raised another question. “How…long?”
“Five days,” she answered promptly. “Honestly, I was beginning to despair that you would ever regain consciousness.”
Good God, five days? The naval battle was meant to have commenced on September eleventh; the last day he remembered was… Hell, he wasn’t even sure, but certainly not before the eleventh. If this woman and her son had traveled to and from Plattsburgh, the entire battle must be over. Had been over when they’d found him, else certainly they would not have undertaken such a trip, especially since the town had been nearly deserted when the British army had arrived and set up camp.
He licked his painfully dry lips, which seemed even drier than before as the larger implications of his predicament sank in. If the British had failed to take Plattsburgh—and that seemed likely—then there would be no British encampment for him to return to. The army would already be on its way back to Fort York. He was not going to find his way back to his battalion any time soon.
Not that he felt like he would be doing very much of anything any time soon.
“The battle. It’s over?”
“Yes. Last Sunday. Your army and navy retreated the same day.”
Geoffrey tried to calm his rising panic at the thought of what might have happened to his men. How many had been lost or wounded in the battle? And what did they think had become of him? “And today is…?”
“Sunday.”
A week. He had lost a week. No, worse than that. Nine days.
He closed his eyes and slumped back against the pillows, enervated by his helplessness and by a crushing sense of abandonment. The establishment—and the people—to which he’d dedicated more than half his life had left him for dead. And this woman, this beautiful woman whose name he did not even know and who should have been happy to stomp on his grave, had been the one to save his life. He knew he ought to be grateful—to her, to his lucky stars, to God—but somehow, all he felt was bewildered and alone.
When he opened his eyes again, he found her watching him, her expression solemn and sympathetic. As if she had some small inkling of what he was going through. Whatever had made her decide to rescue him ran deep and true in her nature. She exuded such genuine warmth and compassion, perhaps she’d simply had no other choice.
“Do you think you can manage more water?” she asked.
He nodded, and she slid off the end of the bed to fetch and refill the cup. This time, his stomach did not rebel quite so violently as before, and he was able to drink enough to quench his thirst.
“Thank you,” he said once he had finished his second cup and refused a third. “I don’t know how I can ever repay your kindness.”
That dazzling smile touched her features again. “Perhaps you cannot,” she admitted, but her tone held enough amusement that he knew she was not serious, “but you could begin by telling me your name so I can stop referring to you as ‘the wounded man’ or ‘the British officer,’ which are both inconveniently wordy and dreadfully impersonal.”
He could not help but smile back, even though it made his dry lips crack and his head throb with pain. “Is that all?”
Chapter Three
His eyes were the color of leaves at the beginning of autumn—a mix of green and brown and gold—and his name was Geoffrey Langston.
Laura simmered the pot of beef bones and vegetables on the hearth, half giddy with relief that he had not died in her care. If he had… Well, no matter what she had told Daniel, she wasn’t sure she could have forgiven herself.
Lieutenant Colonel Langston had remained awake for an hour or so before falling into a more natural sleep and showed no signs of slipping back into his unresponsive state. He woke again an hour or so after Daniel, Joseph, and Abigail, the charwoman, returned from church, and insisted upon getting out of bed to see to his own privy needs. Laura had been forced to overrule him on the notion of doing so without help, and thank heavens she had, for even with the support of two strong, healthy men, he had nearly fallen to the floor when he tried to stand.
Now he was tucked back into bed and in need of something heartier than water and broth to consume. As Laura could scarcely expect an injured man who hadn’t eaten solid food in a week or more to dine on dry bread and cold stew like the rest of the family, she was forced to break the Sabbath by working in the kitchen. Not that she was ever entirely c
onsistent in her observance in any event, for she was not a person to whom contemplative idleness came easily. Contemplative activity, on the other hand, she could manage quite well.
As she added seasoning to the broth, she considered the question she had not dared ask herself before he’d awakened. What should they do with Lieutenant Colonel Langston now?
The obvious answer would be to take him to Fort Moreau as soon as he could be expected to tolerate the journey. There he would be held by the army as a prisoner until such time as the war ended, at which point he would likely be returned to the British in exchange for American prisoners. He would be treated well during his stay, insofar as any person denied his freedom could be said to be treated well, and eventually return home to his family in England. Clearly, it was the only reasonable—and possibly the only lawful—course of action.
Why, then, did even the idea fill her with misery and remorse? It wasn’t as if she knew anything about him save his name, military rank, and nationality.
And that he had beautiful eyes in a shockingly handsome face.
Dear God, am I really that shallow? That shameless?
Sleeping with the Enemy: Lords of Lancashire, Book 4 Page 2