door between their chambers. Perhaps she had been so weary she had overlooked taking the precaution against her husband’s trespass.
“I am perfectly fine,” she lied. “My feet ache a bit this morning, and I lost my balance.”
He knelt at her side, his face pinched with worry. “My God, Nell, your feet are raw.”
He touched her ankle, and she jolted at the contact. She wore nothing more than a flimsy night rail, hiked to her knees, and he scarcely had on more himself.
“My feet are none of your concern,” she snapped. “What are you doing in my chamber? Get out.”
Being Needham, he ignored her, gently taking up her right foot in his hands. “Good God, woman. You need to tend to these before infection sets in.”
“I shall do it forthwith.” She reached for his wrist, intending to pull his touch away from her.
That was a mistake as well. Because beneath the flowing sleeve of his dressing gown, his skin was hot. Touching him sent a shock through her. The crisp feeling of the dark hair on his arm set her on edge. For a wild, unconscionable moment, she thought about taking his big hand in hers and pressing it to her breast.
Her nipples went hard, poking through the fabric of her night rail. She hoped he would not notice. Or if he did that he would assume she was merely chilled. How mortifying, to be attracted to him so desperately, after all this time and everything he had done.
“I will tend you,” he countered calmly, pulling himself from her grasp.
Before she could protest, he stood, then bent and scooped her into his arms as if she weighed scarcely anything. “Needham!”
“You may call me Jack,” he corrected, his jaw hard as he strode with her across her chamber to the stuffed chair she kept by the hearth.
Calling him Jack was too familiar.
And she could not afford to be familiar with him. Because already, she had allowed him to cross far too many boundaries. Already, she had proven herself foolishly weak where this man was concerned.
“Put me down, Needham,” she demanded instead.
He did, obeying her for a change as he lowered her gently to the chair. As if she were fashioned of porcelain instead of flesh and bone. He hovered over her then, their faces nose to nose.
He was starkly beautiful, even more so by the morning light. His dark hair was ruffled. He was bereft of all the effortless elegance which ordinarily accompanied him. When he looked like this, she could not help remembering what it had been like to wake up in his bed with him. To roll against him and take his cock in her hand, to stroke and kiss him into wakeful readiness.
“I am going to fetch a basin, some water, and some soap and salve,” he told her, chasing the memory with the coolness of his words. “Do not dare to move whilst I am gone.”
“You cannot order me about.” She frowned at him, aggrieved by him—his presence in her chamber, his stubborn insistence upon forever being at her side, the way he touched her.
The way he had kissed her yesterday.
“I can, but I am fully aware that does not mean you will listen.” His gaze ran over her face, and he gave her a frown of his own. “Your skin burned in the sun yesterday.”
How good of him to notice.
“It did not.” She did not even know why she denied it. The proof was in her painful, pink forehead. She probably resembled a beet.
“You ought to have listened to me and accepted your hat back.” His lips pursed. He exuded disapproval yet again.
She thought, quite absurdly, about the way his beard had felt, scraping over her yesterday. She had not expected it to be so very…pleasant. She had not thought she would like it so much.
“Go away and do not come back,” she told him, expelling all such thoughts from her mind. “I will ring for my lady’s maid, and she will fetch me anything I require.”
Still, he did not rise. He remained where he was, near enough to kiss.
Stupid thought.
Stupid longing.
Stupid heart.
“Let me, Nell,” he said, intently.
And she could not help but to feel that he was asking her for a greater concession than merely asking her to allow him to tend to her badly blistered feet.
“Why do you care if I injured myself?” she demanded, seizing upon her defensiveness rather than lingering upon the mad yearnings coursing through her. “I should think you would be