Run Wild (Escape with a Scoundrel) - By Shelly Thacker Page 0,60
as she could.
But nothing helped. For a time, he had seemed to improve, only to take a turn for the worse.
And now his breathing had become a labored rasp, so faint she could barely hear it. His body lay utterly still, ravaged by the fever that burned out of control. He no longer called out or groaned or made any sound at all—nothing but that low, fragile whisper of breath.
She pressed her fingers against his wrist... but felt only the slightest trace of a pulse.
Shaking her head in denial, she took his hand in hers, wrapping her fingers around his broad, callused palm.
“Please,” she whispered. “Please.”
But there was no response. None. He had given up his grasp on this world, and she was powerless to hold him here.
Clenching her jaw, she echoed what he had shouted at her in the whirlpool. “Damn it, don’t you give up on me now!”
But it was too late. He had surrendered. She could feel the fever taking him. For days, she had resisted despair, enduring to the limits of her endurance and beyond... only to have it come to this.
Death. Slow, silent death in the darkness.
Her tears began to fall, one after another, sliding down her cheeks. He had given up his will to fight... and extinguished hers. She slumped over, still holding his hand, barely aware when her forehead came to rest against his rib cage. She closed her eyes and let the tears cascade down her skin and down his, let the hot, choking sobs take her.
The depth of her sorrow stunned her... because she was not only crying for herself, for fear of her own fate.
She was crying for him.
Him.
She didn’t even know his name. She shut her eyes tighter, tried to stop the flood of emotions. And failed, utterly. As she had failed at all the rest.
Her feelings for him made no sense. He was an outlaw, an unpredictable scoundrel. A man who had come into her life like a thunderbolt straight out of a storm cloud, startling and dangerous and unexpected. But she could no longer dismiss what she felt for him as simple gratitude or respect. She knew better now.
She knew him better now.
Far better than she had when they entered the cave three or four days ago.
He had been delirious for hours, calling out in pain, thrashing until she had to hold him down, afraid he would injure himself further. For much of that time, he had been talking, calling out names, cursing, uttering gibberish...
And sometimes speaking quite clearly.
Speaking of things so chilling, she could only hope he was hallucinating.
But she didn’t think he was.
Sam pushed herself up to her knees, wiping at her damp cheeks, gazing down at the brand on his chest through a blur of tears. She didn’t know what to think anymore, much less what to feel. Before, she had been curious about his past.
Now she almost wished she didn’t know.
Because between his fevered ramblings and the little she did know about him, she had managed to piece together a wrenching picture of his childhood.
In his delirium, he had cried out “Father” several times, and spoken of a rope. A scaffold. He had stared into the darkness as if watching it all unfold before his eyes—an execution.
His father’s execution. He had been forced to watch his father hanged for some offense.
And that was when he had been consigned to the prison hulk.
Sam looked down at him, still holding his hand, unable to make herself let go. His hand looked so large and dark against hers. Seeing him now, with his full beard and broad chest and chiseled muscles, it was hard to imagine him as a boy.
But she could imagine how he had felt. Fresh tears slipped from her lashes as she thought of a small boy with bright green eyes—orphaned, alone, terrified. Sentenced to a fate that must have been a living death. Jailed for a crime not his own, lost among strangers. Beaten and lashed and tormented for God knew how many years.
She didn’t understand how he had escaped the prison hulk or what had happened to him after that. She had only been able to puzzle out fragments of his fevered ramblings. It seemed bitterly ironic to know more about who he had been, decades ago, than about who he was now.
But was it any wonder he had become a hardened man, hostile and sarcastic and cold toward a world that had treated him so coldly?