Beneath a Midnight Moon - By Amanda Ashley Page 0,86
his. His lips were warm with fever and he tasted of the ale they’d given him in hopes of dulling the pain. He trembled convulsively as the doctor forced the poison from his flesh, and she kissed him harder, wishing she could draw his pain into her own body.
His hand cupped the back of her head, his fingers curling in her hair as the kiss lengthened and deepened, and Kylene felt the tension drain out of him, felt his body begin to relax.
Into her mind came a vision of the waterfall at Argone. She could hear the mighty roar of the water as it raced over the edge of the mountain, smell the earth, feel the spray of the falls against her face. She saw herself sitting on a flat rock, with the moonlight shining in her hair. And at her feet sat a big black wolf with eyes as gray as a winter sky.
“That should do it.” The doctor’s words shattered the illusion.
Hardane’s hand fell away from her head and Kylene sat up, momentarily disoriented. “What?”
“’Tis done.”
The doctor pointed at the wound. He had cut away the ragged edges of flesh and forced all the pus from the wound. The blood that oozed from the wound was no longer dark but a bright healthy red.
“I’ll just stitch up the wound, and he’ll be on the mend in no time at all.”
“Stitch him?” Kylene mumbled, staring at the needle the doctor had removed from his bag. “Now?”
“Aye, now.”
She couldn’t watch, Kylene thought frantically. She could not sit there and watch while the ship’s physician poked that needle into Hardane’s torn flesh. She simply couldn’t.
Rising, one hand still clasped in Hardane’s, she glanced at the cabin door, anxious to be gone from the room.
“Kylene . . .” His voice reached out to her.
She stared down at him. “I . . . I’ll be back in a minute.”
“Don’t leave me.”
“Please,” she begged. “I can’t stay. Don’t ask me.”
Understanding dawned in the smoky depths of his eyes. “You’ll come right back?”
Kylene gazed into his beloved face, seeing the harsh lines of pain and fatigue etched around his mouth and eyes. Surely the pain of stitching would seem like a small thing to endure when compared to the probing of the wound, she told herself in an effort to alleviate the guilt she felt for wanting to leave the room.
She looked down at their joined hands, knowing she lacked the courage to draw her hand away, to leave him there to suffer alone.
With a sigh, she sat down on the edge of the bunk once more and poured Hardane another glass of ale.
“I won’t leave you, my brave wolf,” she promised. “Not now. Not ever.”
Feeling as though she’d been run over by a team of horses, Kylene settled into a tub of hot water, sighing as the enervating warmth eased the tension from her taut muscles.
Hardane was sleeping peacefully, thanks to his utter weariness and the amount of ale he’d consumed.
It had been horrible, sitting at his side while the doctor stitched the raw, angry edges of the wound together. She’d kept her gaze fixed on Hardane’s face, trying not to imagine the needle piercing his flesh. Hardane had endured the sewing as he had endured everything else, in tight-lipped silence.
He was here, he was safe, but their troubles were far from over.
She thought of Lord Kray and Sharilyn, of Selene, of Bourke and the Interrogator. Of the children growing beneath her heart.
With a sigh, she closed her eyes. Somehow, they had to rescue Lord Kray and Sharilyn. But how?
Unable to think clearly, she stepped from the tub and dried herself off. Slipping into one of Hardane’s shirts, she sat in the captain’s chair beside the bunk and closed her eyes.
Hardane was here, and he was safe. For now, that was all that mattered.
Chapter 39
Renick and Bourke stood in the doorway, watching as Bourke’s physician treated the wound in Sharilyn’s abdomen.
“Will she live?” Renick asked curtly.
“Aye.”
“And the other one?” Renick asked.
The physician shrugged. “He’s bad off, milord. If he survives the night . . .”
The doctor shrugged again as he contemplated the unconscious man locked in the cell across the narrow corridor.
“I’ve done all I can for the man. The rest is up to him.”
Renick grunted softly. If Kray died, so be it. But the woman had to live. She was the seventh-born child of a seventh-born child. Heir to the secret of mind-bonding and shape shifting, and who knew what other mystical feats.