Page 46 of A Deal With a Notorious Devil
“A poor analogy. I’ve seen kittens with a great deal of ferocity. And you have not got a fever.” Her fingers clenched; her arm tightened in preparation to give the cord a good yank.
“I have, though. I’m sweating something awful. Just look.”
Cautiously, Phoebe peeked over her shoulder. True to his claim, there was a sheen of moisture upon his forehead, and his face was bit more flushed that perhaps it ought to have been. But there was also a convenient glass of water set upon the nightstand within reach and she would not have put it past him to sprinkle water upon his face and pinch his cheeks to sell a falsehood.
“Please,” he said on a faint whine, endeavoring to makehimself look small and pathetic, which was not an easy task for so large a man to accomplish. “I can’t sleep when my bandage is this damned itchy and uncomfortable. And I’m so bloody bored.”
Of course. He’d already been slowed down by the injury to his knee which he’d sustained some months past. Now, to be confined to a bed besides—for a man so accustomed to doing as he pleased and going where he pleased, the unwilling confinement must be intolerable.
“You could bring Hieronymus to visit,” he wheedled. “And I won’t even press you about your tea with Charity.”
A frisson of alarm raced up Phoebe’s spine. “Did you press Charity about it?” she asked.
“I would never,” he declared, striving to look affronted by the accusation. Striving a little too hard, in Phoebe’s estimation. “All right, I would,” he admitted. “But shewouldn’t. Not even for sapphire earbobs to go with the necklace.” He said it with a startling amount of peevishness, as if that little bit of disloyalty had been both exceedingly unwelcome and unexpected.
Still, Phoebe found herself releasing the bell pull as she turned back toward him. “You were right,” she said. “I did like her.”
“You are not going to be friends with my mistress,” he said, in a firm, determined tone. The sort that intended to assert itself as law. The same sort that she had never been much good at heeding.
“I don’t see how you intend to stop me,” she said. “You can’t even make it out of bed at present.” There was something just a little reassuring in that. Weak as a kitten, he’d said. Well, he wasn’t quite that. But he was probably close enough to it. “Where are the bandages?” she asked as she wandered back over to the bed.
“The nightstand drawer,” he said. “Haddington wouldn’tleave them out. Said it ruined the elegance of the room to have evidence of injury left in the open. Thought he might just toss my arse out of it as well just to be safe.”
Phoebe suppressed a chuckle, and reached out to touch her wrist to his forehead. “Oh,” she said, in mild surprise. “You dohave a fever.”
“I do?” Not to his credit, he also sounded surprised. “Hell,” he said, sinking back in the pillows piled behind his head. “Probably why I feel so fucking wretched. Would you fluff my pillows after you change my bandage?”
Digging through the drawer in search of the supplies, Phoebe gave a light laugh. “No,” she said succinctly.
∞∞∞
Phoebe hadn’t put on the damned bracelet, but then she hadn’t left the room either. Instead, she had yanked the bell pull and spoken softly to the servant who had answered the summons, and then she’d situated the chair closer to the edge of the bed, where she had taken a seat. Chris held himself still as she unwound the length of bandage from his waist that secured the gauze to his side. He’d had to sit up to make it a task possible to manage—well, as much as he could sit up, given that every flex of his abdominal muscles sent pain careening through his nerves.
It wasn’t the first time he’d been shot. Probably wouldn’t even be the last. And every fucking time it was a miserable experience. Only this time, he’d got a fever into the bargain. He hadn’t been lying when he’d said he was sweaty; he’d just thought the room had grown uncomfortably warm in the Augustheat.
“I’ve sent for some ice water and a cool cloth for your head,” Phoebe said as she tugged the bandage out from behind him, pulling it free at last. The gauze stuck to his side where it had been placed, no doubt crusted to his skin by his dried blood. “As well as some willow bark tea to bring down your fever, and a meal. I don’t suppose you’ve eaten already?”
“Not recently. Brooks didn’t bring me any breakfast.” He left out the small fact that he’d lobbed a succession of missiles in the man’s direction when Brooks had had the poor judgment to appear at his call instead of Phoebe. He sucked in a breath as she picked gently at the gauze in a delicate attempt to pry it away from his skin.
“It’s been left to sit too long,” she said, and something about her tone suggested she harbored the suspicion that he had intentionally driven away those who would have changed it out well before now. “Perhaps Haddington would be better—”
“No.” He was in pain, ill-tempered, feverish, hungry, and most of all, bored out of his damned skull. “You do it. Just yank it off.”
Blond brows arched high over those queer grey-blue eyes. “I am not going toyank it off,” she said. Her white teeth nibbled at her full lower lip, pinching a deeper rose hue into the soft pink. “I’ll change it out,” she said. “If you tell me what became of Scratch. What you did to him.”
She thought herself a bargainer. He could almost respect it. “I told ye,” he said sourly, his proper enunciation slipping away from him with the advent of her small fingers delicately pulling away the gauze in tiny, painful increments. “Don’t ask questions ye don’t—”
“I do want to know,” she said, her brows furrowing in concentration. “That is, I’m ready to listen.”
“Why?”
“I suppose because I might learn something from it,” she said. “Why, for instance, your butler thinks it would be a simpler task to compile a list of people whodon’twish you dead.”
“I told you I weren’t a good man.”
“Good is relative,” she said patiently, wincing in sympathy as he sucked in a breath when she pulled with a little more pressure and broke open a forming scab in the process. “It’s a subjective judgment rendered upon one’s limited observations. Have you…hurt many people?”
“Yes.” He hadn’t even regretted it. If she expected remorse as a condition of goodness, even a subjective one, then she was bound to be disappointed. “I’ve killed a fair few, as well. More than I’ve bothered to count.”
