Page 37 of The Unwilling Bride
“So I gather. I shall remember.”
As the slightly minty fragrance of the salve infused the chamber, she started to wrap his arm in a clean bandage with swift efficiency, thinking it would be best if she finished quickly. “The binding should be changed and the ointment reapplied before you sleep, and again in the morning.”
After she knotted the bandage, he rose without speaking and went to his wooden chest. He lifted the lid and as he reached down for a clean shirt, he wobbled a bit as if he was dizzy.
Proud, stubborn fool, she thought indulgently as she hurried to his side, regardless of his attempts to wave her away. In some ways, men could be such children.
“Sit down before you fall down,” she commanded. “There’s nobody here to impress with your manly fortitude.”
“Except you.”
“I’m duly impressed. Now sit down.”
He did, but not before he grabbed a shirt. Then he sat on the end of his bed. “Are you always this obstinate?”
She returned to the table and started to put the unused linen bandages back inside the basket. “When I’m dealing with a stubborn man, yes.”
“I’m not stubborn.”
She gave him a very skeptical look.
“I don’t like to be fussed over.”
“So I hear.”
She went to help him put on his shirt, which he was holding in his left hand.
“I can do it myself.”
“I don’t care,” she retorted, her patience wearing thin. She took the shirt from him, found the neck and put it over his head.
This brought her breasts very close to his face.
As she attempted to concentrate and ease his right arm through the sleeve, she reminded herself that she’d helped men dress before. Sick men. Injured men. None of them handsome, and none of them her betrothed.
Despite her efforts to ignore his proximity, sweat started to trickle down her back. She got an itch between her shoulder blades.
Determined to overcome her foolish reaction and to explain what might seem to be a preoccupation with the muscular male body so close to her own, she said, “I see by your scars that this isn’t your first wound that required sewing. Is it true you’ve won over twenty tournaments?”
He nodded.
“Even though they’re illegal?”
He inclined his head.
“And this in spite of all your talk about upholding the king’s laws?”
“The king knows he can’t abolish tournaments completely. The barons would never stand for it.”
“So if the king winks his eye at his own decree, then it can be ignored?” she asked with a hint of scorn.
“If the king winks his eye at his own decree, so do I,” Merrick matter-of-factly replied. “If he does not, I don’t.”
She probably shouldn’t be surprised he would subscribe to that convenient excuse. Most noblemen would. But that didn’t mean there was no risk. “Yet surely you’ve heard of all the trouble Walter Marshall’s had getting the king to confirm his inheritance after his brother died in a tournament. What if you’d been killed doing the same thing? Your family’s land might have been forfeit to the crown.”
“If I’d been killed, I don’t think I would have much cared what happened to my family’s land.”
Not at all amused by his answer, she frowned and let some of her disgust slip into her voice as she tied the laces of his shirt at the neck, which also closed that gaping opening that revealed his chest. “Are you really so irresponsible, my lord? Or are you so sure of the king’s favor that you saw no danger?”
