No! He couldn’t be dead. Please God.
She smoothed the tumbled dark hair back from his alabaster pale forehead, and . . . felt nothing.
Of course! The intense, damp cold had driven all feeling out of her fingers. She rubbed her frozen fingers until they burned, then slipped them back inside his shirt, praying for a pulse.
And breathed again.
Blood gushed from his head, spilling over her fingers in a warm sticky flow. She would not watch another person die . . .
“You’re not going to die,” Maddy told the man fiercely. “Do you hear me? I won’t have it!”
He pushed at her hands, moving his head and legs restlessly. It was a good sign. He couldn’t have moved like that with a broken spine.
She folded her apron into a pad, clean side out, slipped it under his head, and used the apron strings to tie it on. She checked his body for injuries and found a muddy imprint of a horseshoe on the glossy surface of his high black boots: the horse had trodden on his ankle.
Something stung her cheek. Sleet. “We need to get you indoors,” Maddy told him, as if he could hear. But how?
She hooked her arms under the man’s armpits. “One, two, three.” She heaved.
With all that mud, he should have slipped along nicely, but he was a big man, lean but tall, and heavier than she’d expected. And his clothing was soaked and getting heavier by the minute. After several minutes of heaving, she’d moved him a few inches at most. “It’s hopeless,” she told him. “You’re too heavy.
“The wheelbarrow,” she said on a sudden inspiration and ran to fetch it. It was old, heavy, with a drunken front wheel, but it worked and that was all that mattered.
How to get him into it? She tried lifting him, but no matter how she tried—shoulders first, legs first, heaving and struggling—he was simply too heavy.
“Blast!” she said as her last attempt left them both in the mud with the wheelbarrow tipped over. Icy needles stung her skin. An idea formed. She pushed him into the wheelbarrow, side down in the mud, fetched some rope, and lashed his comatose body to the barrow.
Using the prop pole from the clothesline and a large rock, she levered the barrow upward, shoving with all her might. With a lurch, the barrow thumped upright, the man safely aboard.
Her muscles were burning by the time she wheeled him through the cottage doorway, barrow and all. She was beyond worrying about clean floors and tracking mud. The cottage was tiny; the ground floor just one big room, with a fireplace and table, and in the corner, a large bed built into an alcove, built at some time in the past for an invalid grandmother. It was Maddy’s bed now, and her first instinct was to tip the man straight onto it. But he was sopping wet, bleeding, and covered in mud.
She pulled back the bedclothes and lined the nearest half of the bed with an old oilskin cloak. It would protect her bedding.
She wheeled him closer to the bed, untied him, linked her arms under his armpits, and heaved. The barrow tipped and she ended up sprawled on the bed in a flurry of mud and wet limbs, the stranger’s head cradled against her breast.
“There, safe now out of the rain, at least,” she murmured, smoothing back the thick, dark hair from his alabaster forehead. As still and beautiful as a statue of an archangel, she could barely tell he was breathing. Alive but cold, too cold.
“We’ll soon warm you up,” she told him. She wriggled out from beneath him and lowered his head gently. She piled fuel on the fire, pushed the kettle over the flames, and set bricks to heat. With a clean cloth and some hot water, she wiped his face clean. And stared.
Beneath the spattering of mud and blood, his face was elegant. Austere. A hard-edged, wholly masculine beauty. Dark lashes fanned over the pale skin. His mouth had been chiseled by a master, his chin firm and squared and dark with unshaven bristles.
She shouldn’t be staring. His beauty would be no use to anyone if he died, she reminded herself.
“Now to get those sopping clothes off you.”
She pulled off his fine leather gloves. His hands were long fingered and elegant, the nails clean and well cared for. Definitely the hands of a gentleman, she thought with a rueful glance at her own work-roughened paws.
She stripped off his waistcoat, then his shirt and undershirt. There were fresh bruises on his torso, but nothing serious.
Her mouth dried as she reached for a towel to dry him. The male form had few mysteries for her, not since Papa’s accident and being left with two small boys to bathe and dress, but this was different. Very different.
Papa had been old and his flesh was flaccid and loose, his muscles withered, and the boys were like little skinned rabbits wriggling in the bath, skinny but still soft with the bloom of childhood.
This was a man, young and strong and in his prime.
Papa had smelled of sour old-man flesh, talcum powder, and the pungent ointment she used to rub into his back and legs for the pain. The boys smelled of . . . little boys and soap. The man in her bed smelled faintly of shaving soap and cologne water, and horse, and wet wool and . . . something else. She breathed it in but could not identify it—some kind of dark, musky man-smell. It should have repelled her. Instead she found it . . . enticing.
She breathed him in again as she dried his broad chest and firm-skinned, hard-muscled body, rubbing briskly with a rough-textured towel to get his blood moving. The scent of him settled deep in her awareness. She pulled a blanket over and tucked it around him.
