Читать книгу The Baron and The Bodyguard - Valerie Parv - Страница 11

Mathiaz was floating.

Pain shredded the edges of the mist surrounding him, but he found if he concentrated, he could push the pain away and enjoy the sensation of nothingness. Of floating free of care.

“Come on, Baron, don’t do this to me.”

The woman’s voice punched through the mist, bringing the awareness of pain closer. Pushing the pain away meant pushing her away, too, and for some reason, he didn’t want her to go, so he let both of them in. Immediately fire tore along the side of his leg, and every muscle in his body set up a clamoring ache as though from overuse. He heard a distant groan that he barely recognized as coming from himself.

He wanted to retreat into the mist, but the woman’s voice came again, refusing to let him go. “That’s it, come back to me. You can do it.”

Come back where? To whom? He couldn’t force the questions out, but she anticipated them. “It’s me, Jac. You’re in the hospital. You have to wake up for my sake, Mathiaz.”

Jac? Instinctively he rejected the name. Jacinta, that felt better. He remembered that her name was Jacinta Newnham, although she liked to be called Jac. He must have murmured her name, because her sigh whispered over him.

He felt her bend closer, and her lips brushed his mouth. A faint scent of frangipani teased his nostrils, the perfume as familiar as her touch and every bit as arousing. The sensation was so pleasant that he took it with him back into the mist.

Jacinta felt his grip slacken and fought back tears as she looked at Mathiaz in the bed. The nightmare was happening all over again. A man she cared about was hovering on the brink, and there was nothing she could do. For a moment, she’d thought she’d managed to reach him, only to watch him sink back into coma.

A white-coated man came to stand beside Mathiaz’s bed. “Isn’t it time you got some rest?”

She gave the doctor a savage look. “I’m not going anywhere until he comes out of this, Dr. Pascale.”

“I know I asked you to come in and talk to him, but running yourself into the ground isn’t going to help anyone.”

“Then tell me what will?”

The doctor’s craggy face softened. “With all the medical marvels at our disposal, sometimes there’s nothing you can do but wait.”

Nothing you can do. The words she hated most in the whole world. “There must be something.”

“You’re doing it. Keep talking to him, let him know you’re here and that there’s a world he should be rejoining by now.”

“Talk to him about what?”

The doctor thought for a moment. “You worked with him for four months. Talk about the time you spent together.”

“That ended ten months ago. We didn’t part on very good terms.”

“He fired you?”

She shook her head. “He wanted me to stay. I was the one who quit.”

“Didn’t take to royal life, huh?”

“The baron hired me for a specific assignment. When the danger to him was past, I had no reason to stay.” She didn’t tell the doctor that Mathiaz had given her the one reason guaranteed to make her run like a rabbit. He had begun to care about her.

The doctor’s expression showed he had his own suspicions. “I got the impression that the two of you…”

She didn’t let him finish. “We set out to create that impression as a cover. Mathiaz thought that being seen with increased security would alarm the public. Running my own defense academy, I have the skills but I’m not actually a bodyguard, so he suggested I pose as his girlfriend while keeping him from harm.”

The doctor looked at her as if he didn’t quite believe her, but decided to let it go. “Then talk to him about yourself.”

“He already knows my background. He had palace security check me out before I came aboard.”

“I don’t mean the facts, I mean you, your interests, your passions. You do have passions, don’t you?”

She kept her face averted. What would the doctor say if she admitted that one of her passions had been Mathiaz himself? “Climbing and adventure training,” she said instead.

The doctor made a skeptical noise. “I’ve heard you took two American teenagers to ride the Nuee Trail, but I’ve never heard having a death wish described as a passion before.”

“Depends how much you care about what you’re doing. Those boys were tough street kids. A judge gave them the choice of undertaking one of my adventure training courses to straighten themselves out, or going to jail.”

“I’d take jail.”

She knew the doctor didn’t mean it. As court physician, Alain Pascale was known for his gruff manner, but also for his willingness to do anything he could to help his patients. “Anyway, I didn’t take them out solo. The court supplied a supervisor who complained all the way up and down the mountain. The boys acted tough but they were only sixteen and seventeen,” she told him.

“The age when Carramer males traditionally ride the Nuee Trail,” the doctor mused. “They considered it a rite of passage for hundreds of years.”

“As well as being one of the toughest endurance rides in the world,” she pointed out. “When those boys finished the course, they were different people.” She had also been different, too, in love with an island kingdom called Carramer. She had returned to America long enough to resign from her job as a personal trainer, said a tearful goodbye to her parents and older sister and moved to Carramer. When suitable premises in Valmont came up for rent, she had leased it and spent the next three years establishing her own fitness business. Guarding Mathiaz had seemed like an interesting change of pace at the time.

The doctor patted her shoulder. “Now you know what to talk to the baron about.”

“This feels weird,” she said to the still form in the bed after the doctor had gone. “While I worked for you, we talked so much, but I managed to tell you very little about myself.”

He had asked, she remembered, but she hadn’t wanted to let him get too close. She still wasn’t prepared to tell him the most significant details of her life. He might be unconscious but she preferred to keep some secrets.

“There isn’t much to tell,” she began awkwardly. “Compared to your royal family, mine isn’t the least bit glamorous. Mom and Dad have a berry farm in Orange County, California, and my sister, Debbie, runs a store selling their produce and local handicrafts when she isn’t taking care of her husband and their three children. She’s much better suited to that life than me, although I never thought I’d end up on an island in the middle of the South Pacific.”

She lapsed into silence. Once she had thought of training as a kindergarten teacher. She enjoyed working with children, the reason she’d volunteered to help the street kids in her spare time. Switching her degree from education to science, with a major in sport and exercise had been an impulsive choice. The right one, as things turned out. At twenty-seven, she was still a teacher of sorts, and exercise was a universal skill, as useful in Carramer as in Orange County.

“I’m supposed to talk to you about passion. How’s that for irony?” she asked Mathiaz’s unmoving form. She felt a pang as she said the word. Mathiaz had been a passionate man—was a passionate man, she amended the thought firmly. They had agreed to act in public as if there was a romance between them. Holding hands, exchanging looks, all in the name of keeping him safe.

When had they stopped acting?

The first time he kissed her, she remembered. Two months after she started working for him, she had accompanied him to a trade dinner. Hardly a forum for passion. In the back of the limousine, returning to Château Valmont, they had laughed about how boring the chief delegate’s speech had been. Letting Mathiaz kiss her had seemed like the most natural thing in the world.

He’d kissed her again as they shared a nightcap at his villa in the royal compound. Talked long into the night. Talked some more the next day. Kissed again. She had told herself she was acting a part, while recognizing the lie for what it was.

She should have left after the man threatening Mathiaz was caught, but she’d agreed to stay for another month, telling herself she needed the pay check. The truth was, she needed Mathiaz. And she didn’t want to need any man.

Unconscious, he was no threat to her peace of mind, she told herself. When she had agreed to Dr. Pascale’s request to help Mathiaz, she hadn’t counted on the strength of her own feelings at being so close to him. She dragged a hand through her hair. When she’d walked into the room, found him tangled in tubes and medical monitors, her heart had almost stopped.

She’d taken his hand without thinking, unprepared for the electric jolt that arced through her. His fingers had closed around hers so strongly that she had to remind herself he was unconscious. He’d felt as if he was holding on to her. According to Dr. Pascale, he possibly was.

She cleared her throat. “Dr. Pascale asked me what’s my passion? Being strong, having answers. Only this time I don’t have any. He thinks I can help you by talking to you. But you have to do your part. You have to wake up.”

The man on the bed stirred, his fingers flexing. With a sigh she slid her hand into his, and he seemed to settle. She wished she could say the same for herself, but the pulse at her throat fluttered like a trapped bird, and she could feel her heart hammering. She told herself she was scared for Mathiaz, but knew some of her discomfort was for herself. For the pleasure she felt at his touch and didn’t want to feel. Could you turn off feelings by wanting to? In the ten months since she’d left him, she’d tried with everything in her. Thought she had succeeded. Knew she was kidding herself the moment she walked into his hospital room.

She still cared about him, and it scared the life out of her.

She untangled her fingers from his and straightened. “I’m sorry, Mathiaz, but I can’t do this anymore. I have to go.” His eyelids began to quiver.

Mathiaz had no idea how long he drifted, dreaming of the woman called Jacinta. Gradually he became aware that she was calling to him more and more urgently. He grasped her hand because the gesture seemed natural. How warm and soft she felt, but she wasn’t, he knew. How did he know that?

This time he was able to force his eyes open, and saw a vision bending over him. Jacinta. A head sculpted by Michelangelo was capped with shining blond hair, neat except for a few stray wisps curling across her forehead and around her ears. The effect suggested an abandoned nature kept under firm control, but not quite. His blurred gaze gave him an imperfect view of her unusual gray blue eyes, enough to see that they glistened, as if she was trying not to cry.

He moved restively, wanting to stroke her lovely face, to reassure her that tears were unnecessary. He was fine. But his arms were held to his sides by a web of tubes. He couldn’t summon the energy to wonder what flowed through the tubes, or why they snaked into his veins. He was too busy trying to focus on what Jacinta was saying to him.

His hold on consciousness was too precarious to sort out her words, so he concentrated on her generous mouth, finding that he remembered exactly how her lips felt against his own, and how much heat her touch could ignite inside him. He groaned again, this time with the remembered pleasure of holding her, caressing her. In the vestiges of his floating cocoon, the image was so vivid that he raised himself to take her into his arms, desperate to turn the dream of closeness into reality.

She pressed against his shoulders, settling him back. “Don’t try to move, you’ve been hurt.”

As if he hadn’t worked that out for himself. He didn’t normally wake up in this much of a mess. “What…” he tried hoarsely. His mouth was too arid for speech.

She lifted his head and slid ice chips into his mouth. The coolness eased the burning in his throat, but not in his body. The brush of her fingers against his lips made him ache to embrace her and kiss her again.

Again? Had he really kissed her, or only in his dream? Surely if he was dreaming, he should be able to control the outcome? Which didn’t include being pinned to a bed, restricted to looking at his ministering angel, when his imagination stretched to far more enjoyable ways they could spend the time.

“I see our patient is finally coming around. Nice work, Ms. Newnham.”

The gravel voice dissipated some of the mist surrounding Mathiaz, and he felt the pain settle around him like a cloak, unable to be pushed away. His vision cleared, revealing a steel-haired man in a white coat looming above him, coming between Mathiaz and the angelic vision. Mathiaz made an involuntary sound of protest as the doctor checked him over with professional skill.

When he finished, he peered intently at Mathiaz. “Do you know who you are?”

Mathiaz croaked out an unsuccessful reply, coughed, and tried again with better results. “Mathiaz Albert Alphonse de Marigny, Baron Montravel.”

The doctor’s concerned expression eased, although it was hard to tell because his face was as craggy as clothing that had been slept in for several days. “Beats me how you remember all that even when you’re not injured. Now who am I?”

This was much easier to answer. “A pain in the neck.”

The doctor shot a relieved look at Jacinta. “He’s himself all right. Like the rest of the de Marigny family, he has no respect for my medical skills. You’d think I’d be entitled to some respect after bringing most of them into the world, Lord Montravel here included.”

Alain Pascale, personal physician to Mathiaz’s cousin, Prince Lorne, ruler of Carramer, Mathiaz’s mind slowly supplied the details. The doctor had served the family for decades, as he said delivering many of the royal babies in that time. He was the only man in Carramer who could speak so familiarly to members of the royal family, his unique place in their affections giving him immunity from the demands of protocol. He wasn’t above taking advantage of it when he thought one of the family needed his guidance, Mathiaz knew. But the doctor was semiretired now. Whatever Mathiaz had gotten himself into must have been drastic to drag the doctor away from his beloved orchid growing.

“What happened?” he struggled to ask.

The doctor shook his head. “Plenty of time for that. Right now, you need rest.”

Pascale did something to the equipment beside Mathiaz’s bed and he felt himself slipping back into sleep. He didn’t resist. Jacinta waited for him there.