‘Miss?’ He touched her shoulder, giving it a slight shake.
She did not do as much as twitch. Her skin looked thin and far too white, her lips tinged blue.
Reaching over the side of the lifeboat, he scooped his arms underneath her and lifted her out.
Her head rolled back. One arm fell limp at her side. She was heavy, but he suspected the weight had to do with yards of drenched cloth.
‘It’s all right,’ he whispered while easing her head up against his shoulder. ‘I’ve got you.’
The proper thing to do would be to rouse some woman from sleep and ask her assistance.
But then, proper hardly mattered in a life-and-death situation, and instinct warned him that her situation was desperate. His quarters were all the way up on the next deck, but the room would still be warm from the fire he had only recently banked. It would not take much to get a good blaze going.
‘Hold on, angel.’ Her lips were near enough to his ear that he ought to have felt warmth pulsing from them, but did not.
Without a second to be spent rousing a helpful woman or finding a proper room, he ran. His feet nearly slipped out from under him a time or two when the deck jerked unexpectedly.
It seemed an hour, but could only have been minutes before he carried her into his room and kicked the door closed behind him.
The space was warm, but not nearly warm enough.
What to do first? Building up the fire was urgent, but so was getting her out of her wet clothes. No matter how hot the flames, heat would not penetrate her icy garments.
Since he could not lay her down on the bed without soaking the mattress, he went down on his knees in front of the stove. He gathered her close with one arm, opened the stove door with the other. He stirred the coals with a poker. A few weak flames came to life. He added fuel, gave a great sigh of relief when the fire blazed.
If his fingers felt half-numb with cold, he did not want to imagine her condition. Her very bones must be chilled. He feared she was slipping away even as he held her.
This might well be the only gown she owned, but he ripped it from her without a care for the fabric. There was not a second to be lost in fumbling with buttons.
He stripped the clothes from her, then tossed them to the corner of the room—perhaps they could be mended, but he had not been careful, only fast.
Rising, he held her tight and brought her up with him. Carefully, he laid her down on the bed, then covered her with a sheet. Gathering the two blankets heaped at the foot of the bed, he laid them over the stove to warm them up.
‘Hurry up, damn you,’ he muttered to the flames and the wool, as if cursing at them would speed the heating.
There! One was hot, so he ripped away the sheet and tucked the blanket all around her.
If only she would moan or shiver, if only her eyes would move beneath her pale lids.
As soon as the second blanket was heated through, he traded it for the one he had just put on her.
On and on he went like this. He had no idea how long he repeated the process, but it seemed a very long time.
At last she made a tiny sound—a quiet groan.
‘Come on, angel. Listen to my voice, come towards it.’
What he ought to do was summon the physician he kept on staff, but it would mean leaving the lady alone.
It was still too risky for that. She needed warmth, constant and steady heat to bring her around.
Rees was warm. The exertion of caring for the lady had him sweating.
Body to body provided the best and most constant source of heat.
Because his clothing was still damp, he stripped down to his small clothes. He tucked a new warm blanket about and under her so that when they touched, it would not quite be skin to skin.
It wasn’t proper to be this close to her, but neither was it proper to let her die.
Easing on to the cot, he lay down beside her and hugged her close.
Even through the wool blanket the shock of her cold skin against his chest nearly made him recoil. Instead he hugged her tighter, briskly rubbing her arms.
While he did his best to protect her modesty, when it came down to it, they were sharing a bed with no vows spoken to sanctify it.
There would be repercussions for this, but with a life at stake, her life—for some reason, he had been drawn to her from the first when he spied her through the glass—he would deal with whatever came after.
‘Think about a blazing fire,’ he whispered close to her ear. ‘Summertime and warm breezes.’
Perhaps the suggestion of heat would somehow help. ‘Do you enjoy picnics in the sunshine? Walking in the park with it beating down on your head?’
After a time, he thought that her arm did not feel as icy as it had. Maybe her lips were losing the blue tint. He touched them with his thumb, hoping to add some heat and see them grow pinker.
There was not much he could do other than wait and see what happened. Hopefully by dawn he would be able to leave her long enough to bring tea and the doctor.
He did not allow himself to drift off to sleep in the event she woke, or in the event she did not.
The latter did not bear thinking.
This stranger in his arms was going to become his wife, just as soon as she was coherent enough to see the need and agree to it.
Honour dictated it to be so.
How would she react to the news? What kind of life would they have, for that matter?
He could not even imagine since he knew nothing about her other than that she was willing to give away her passage to a desperate mother. She must be selfless, or at the very least exceptionally kind.
There were men of his station who would know less of their brides than that.
And there was something he did know about her, knew quite intimately. Something he would not allow himself to dwell upon until they were properly wed.
All this was going to be a stunning surprise to her. One moment she had taken refuge in a lifeboat and the next—well, she would be wedding a man she’d never met.
Entering a marriage she had no choice in was bound to be distressing, but nothing about this could be helped. The pair of them were sharing his bed. The fact that she was not in any way consenting to it did not change the outcome for either of them.
He slid his open palm over the blanket, hoping to heat the wool even further. He was acquainted with the form of her limbs far
