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.
