AllFreeNovel
Share Us
‘I can manage, go back to bed, Anusha.’ The moonlight turned his hair to silver, his bare chest was so close she could see the individual hairs, the way the brown aureoles of his nipples had tightened in the cool air.
She pushed aside his hand and lifted the trailing bandage. ‘This has stuck to the wound.’
‘I had noticed,’ he said wryly.
‘Then it needs to be soaked off and the wound redressed. Come down and I will do it. You need to be lying down and in my cabin there are all those lamps you gave me. I cannot see clearly enough up here.’
‘I can see far too clearly.’ Nick sounded grim. ‘What the blazes are you wearing?’
‘My shift—you have seen it before when you woke me the night we left Kalatwah.’ She pushed the end of the bandage back into his hand, abrupt because she was moved by his stoicism and felt guilty about her neglect of his hurt. ‘Why are you up here on this hard deck and not sleeping? How can you look after me properly if you make yourself ill?’
‘Do you know, I had not considered that,’ Nick said. ‘Go back to bed.’
‘Not without you.’ His eyebrows soared. ‘Foolishness,’ she scolded. She would not let him see how that unspoken thought affected her. ‘Is that all men ever think about?’ It eased her conscience to put him in the wrong. ‘I want to dress your shoulder and I want to know why you are up here.’
Nick allowed her to tug him towards the hatch. ‘It was too hot below to sleep. I opened the hatch, and your door, but then it needed guarding. I can manage.’
‘No, you cannot or you would have changed the dressing before now.’
He picked up the musket and went down the ladder. ‘I suppose I will get no peace unless I let you torture me.’
Anusha did nor dignify that with a reply. She filled a copper urn from the water barrel tied to the foot of the mast and followed him down. ‘No, go to my cabin, the lights are better and I need my things.’
Chapter Twelve
The fact that the infuriating woman was right was no consolation. He should have redressed his shoulder at least three days ago, it was going to be a devil of a job doing it himself and Anusha’s cabin had the broader bed and the better lamps.
It also smelled of the jasmine oil she used on her hair, the myriad of feminine potions and lotions that she seemed to have acquired in Kalpi and, most distractingly, of herself.
It would be simplest to take the line of least resistance, do what she wanted and then escape.
‘Lie down,’ Anusha said, wriggling past him with a jug in one hand and a basin in the other. The pressure of a rounded backside against his thigh was more than enough incentive to obey. Nick lay down, swamping the hollow her body had made in the thin mattress, his head on a firm, Anusha-scented pillow.
‘Lie still.’ She sat on the edge of the bed, her hip against his, snipped through the loose length of bandage with a pair of tiny scissors, then leaned close to peer at the part that had dried on to the wound. Nick closed his eyes and gritted his teeth. ‘I haven’t done anything to hurt you yet,’ Anusha protested.
No, but that shift is virtually transparent with the lamp behind you, your right breast is squashed against my chest and I am fantasising about simply rolling over and crushing you into this mattress. ‘Lying down must have jarred it,’ he lied with an heroic effort of self-control. Why he was bothering to pretend when she only had to glance below his waist to see what the problem was, he did not know. He was rock hard. For all her theoretical knowledge she would be terrified.
Anusha got up and began to set things out on the shelf. ‘It is a good thing I packed my medical box.’
Nick opened a cautious eye. ‘Do you know what you are doing with it?’
‘Of course.’ She dropped a small sponge in to the basin and picked up a sinister sharp object. ‘It is part of our lessons in the women’s mahal, to know how to care for our man if he is sick or wounded.’
He realised that she was speaking Hindi again, as though what she was doing was taking her mind back to Kalatwah. Our man. She said it with complete unconcern. She was not flirting, it had been an unconscious slip. Nick felt his groin tighten again and locked eyes with Anusha. The thin, loose trousers were no shield for his all-too-obvious thoughts.
‘Now, I’ll just put these towels here and sponge the dressing free,’ she said, settling beside him again.
