The Savage Heart

“I am not…that radical! Will you please stop undressing me?”

He didn’t even slow down. “With the best of luck, it will take the doctor a little time to get here,” he said as he worked buttons through the dainty holes. “I smell the blood.”

She started, having forgotten about Matt’s remarkable sensory powers, honed from childhood. If he’d ever been a child. Sioux males trained to be warriors from a very early age, learning the knife and bow and horsemanship as young boys, and getting a taste of battle by accompanying war parties as water carriers.

“Matt…” she protested, both hands going to the buttons to stop him.

He brushed her fumbling fingers aside. “I never imagined you to be such a prim woman,” he chided. “You and I know more about each other than many husbands and wives do.”

That was true. Intimacy had been forced into their relationship because she nursed him so long after his devastating wounds. Not that her father hadn’t had many qualms. It violated his sense of morality and decorum, but he had been unable to withstand her tearful pleas to be allowed to help.

“But this is…different,” she tried to explain.

His hands stilled for an instant while he looked into her eyes and saw the shyness there.

“I would do the same for anyone,” he said evenly.

She bit her lower lip.

He moved her hands aside very gently. “No one will ever know,” he said softly. “Does that reassure you?”

It was odd that she trusted him so much. The thought of any other man’s hands on her was sickening. But not Matt’s. They were immaculate hands, always clean and neat and so very strong, yet gentle.

The problem was that her heart reacted violently to the touch of those hands on her bare skin over her collarbone. She ached for him to do more than unbutton her clothing, though she couldn’t imagine what that “more” might be.

He pretended not to notice, and unbuttoned the last of the buttons on her blouse. Visible beneath it was a whalebone corset and, above that, a lace-decorated muslin chemise. At the sight of the dark points of her nipples through the muslin Matt’s hands stilled. A faint glitter claimed his dark eyes for an instant.

“You mustn’t stare at me like that,” she whispered.

His eyes lifted to hers. “Why not?”

She wondered that herself. While she was struggling for a rational reason, his eyes went back to her bodice and seemed bent on memorizing how she looked.

“Oh, this is very unconventional,” she protested weakly.

“And wickedly pleasurable,” he murmured. His hand slid from the buttons of her blouse to the edge of the muslin and she jumped as if his lean fingers burned her soft skin.

“You rake!” she gasped, catching his hand.

“All right.” He chuckled, letting her move his curious fingers back to the task at hand. “If I had any lingering doubts about your modern ideas, they’re gone now.”

“What do you mean?” she asked indignantly.

“All that talk about free love and liberated morals,” he chided. “You’re a fraud.”

She glowered, but she didn’t deny it. He lifted her and moved her arm gently to free it from the long sleeve of her blouse. It hurt dreadfully.

He whispered to her in Sioux, a tender command to be still. Once the arm was free, leaving her only in the sleeveless muslin chemise, he turned her arm gently so that he could see the wound. It was a long, deep cut on her upper arm, made not by a cane, but almost certainly by a sword. A sword concealed in a cane? Whoever had wielded it had meant to do damage, perhaps even more damage than he’d accomplished with this wound.

“This is deep,” he said angrily. The rent in her otherwise perfect white skin was sluggishly discharging blood. He took a cloth from the washstand, applied pressure, making her wince, and held it until the bleeding began to stop.

“I wish I knew who did it,” she muttered.

“No more than I do.” He held her hand above the cloth he’d placed over the wound and left her long enough to fetch a basin of water and soap and a fresh cloth. He bathed the wound gently, watching her posture go rigid as he performed the necessary chore. He put the basin aside to fetch a bottle of rubbing alcohol and some cotton flannel. “This is going to hurt like hell,” he told her.

She held her arm steady and looked at him with her teeth locked, then nodded.

The sting was almost unbearable. She made a sharp little cry and bit her lip as he flooded the wound with the alcohol.

“Sorry,” she said at once, pale but game. “That was shameful, to cry out like that.”

“Considering the pain, it was hardly shameful,” he said honestly. He covered the wound with another piece of clean flannel and went to fetch her lacy robe from the clothes closet. Gently, he enfolded her in it.

“No, Matt, it’s the only one I have! The blood will stain it!”

“Robes are easily replaced,” he said indifferently. “Put it on.”

And without argument she did so, docile, he supposed, because of the pain. He drew the front edges together, his knuckles just barely brushing the curve of her breasts above the chemise, and she gasped at the contact.

He hesitated, searching her eyes. Under his hands, he could feel the frantic whip of her heart; he could see the erratic beat of the pulse in her neck. Her lips parted and everything she felt was suddenly visible. A scarlet flush ran from her cheeks down her white throat to the silky white skin of her throat and shoulders and breasts.

Something was happening to her. She felt her breasts draw, as if they’d gone cold. Inside her, there was a burst of warmth, a throbbing that made her feel tight all over. Matt’s hands contracted on the lace of the robe, and if she wasn’t badly mistaken, they moved closer to her skin, the warm knuckles blatantly pressing into the soft flesh.

His eyes were on a level with hers, and her heart raced even faster as she saw the heat in them. They were a liquid black, steady and turbulent, unblinking on her rapt face. For seconds that dragged into minutes, they simply looked at each other in hot silence.

Just as his hands moved again, just as she felt the chemise give under their insistent but almost imperceptible downward pressure, footsteps on the staircase sounded like thunder, breaking the spell.

Matt stood up at once and turned away from her, leaving her to close the robe and fasten it frantically. Her hand went protectively to the flannel she was holding over the wound.

There was a perfunctory knock and the door opened.

The doctor glanced from one to the other. “Matt Davis? And this would be your cousin?” he added with a smile, closing the door behind him. “What happened?”

She told him in a jerky voice.

“I brought her some water and soap to bathe the wound and some flannel and alcohol to clean it thoroughly,” Matt said. “But it will need more tending.”

“Of course it will. Wait outside again if you don’t mind, young man,” he added, assuming, as Matt had meant him to, that Tess had done the treatment herself.

“Certainly,” Matt said formally, and went out of the room.

The doctor pulled the robe aside and probed the wound carefully. “What did this?”

She winced at the unpleasant examination. “A cane, I believe.”

“No, ma’am. More probably the point of a sword cane,” he corrected. “A nasty deep cutting wound, too. I’ll do what I can, but you’re going to be very sick for a few days, young woman. This wound will have to be carefully watched for sepsis. I’m to be called at once if you see red streaks on your arm…or a greenish discoloration around the wound.”

“I’m a nurse, sir,” she said in a strained tone. “My father was a physician.”