COUGH!
She very nearly flew to the other side of the bed.
“Oh, for the love of God, I've been touched by women more appealing and more interested than you,” he snapped. “You needn't fear. I may starve the truth out of you, but I won't ravish you.”
Oddly enough, Caroline believed him. His inclinations toward abduction aside, he didn't seem the type to take a woman against her will. In a rather strange sort of way she trusted this man. He could have hurt her—he could even have killed her—but he hadn't. She sensed he had a code of honor and morals that had been absent in her guardians.
“Well?” he demanded.
She inched back toward his end of the bed and placed her hands primly on her lap.
“Open up.”
She cleared her throat—as if that were necessary—and opened her mouth. He brought the candle flame close to her face and peered in. After a moment he drew back, and she snapped her mouth closed, staring up at him expectantly.
His face was grim. “It looks as if someone took a razor to your throat, but I expect you know that.”
She nodded.
“I suppose you were up all night coughing.”
She nodded again.
He closed his eyes for a fraction of a second longer than was necessary before saying, “You have my reluctant admiration for this. Inflicting such pain upon yourself just to escape a few questions shows true dedication to the cause.”
Caroline gave him her best expression of outrage.
“Unfortunately for you, you chose the wrong cause.”
All she could manage this time was a blank stare, but it was an honest blank stare. She had no clue what cause he was talking about.
“I'm sure you can still speak.”
She shook her head.
“Give it a try.” He leaned forward and stared at her so hard she squirmed. “For me.”
She shook her head again, this time quickly. Very quickly.
He leaned in even closer, until his nose was almost resting on hers. “Try.”
No! She opened her mouth, and would have shouted it, but truly, not a sound emerged.
“You really can't speak,” he said, sounding wholly surprised.
She tried to shoot him her best what-on-earth-do-you-think-I-would-have-been-trying-to-say-if-I-could-speak look, but she had a feeling that the sentiment was a bit too complex for a single facial expression.
He stood quite suddenly. “I'll return in a moment.”
Caroline could do nothing but stare at his back as he left the room.
Blake sighed with irritation as he pushed open the door to his study. Damn, he was getting too old for this. Eight-and-twenty might still be relatively youthful, but seven years with the War Office was enough to leave anyone prematurely tired and weary. He'd seen friends die, his family was always wondering why he continually disappeared for long stretches of time, and his fiancée …
Blake closed his eyes in pain and remorse. Marabelle wasn't his fiancée any longer. She wasn't anyone's fiancée and wasn't likely to become one, buried as she was in her family plot in the Cots-wolds.
She'd been so young, so beautiful, and so damned brilliant. It had been an amazing thing, really, to fall in love with a woman whose intellect surpassed one's own. Marabelle had been a prodigy of sorts, a genius at languages, and it was for that reason she'd been recruited at such an early age by the War Office.
And then she'd recruited Blake, her longtime neighbor, co-owner of England's best-furnished treehouse, and partner in dancing lessons. They'd grown up together, they'd fallen in love together, but Marabelle had died alone.