His eyes widened. ‘Thank me? Whatever for?’
‘For making your own memory loss into a game. It has helped keep my own reality at bay.’ Suddenly she saw, too, why she’d been so keen to play along, even though she’d suspected he wasn’t as confused as all that. Little things, like the way he’d recognised Ben, then tried to cover his moment of spontaneity by turning the subject, had made her suspicious. But not suspicious enough to challenge him. For one thing, he wasn’t well. For another—what would she do if she didn’t have Tom to nurse? She couldn’t go to Justin and ask about Gideon. Justin really was too ill to burden with her problems. Nor was she prepared to slink back to Antwerp with her tail between her legs and beg everyone’s pardon for running away. So, on the whole, she was grateful to him for providing her with the excuse for staying right where she was, until she was ready to face the future.
‘I don’t know what I will do when this is all over, but, you know, pretending to be a queen to your courtier has been a sort of golden interlude in a time of darkness.’
‘Has it? Been golden for you? I’m glad,’ he said sleepily. ‘I only wish I could give you many more such days.’
‘Ah, but both of us have been pretending to be someone we are not today. That can’t go on for ever, can it?’
He winced. She could tell that though he was in pain, he was fighting it. Trying to stay playful and flirtatious. And awake.
‘I have one last command for you which, as my loyal subject, you must obey.’
He smiled and half-inclined his head.
‘I shall obey without question,’ he vowed, falling neatly into her trap.
‘Then drink your medicine and sleep,’ she said firmly.
‘Unfair,’ he protested.
‘Not at all,’ she replied sternly. ‘You need to rest. Come on,’ she said, measuring the drops into the glass, just the way the surgeon had shown her. ‘Drink it all up like a good boy.’
‘A good boy?’
She shrugged. ‘That is how my nurse always used to talk to me and my brothers when we tried to wriggle out of taking our medicine. And then she’d say that we needed our sleep. Because sleep is the best medicine of all.’
‘Yes, you are right. It’s just that I...’ He shot her one of those melting looks that made her toes curl, even though she knew it was only put on for effect. ‘I don’t want today to end. I will remember it all,’ he vowed with so much sincerity she really wanted to believe him. ‘Every moment. Every smile you have granted me. Like treasure.’
‘That’s a lovely thing to say,’ she said as he drank the laudanum mixture.
‘But you don’t believe me?’ He gave her an aggrieved frown, then shut his eyes and slipped almost at once into exhausted slumber.
‘The danger is,’ she murmured softly, ‘that I want to believe you. Even knowing what kind of man you are.’
She sat down at his bedside, the discarded medicine glass in her hand, just staring at him, her head tilted to one side as she tried to work out how she could feel the way she did about such a notorious rake. And why it was that the sight of his naked torso now could give her thrilling little goosebumps, when it hadn’t affected her in the slightest when she’d been sponging it down. Why hadn’t she reacted to the magnificent way he was put together until he’d woken up and started talking to her? It was the same body, after all.
Because, she realised on a flash of inspiration, it wasn’t his looks alone that made him so attractive. She’d thought him handsome when she’d first seen him, but hadn’t wanted to linger in his vicinity any longer than she had to. It was him. The man he was inside. The things you couldn’t know unless you talked to him.
No wonder Justin wouldn’t let her speak to him. His charm was well-nigh lethal. What woman wouldn’t like a man who looked like this and who could be so playful, willing to obey her every command just as though she was a queen and he her devoted slave?
Actually, come to think of it, it wasn’t just his charm that tugged a positive reaction from her. The charm wouldn’t have affected her at all had she not already seen him at his lowest—if she hadn’t seen him battling his demons and then clinging to the sound of her voice, or the tou
ch of her hand, as though she was his only anchor.
As though he was just as lonely as she was.
It was just as well she knew it was all make-believe, or she might be in real danger of falling for him. Fortunately she knew just how charming men could pretend to be, if they thought it would get them what they wanted. But deep down, they were all selfish, inconsiderate tyrants.
All men? Even Gideon?
Oh, it felt disloyal to think of him in those terms. But hadn’t he always been as self-absorbed as any of the males in her family? True, he’d been more willing to spend time with her. To talk to her. But he’d never dreamed of putting her wishes first. She had always been the one supporting him. She’d been rescuing him from the consequences of his scrapes since they’d both been in the nursery and she’d unlocked windows to let him in when he’d sneaked out to steal apples. She’d even been distracting his company commander so that he could do whatever it was he’d been up to in Brussels before that last battle.
Even the plan to come to France—supposedly on the hunt for a husband—had come about because she’d sensed, from the letters he’d written, that he needed her. In between the descriptions of the social whirl in which his regiment was involved she could detect a sort of malaise. She’d wanted to help him. And so she’d fostered Gussie’s and Mama’s hopes, so that she could be at hand to help when whatever it was she could sense coming actually came.
Only she’d been too late. Or not in the right place at the right time. Or something. She’d failed him. He was dead, and she was left sitting here watching over...
As if he knew she was thinking of him, Tom moaned. His eyes flickered under his lids. He flung his arm out, throwing off the sheet.