Pen tossed on the bed, muscles straining. His face was twisted into a terrifying grimace and the hair over his brow was damp with sweat.
“No! No! No!”
She pressed a hand on his arm. “Pen.” Then, as he continued to flail, she worried that he would reinjure his ribs. She set thecandle down and pressed both hands to his chest, beneath his collarbone. He was firm and warm. “Pen!”
He clamped his right hand over both of hers. His eyes flew open and the room swirled as he stared at her.
“There was shooting,” he said, his voice hoarse and raw. “I was—” He glanced down and saw the bandages beneath his loose shirt, his arm working loose from its sling. “I was injured?”
“Not from shot. You fell into a boat. Do you remember?”
His eyes were wild, glazed. “Blood. Everywhere. Pieces of—ah, God. The screaming.”
“You’re not there now. You’re here.”
His throat worked, and she helped him sit, holding the mug to his lips. He drank deep, then curled his lips at the bitter taste of the willow bark. She wiped the side of his mouth with her finger, and he startled and stared at her arm, pale and bare where the sleeve of the wrapper fell away. His gaze traveled up her arm and stopped at her breasts.
She pulled the wrapper around her, crossing her arms over her bosom. Her breasts tingled from his gaze, a strange reaction to have. He roused her nerves to alertness.
“It was a bad dream. Ahunllef, we call it.”
That wasn’t exactly true. She suspected he’d been reliving a memory.
He drank again, and she held the mug for him, but this time his eyes wandered around the room, what he could see of it in the small nimbus of light. “I’m in a hospital? Where’s Arwen?”
“Who?” Her heart pinched. So there was a woman in his life, someone he cared about. Not enough to be faithful to, obviously, but the concern on his face was real.
So was the puzzlement. “Arwen,” he said slowly. “She was sent to the sanitorium. But not this one?”
“You’re at St. Sefin’s Priory,” she said, and at his look of complete bafflement, continued. “In Newport. Wales. Do you remember that much?”
“How am I in bloody Wales, the back end of Britain?”
He’d called it that before. Yet he had a Welsh name for a title and a Welsh estate he’d apparently never seen. Gwen’s heart hardened to his distress.
“I’m hoping you might explain that, eventually. We found you in a boat this morning, floated up to shore like you were Arthur of Avalon.” No, he was far from an Arthur, that great king of Welsh legend. King Arthur was a leader of men who had fought to keep invaders from overtaking his country. Penrydd was a spoiled bully who summoned his servants with a bell.
“My head hurts.” He put a hand there, probing the lump on his skull. “God, there was so much blood. I thought I was being ripped apart.”
“Try not to think about it,” Gwen said. “Think of something pleasing.”
His eyes rested on her face, traced down her cheek to her throat, her collarbone, the swell of her bosom beneath her gown. “Who are you?”
“I told you.” It was one thing for him to forget her after several days and a blow to the head. It was quite another thing that he couldn’t recall her from hours before.
“My name is Gwenllian. I—run this place, I suppose you could say.”
“You own it?” He sipped his tea, his hand steady. Which was fortunate, for she jerked as she sat back.
“I am hoping to purchase it,” she said, choosing her words carefully. Should they have this conversation now? Without Dovey, or Evans, or anyone else who had a vested interest in the place?
“Hmm.” He swept his eyes down her body, tracing the curve of her hip, her legs. She’d sat on the cot to lean over him, and now she felt heat reaching from his body through the bedclothes to her skin.
His lips curved in a slow, sensual smile. The heat swirled through her middle, upsetting her sense of balance.
“I wager you’d be a pleasant distraction, Gwenllian. What would convince you to stay with me this evening?”
Sign the deed to St. Sefin’s over to me, clear and free, she almost said.
