“Who are you?” He had to force the words out one by one, each a superhuman effort.
The woman’s eyes flew open as she jerked awake. The cat leapt from her lap and disappeared into the gloom behind her.
For a moment, he and the woman only stared at one another. Her eyes were a very dark gray, luminescent in the firelight, tipped ever so slightly at the corners. Lovely. Strangely familiar, though he didn’t know her.
He would have remembered someone like her.
She moved suddenly, tossing her blanket aside and coming at him with an outstretched hand.
Witch.
Grabbing her wrist, he yanked her off balance. As she fell forward, he twisted, jerking her onto the bed. She landed sideways with a small grunt, and he collapsed on top of her. Pain ripped through him with the movement, and his body shuddered.
Dear Lord, he was weak as a babe.
She shoved at his shoulders. “What the fuck are you doing?”
He didn’t move, both because she was warm and softly curved and beautiful—even injured as he was, part of him responded to the feel of her under him—and also because he didn’t know if she was a threat.
“Who are you?”
The woman shoved him again, more insistently this time. “Get off of me, you oaf. You’ll tear out your stitches.”
“You’re the one who sewed me up?”
She jerked her chin in a nod. “I knew I’d regret it.”
He withdrew enough for her to slip out from beneath him and she scurried away, clipping his hip as she went. He grunted as he fell back onto the bed.
The woman glared at him from several paces away, her dark eyes spitting fire. Her pretty lips pressed together in a hard line. She looked ready for a fight. He didn’t blame her. She’d saved his life and he’d treated her like a threat. He saw everyone as a threat lately.
“Where are my men? Please…I need to know. I’m sorry I grabbed you. You startled me when you lunged at me.”
“I didn’tlungeat you. I was checking you for fever.”
He grimaced. “It’s trained into me. A hand is raised against me and I react.” He scrubbed a hand down his face. “How long have I been out?”
She glared at him for another heartbeat, then turned around. He closed his eyes against the throbbing in his head, but listened to her move about the room. There was the trickle of water and the sound of a stool being scraped across floorboards. A cool hand was placed across his forehead and then the wooden rim of a cup touched his lips.
“Drink this,” she said. “You need water more than anything. You’ve been running a fever since the first night, and we couldn’t get you to keep anything down. It seems to have broken, though, which is good.” She gave a brittle laugh. “I didn’t think you were going to make it.”
He swallowed just a few sips before she removed the cup.
“I found you injured in the woods. You’d lost a lot of blood, but the infection was what worried us.”
He opened one eye. “Us?”
“My mother lives here too. She’s a healer. Try not to tackle her if she checks on you in the morning. She’s old and blind and no threat to you.”
“I promise you I’m not in the habit of attacking defenseless women.”
Again, that bitter laugh.
He closed his eyes. “How long have I been here?”
“Two nights. This is the second.”
Fuck. “Have you seen any sign of my men?”
